Analysis as a potential space “The case of F”

“My funeral is cheaper for the school than a year's tuition.” That was how F described how she felt about her school's stance after the September 19 earthquake. Although her school was not damaged, a high school belonging to the same institution was severely affected. F's illusion of belonging to a school that took care of its students and served as an ideological support system collapsed.

F is a 17-year-old patient whose dream was always to be part of the high school where she studies, and in the process of separating herself from her family's ideals, she found in that institution a place to build her sense of identity. Blos (1971) discusses how adolescents, in the process of development, seek ideals outside the family nucleus with which to identify, in order to separate from their parents and create their own individuality.

What strikes me about this case, and why I decided to do a project on it, is how, after what happened on September 19, F has shifted her ideals in her analysis, seeking to carry out campaigns in favor of mental health, talking about her therapeutic space as the place where she feels she can be herself, creating a space that allows her to rebuild her broken ideals.

One of the most important ideas introduced by Donald Winnicott is the concept of potential space. Potential space is a concept that Winnicott used to refer to the intermediate area that is experienced between reality and fantasy. Although potential space originates in a physical and mental space between the mother and the baby, later in the course of normal development, the individual becomes capable of developing their own ability to generate potential space.

Mother-Child Unit: Precursor to Potential Space

The mother-child unit creates a new entity. According to Winnicott, all levels of psychological development are represented by this unit. An aspect of the mother is mixed with the baby in a state conceptualized by Winnicott as “primary maternal concern,” which is the experience of losing oneself in the other.

For Winnicott, psychological development does not begin only when the child deploys his potential to defend himself from anxiety. Instead, early development centers around the mother providing the child with the illusion of a “subjective object,” through which she creates the illusion that there is no difference between reality and fantasy. The good enough mother is able to provide for the baby's needs in the way that the baby particularly needs. At first, the baby has the omnipotent fantasy that he satisfies his own needs.

The Transitional Period

After the mother-child unity period, there is a change in the type of relationship, which allows for a gradual separation between the two. It is during this period that transitional phenomena emerge.

In Winnicott's theory, he asks the question: Given that the child is isolated from external reality at the beginning of development, how does he utilize his experience in the process of emerging from this state of isolation? The maternal environment provides a mental space in which the infant begins to generate his own experience. According to Ogden, it is through this that a new psychological entity is created in the infant's mind.

The transitional period can be understood as the phase in which the infant begins to internalize the maternal environment. During this period, the mother's role is to gradually wean the infant from the supportive environment through frustrations appropriate to the infant's stage of development. It is at this point that the infant develops the capacity to be alone. Ogden explains that during this period, the infant allows itself to abandon the internalized omnipotent object of the mother and begins to relate to the external object. During this period, the mother must be physically and emotionally present to survive the infant's destructive fantasies and accept and acknowledge the infant's acts of reparation.

What is a Potential Space?

Ogden suggests that one of the most creative ideas introduced by Winnicott is potential space. This term was used by Winnicott to refer to the intermediate area of ​​experience between reality and fantasy. Although potential space arises in the space between mother and infant, it subsequently becomes possible, in the course of normal development, for the child, adolescent, and adult to develop the capacity to develop their own potential space.

In the book Matrix of the Mind, Ogden explains the concept concisely and clearly, which I present below:

1. Potential space is the hypothetical area that exists but may not exist between the infant and the mother during the infant's phase of rejecting the acceptance that the infant and the mother are not part of the same unit.

2. Play, creativity, transitional phenomena, psychotherapy, and cultural experience occur in potential space, which is "not part of the internal world" and "not part of the external world."

3. Potential space is an intermediate area experienced between internal and external reality.

4. The essential characteristic of potential space is the paradox of accepting that the baby creates the object, but the object was waiting to be created.

5. This area is the product of the experiences that the environment provides to the baby, child, adolescent, and adult throughout their development.

6. Potential space unites and separates the infant from the mother. The separation of the infant from the mother and the outside world is achieved by the absence of a space between mother and infant, where the potential space filled with (illusion, play, symbols) is established.

