Playing in the Darkness: Use of the Object and Use of the Subject

Abstract

Play in the context of the patient’s sense of absence, loss, and compromised capacities for symbolization can be a link between unsymbolized experience and greater capacities for representation. Winnicott’s concepts of play evolved as one of the ways that analysts translate unconscious and unrepresented experience. For many patients who have experienced absence, the analyst and the analytic setting are subjected to the patient’s unconscious efforts to destroy and negate meaning and relatedness. For the analyst to be “used” as an object to be destroyed and to survive destruction, he must become a subject in the mind of the patient and in his own mind as analyst within the intersubjective field. The analyst’s work with his own resistance is vital to becoming a changing subject and an object available for play in the psychoanalytic process.