Television and Everyday Life

The intermediate
area to which I am referring is the area that is allowed to the infant between
primary creativity and objective perception based on reality testing.
The
transitional phenomena represent the early stages of the use of illusion, without
which there is no meaning for the human being in the idea of a relationship
with an object that is perceived by others as external to that being.
(Winnicott, 1975, 239, italics in original)
Winnicott identifies this intermediate area of experience with the individual’s
subsequent capacity to become involved in any creative activity; in the arts,
religion, ‘imaginative living and…creative scientific work’ (ibid., 242).
In his discussion of the relationship between transitional phenomena or
objects, the emerging individual, and culture, Winnicott is, therefore, making
a number of interrelated points (1974, 118). The first is that cultural experience
is located in the potential space between the individual and the environment
(originally the object). This is also true of play, the first expression of cultural
experience. The second is that each individual’s capacity to make use of this
space is determined by life experiences that take place very early on in an
individual’s existence. From the very beginning the infant has intense
experiences in the potential space between the subjective object (the emerging
him or herself) and the object subjectively perceived (the not-me or the other).
This potential space is at the interface between there being nothing ‘but me’ to
experience and there being other objects and phenomena outside my control.
Every baby has both good and bad, favourable and unfavourable experiences
within this potential space. Initially, dependence is maximal. The potential
space happens only ‘in relation to a feeling of confidence’ upon the part of the
baby—on his or her ability to trust or to be encouraged to trust—and on the
confidence generated by a dependable mother-figure or by environmental
elements. Confidence (trust) consists in the introjection (the interiorisation) of
evidence of that dependability. Finally, in order to study the play and then the
cultural life of the individual, Winnicott argues ‘one must study the fate of the
potential space between any one baby and the human (and therefore fallible)
mother-figure who is essentially adaptive because of love’ (ibid.).
I want to apply some of these arguments to television, but before I do there
are a number of points to be made arising from my discussion thus far; points

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Television and ontology
11
that will also, hopefully, make connections with my earlier discussion of
ontological security.
The first is by way of a gloss on the kind of argument that Winnicott presents.
It may not be necessary to point out (but then again it may be) that Winnicott’s
talk of mothers and breasts can be seen as both literal (there are real mothers
and real breasts and both are objects of intense emotion) and metaphorical;
that is the carer may not be a ‘mother’ as such, and the breast may well be a
bottle. Equally his apparent concern with the materiality of the transitional
object should not be taken too literally. Not all of us will drag blankets around
like Linus in Schultz’s cartoon; the space created by the work of the mother-
figure, when it has indeed been created, can be filled in all sorts of ways.
Winnicott may or may not have believed in the need for an authentic mother or
an authentic breast: his characterisation of the ‘good enough mother’ is
sufficiently ambiguous to leave the question open. But it matters not for his
argument. What does matter, of course, is the consistency of care and the kind
of care an infant receives, and the need to understand the relationship between
that care and the capacity of the developing child to establish his or her
individuality, to separate off from the mother-figure and to begin to become an
independent agent in the world.
The second is perhaps more difficult to deal with. It concerns Winnicott’s
obvious clinical concern with pathology and health. Once again I think it is
possible to distance oneself from the authority of the clinical gaze without
sacrificing the main burden of the analysis. By this I mean the following. What
Winnicott is pointing to, and I shall be discussing this again in a moment, is
the very fine line between pathology and health in matters of creativity, culture
and individuality. Dependence and independence are separated by a hair’s
breadth and yet are totally interdependent; creativity and addiction are
expressions of that mutuality. Equally the boundary that separates the individual
from those that surround him or her is equally fragile and vulnerable. The line
between the good enough mother (or mother figure) and the one who seems to
have failed is equally fine and contentious. Once again, though, the strength of
Winnicott’s position for this discussion is not so much the clinical judgement
but the recognition that the environment is a crucial factor in understanding
the fundamental development of the individual as a social and cultural agent,
and most importantly as a psychodynamic one.
This point releases a third. The challenge that Winnicott poses to sociology
is real: different in its focus and more tangible than that posed by Freudian
psychoanalysis, and, in a different way, by Lacanian theory (see Giddens, 1991).
For Winnicott is presenting a descriptive and an analytic account of the creation
of the subject as a social and symbolic unit (not, 
pace
Lacan, as a subject
fragmented by and through the symbolic) who can of course be damaged and
destroyed, but who can develop (and most often does develop) into a viable
social actor. He is also presenting an account which requires the social to be

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12
Television and Everyday Life
taken fundamentally 
into
account. But not in a simple relationship of cause
and effect.
Potential spaces, transitional phenomena, are just those: potential and
transitional. In both cases they speak to the dialectic of dependence and freedom,
trust and insecurity, creativity and sterility, potency and omnipotence which
mark the particular problematic of action in everyday life. Within this space,
and through these—ultimately cultural—phenomena, individuals come to some
kind of terms with the subjectively perceived, objective circumstances of their
early and then their later environment. Winnicott’s psychodynamic theory is
therefore also a sociological theory. And its appropriation here is not, once
again, a slip into reductionism but a challenge to understand society and culture
in terms of its construction by individuals in environments which are not often
of their own making.
The equation which is being offered here is one which Giddens has already,
but in a different register, provided. It is an equation of trust, security and the
capacity to act, both individually and socially. To this Winnicott adds, explicitly,
the capacity to create. He draws in culture, but he also, through his discussion
of transitional objects, draws in media.
I have used the term cultural experience as an extension of the idea of
transitional phenomena and of play without being certain that I can define
the word ‘culture’. The accent indeed is on experience. In using the word
culture I am thinking of the inherited tradition. I am thinking of something
that is in the common pool of humanity, into which individuals and groups
of people may contribute, and from which we may all draw