Play and Cultural Experience

The place where cultural expereience is located is in the potential space between the individual and the environment (originally the object). The same can be said of playing. Cultural Experience begins with creative living first manifested in play.

(Winnicott, 1971)

Question 1

Winnicott’s idea of a transitional object or space lays the groundwork for the “seat of the imagination” or the basis or origin of aesthetic sensibility in this stage of human development. In supplemental reading, Ellen Handler Spitz expands this view and posits whether the transitional object can be considered prototypic of a work of art (page 67). How does this view of the “seat of imagination” fit with your own beliefs and experience?

Question 2

I can see how Winnicott’s psychoanalytical view is developed. What I question is the strength or validity of the absolute need of the “good enough” mother as a source of the aesthetic sensibility in an individual, or perhaps I question more the certainty of pathology when the infant is weaned to soon, too late, or not at all.

At the start the adaptation has to be almost exact, and unless this is so, it is not possible for the infant to begin to develop a capacity to experience a relationship to external reality, or even to form a concept of external reality.

(Winnicott, 1971) p.11

What factors would lead you to agree or disagree with Winnicott’s view of the importance of the “good enough” mother?

Question 3

Handler Spitz, in quoting Jeanne Lampl-de- Groot, brings to mind the fact that this transitional phenomenon applies at least to Western Civilization (Spitz, 1982). Explain why you think this transitional phase and Winnicott’s resulting cultural ideas relating to ‘play’ and “experience’ are relevant globally or more relevant to Western culture only? AND how will this influence the way we apply this knowledge in a diverse classroom?

Question 4

Since this early transition or symbiosis is the origin for the union of the inner and outer worlds, what role does memory and nostalgia have in the creation of new aesthetic experiences?

And

How does this relate to the idea that art and creativity push boundaries, and breed invention and inspiration?

Quotes for your consideration

These biological commonplaces are something more than that; they reach to the roots of the esthetic in experience. The world is full of things that are indifferent and even hostile to life; the very processes by which life is maintained tend to throw it out of gear with its surroundings,. Nevertheless, if life continues and if in continuing it expands, there is an overcoming of factors of opposition and conflict; there is a transformation of them into differentiated aspects of a higher powered and more significant life. The marvel of organic, of vital, adaptation through expansion (instead of by contraction and passive accommodation)
actually takes place.

(Dewey, 1934) p. 14

In the good literary text, readers must find a place for themselves among that which has been presented by the author.

(Sumara, 1999) p. 292

Other examples provided by Ellen Handler Spitz (Spitz, 1982)


Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and the inward man be at one.

Socrates on the nature of love and beauty

“there is no inward standard different from the outward fact with which that outward fact may be compared. A unification of this kind is the goal of our intelligence and our affection, quite as much as of our aesthetic sense…. Beauty is the pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature”

Santayana

…the experiences that art intensifies and amplifies neither exist solely inside ourselves, nor do they consist of relations apart from matter. The moment when the creature is both most alive and most composed and concentrated are those of the fullest intercourse with the environment, in which sensuous material and relations are the most completely merged.

(Dewey, 1934) p. 103

References

References

Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. . New York: Pedigree Books.

Spitz, E. H. (1982). The past of illusion: A contribution of child psychoanalysis to the understanding of aesthetic experience. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 16(4), 59-69.

Sumara, D. (1999). Of seagulls and glass roses: Teachers' relationships with literary texts as transformational space. (pp. 289-289-311). New York: Peter Lang.

Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality. (pp. 1-25-95-110). New York: Routledge.