On not interpreting: The metaphor of the baby,enactment, and transitional experience

Conclusion Winnicott suggests that transitional experiences after outliving their usefulness tend to fade into the background, leaving behind the capacity to develop further transitional experiences and symbolic thought. My understanding of this transitional experience remained uninterpreted as a form of joined action or play in the analysis. This complex set of actions and unverbalized meanings represented for me an aspect of the use of the metaphor of the baby and the allegory of the caretaking parent both in terms of the narrative structure and in the capacity to engage in a process of enacting the patient’s dissociated experiences and facilitating the development of his symbolic experiences of greed and aggression through the development of a playful transitional experience. I believe that it was the patient’s concrete experience of greed and aggression that was at the core of the patient’s arrested development in his capacity to be a sexual and loving adult and to develop an intimate relationship with another person. I believe that the evolving transitional experience of eating the donut and later the cookie enabled us to enact and play out the multiple meanings of greed, envy, the destruction of the object, and finally the reparation and recreation of the object. In the paradox created through the transitional experience I could be both greedy and trustworthy and he could be both sadistic and generous. In the beginning of this paper I suggested a series of dichotomies that define differences in contemporary approaches to psychoanalysis. In the developmental arrest position that I developed in this paper the treatment parameters emphasize mutuality, symmetry, constructivism, the political and social dimensions of experience, and most importantly the analyst’s countertransference participation is thought of as strategic, critical, and voluntary. Psychoanalysis has traditionally been thought of as involving multiple levels of experience, some conscious and verbal and some unconscious and experiential or acted out. The concepts of play, enactment, and transitional experience presented in this paper bring to the fore a mode of psychoanalytic related ness that is experiential and conscious, although not objectively or verbally interpreted, which I believe is necessary as a means of developing the capacity for symbolic thought. Presented to the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, October 19, 1995.