Television and Everyday Life

if we have
somewhere to put what we find
.
(Winnicott, 1974, 116, italics in original)
I sympathise with Winnicott’s troubles with the definition of culture. His last
emphasis above, however, provides a powerful metaphor for understanding
culture as something in which we all participate, but with different degrees of
competence and with different degrees of freedom. Equally the phrase ‘if we
have somewhere to put what we find’ does imply that we need to understand
the dynamics of that participation.
Crucial to this participation is the transitional phenomenon, the transitional
object. The point I want to make here is this. Winnicott draws attention to the
central role the transitional object has both for the child’s development and for
the creation in the newly separating individual of a sense of identity and security
within a challenging world of self and others. In the normal scheme of things
the emotional significance of the early, intensely cathected object is reduced,
eventually, to insignificance. The space it occupied is filled by other cultural
activities and forms which continue the work of providing relief from the strain
of relating inner and outer reality (indeed, as he points out (1975, 240) the task
of reality acceptance is never complete). This cultural work continues, with its

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Television and ontology
13
consequent satisfactions and frustrations, and with the continuing reliance on
objects and media to facilitate it. I want to suggest that our media, television
perhaps preeminently, occupy the potential space released by blankets, teddy
bears and breasts (Young, 1986), and function cathectically and culturally as
transitional objects. As such, they are, of course, vulnerable to the exigencies
of our own individual upbringing as well as to the environments in which they
are both produced and consumed. And vulnerable also to the precarious balance
of pathology and health towards which Winnicott is clinically so sensitive,
and to which I also must briefly once again pay attention.
The link between Winnicott’s arguments and my own, and the status of media
as transitional objects can usefully be illustrated, in the first instance, by drawing
on one of Winnicott’s own case studies: the case of the string (1965). The case
concerned a seven-year-old boy with an obsession with string. He was constantly
tying chairs and tables together; he would tie cushions to the fireplace, and prior
to his being seen by Winnicott he had been found tying a string round his sister’s
neck. Winnicott interpreted this behaviour as the boy’s attempt to deal with his
fear of his mother’s separation (the mother had been separated from the boy for
considerable periods on more than one occasion): ‘attempting to deny separation
by his use of string, as one would deny separation from a friend by using the
telephone’ (ibid., 154). The boy’s symptoms were alleviated as a result of the
mother’s ability to discuss her son’s anxieties with him.
Winnicott comments on the symbolic significance of string as an extension
of all other techniques of communication. String, symbolically and materially,
is for joining things together: ‘it helps in the wrapping up of objects and in the
holding of unintegrated material’. This is its common significance, yet for this
boy its significance was exaggerated and his use of it seemed abnormal. Its use
was associated with a sense of insecurity and the idea of a lack of
communication. String had become not so much a joining medium but one
associated with the denial of separation. ‘As a denial of separation string
becomes a thing in itself, something which has dangerous properties and has
to be mastered.’ For Winnicott this case was useful both in exploring pathology
in relation to transitional phenomena and as an example of the development of
a potential perversion. In later comments (1974) he notes that the boy was not
cured and developed new addictions, including addictions to drugs, during his
adolescence.
How does this case help in the understanding of the media? As part of his
later comments Winnicott asks whether an investigator making a study of drug
addiction would pay proper attention to the psychopathology evident in the
area of transitional phenomena. My argument, in relation to the use of television,
both pathological and non-pathological, creative and addictive, is explicitly
the same. But there is more to it, I think, than matters of pathology, though
such matters loom large in any discussions of the medium, these days and
always. There are a number of observations which can be made. The first is a

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14
Television and Everyday Life
general, sociological rather than psychoanalytic, one about addiction. The
addiction to string may be an exception (and indeed Winnicott does not explain
why the child’s relationship to string is itself addictive, or leads to further
addiction), but quite clearly the regular cycle of moral panics associated with
the introduction of new media is most often associated with the fear of addiction
(see Shotton, 1989; Spigel, 1992 on television). Addiction is plausibly, as
Giddens has suggested in correspondence, a particularly modern pathology,
since it emerges out of the often unmanageable demands for self-autonomy
that life in modern society creates. Addiction and obsession are transferrable
(they attach themselves to multiple objects and practices), but it seems that
they are most pervasive (and often also most troubling) when the media provide
their focus. More particularly the string case illustrates that the same object
can be used both positively and negatively, and that addiction and creation are
very closely related to each other. But it also illustrates the ways in which an
understanding of the use of such a medium as string can be grounded in the
early experiences of childhood, precisely in relation to such issues as security,
separation and the desire for communication. If string is a very simple medium
indeed television, of course, is another story.