Analytic Space as Potential Space

Analytic space can be thought of as the space that exists between patient and analyst, where the analytic experience is generated and where personal meanings are created. “Psychotherapy is created between two realms: that of the patient and that of the analyst.” Winnicott.

In the analytic space, fantasy and reality are combined in a dialectical relationship. A dialectical relationship is a process in which two opposing concepts are created and maintained in a dynamic. In psychoanalysis, the central point of the dialectic is the relationship between conscious and unconscious; there is no consciousness without unconscious, and vice versa. The dialectical process is directly related to the creation of subjectivity. Ogden describes subjectivity as the capacity for self-awareness about one's own thoughts and feelings. (Ogden)

According to Ogden, the capacity for a “mature” transference implies the ability to generate the illusion of being experienced as real and unreal simultaneously. If the transference experience is experienced as real, a psychotic transference is generated. On the other hand, if reality becomes too present, intellectualization predominates, leading the analyst to make specific interventions. (Ogden)

The analyst's task is, through the therapeutic framework and his or her interpretations, to provide the conditions for the patient to begin creating personal meanings and to "play" with those meanings. Through interpretation, relationships between symbols are created. Each meaning influences the way the subject constructs and interrelates their symbols and affects how they interpret their experiences.

Adolescence and Potential Space

Although Winnicott's concepts are contextualized in the early years of a child's emotional development, I believe that within the line of development explained in this work, they can be applied to later stages of development, such as adolescence.

In adolescent development, young people are expected to de-idealize their parents to separate from them. This will be possible if they have internalized what Winnicott calls the maternal environment. Adolescents need to idealize environments and groups to begin internalizing new values ​​that allow them to create a sense of individuality. The institutions to which adolescents belong serve as facilitating environments for this process to take place. These environments become repositories of drives and fantasies. If we relate this to the concept of potential space, I propose that the ability to generate potential space can be facilitated by the type of environment to which the adolescent belongs. But what happens when these environments are suddenly de-idealized by a traumatic event?

Excerpt from session F----expand the session further

F arrived at the office on time, exactly a week after the earthquake. She lay down on the couch and began to talk agitatedly about her experience during the earthquake. As she recounted what had happened, her voice rose and she cried inconsolably, "I can't believe that the same night, they sent us an email saying we had to show up the next day. How dare they do that, after what happened in the south? What a lack of respect and consideration for us." "Everything happened so fast. We were in the school auditorium and the floor started to shake horribly, and I didn't understand what was happening." "I don't know why, but I feel like something broke inside me. I always wanted to study here, and now I feel like nothing makes sense anymore, so why bother trying?" Hearing all this, I felt just as angry and disillusioned as she did, because the experience was finally shared. I interpreted that with the tremor, she had realized that studying there didn't make her invincible.

Hearing this, she remained silent and said nothing for several seconds. The rest of the session continued talking about how she felt. I got the impression at that moment that what I said did not affect her. In the next session, F began talking about how upset she was with her family for not understanding how important it was for her to go to therapy and that she had been thinking about carrying out mental health promotion campaigns with her colleagues. This session fragment shows how, transferentially, she is depositing her omnipotence and need to feel supported in the analysis. The potential space is where personal meanings are created, a dialectic is constructed between both subjectivities: analyst and patient. My interpretation was permeated by my own experience, and together with its association, a new meaning was constructed.

Analysis is a vehicle for this to happen, and in F's case, the fantasy of omnipotence she had of being part of her school is being deposited in her relationship with me, due to the anguish that this event has generated. At this point in the analysis, just as Winnicott suggests, F is needing that from me; an object that allows her to create that illusion, which will gradually dissolve. It is very likely that as the process progresses, she will begin to de-idealize me and enter a depressive position that allows her to repair not only her educational ideal and parental figures, but also herself.

Let's talk about your Potential Space: together, we can identify spaces for growth and connection that can be fostered at home or in the classroom.