D. W. Winnicott's distinctive contribution to our understanding of human development, based on extensive clinical work with babies and young children, is known and valued the world over.
In “Playing and Reality”, he is concerned with the springs of imaginative living and of cultural experience in every sense, with whatever determines an individual's capacity to live creatively and to find life worth living. The ideas expressed here extend the theme first put forward in his paper Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena, published in 1953. They relate to an area of experience that has for centuries been a recurrent preoccupation of philosophers and poets. This intermediate area, between internal and external reality, is intensely personal, since its existence depends, as does the use that can be made of it, on each individual's early life experiences. If children can utilize this realm to initiate their relationship with the world, first through transitional objects, and later through play and shared playing, then cultural life and enjoyment of the cultural heritage, will be open to them.
What are the origins of creativity and how can we develop it, whether within ourselves or in others? Not only does Playing and Reality address these questions, it also tackles many more that surround the fundamental issue of the individual self and its relationship with the outside world. In this landmark book of 20th-century psychology, Winnicott shows the listener how, through the attentive nurturing of creativity from the earliest years, every individual has the opportunity to enjoy a rich and rewarding cultural life. Today, as the hothousing and testing of children begins at an ever-younger age, Winnicott's classic text is a more urgent and topical story than ever before.
