Television and Everyday Life

TELEVISION, POTENTIAL SPACE AND TRANSITIONAL
OBJECTS
D.W.Winnicott offers a theory of the individual and of the psyche which is
based on a rejection of the classical Freudian model of ego psychology. Instead
of the individual being seen as a structured bundle of unconscious processes
and instincts whose explanation and analysis requires a deep immersion in the
inner workings of the mind, Winnicott suggests that the individual is a product
of the facilitating environment of his or her early years; the early years in
which the developing child must learn, through experience and through his or
her relationships with others, a sense of self. Winnicott’s narrative account of
these early years provides the basis for what has been called ‘object relations’
theory. Its significance within psychoanalysis is that it requires consideration
of the individual not as a monad, or in isolation from others, but on the contrary,
precisely as both the product and producer of symbolic acts of communication.
Its significance in this context is the same. Winnicott and others within what
has become the English school of psychoanalysis (Kohon, 1986) have provided
an opening within psychoanalysis for the consideration of the social, and of
course at the same time they have provided an opening within the study of the
social for the consideration of psychoanalytic and psychodynamic processes.
At the root of Winnicott’s account of the development of the individual lies
the relationship between the the baby and its mother, a relationship focused,
both literally and symbolically, on the mother’s breast. The key to the successful
emergence of the individual is, in Winnicott’s view, the ability of the child to
separate from the mother. That ability is itself conditional on the quality of the

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Television and ontology
9
caring environment provided for it, above all in terms of its reliability and
consistency (as well as its intensity). The child can separate from the mother if
there exists in the relationship enough trust and security for him or her to do it
safely. But that separation is neither a simple nor an insignificant process.
Separation, indeed, also involves connection. An individual’s ability to see
him or herself as separate from another is based on a willingness to recognise
at the same time the links with that other. Independence involves dependence.
The emergence of the individual as ontologically secure requires both a
distancing and a closeness in his or her relationships with others and a
complementarity of inner and outer security. Inner and outer, the worlds of
subjective and objective reality, have to be distinguished but also related. How
is this achieved? What are its implications?
Winnicott argues that the emergence of the individual is a process involving
both social and symbolic dimensions, substantially grounded in the experience
of space and time, and substantially relevant to an understanding of the
emergence of culture. The separation of the individual, the creation of the
individual as a social subject, involves the emergence of a space—a potential
space (perhaps more accurately a space for potential) in which the work of
separation, the separation of ‘me’ from ‘not me’ can take place. This potential
space is a transitional space in a number of senses. It is a space, as we shall
see, in which the first objects emerge in the perception of the infant. The first
objects are the first symbols. The first symbols are the product of the first
creative acts. And the first creative acts are the first encounters with culture.
This space consists, then, in the intermediate area between infant and mother,
between subject and object. It is the space within which the infant both tests
reality and begins to be able to fantasise, to imagine, to dream, and to play.
The key to the unlocking of this process and of the various elements of it
which make it such a deceptively simple one are to be found in Winnicott’s
discussion of the first possession. The first possession starts with the newborn
infant’s fist-in-mouth activities and leads eventually to an attachment to a teddy,
a doll, a blanket; to what Winnicott calls a transitional object. This object is
the focus of a great deal of emotional and cognitive activity. It is the first mark
of the infant’s recognition that he or she is in some sense separate from the
mother. It is the focus of all the powerful emotional energies, desires and
fantasies which have been attached to the mother as an extension of the infant,
but which are increasingly vulnerable because the mother goes away. This
object becomes vitally important to the infant for use at the time of going to
sleep, and as a defence against anxiety. It becomes a comfort and a comforter.
It is taken everywhere, cherished for its familiarity, a magical object embodying
the continuities of care but also the infant’s emerging powers of creativity. In
terms of a simple metaphorical substitution, which is what it is, the transitional
object stands for the breast (as indeed the breast ‘stood for the mother’
previously), but in the space created by the metaphor it is the object through

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Television and Everyday Life
which the infant begins to distinguish between him/ herself and the mother (or
as Winnicott puts it, ‘between me extensions and not me’), and equally
important, between fantasy and reality. The space is the space of illusion: the
capacity to imagine, the capacity, indeed, to create meaning. As Winnicott
suggests:
From birth…the human being is concerned with the problem of the relationship
between what is objectively perceived and what is subjectively conceived
of, and in the solution of this problem there is no health for the human being
who has not been started off well enough by the mother.