Playing and Reality is the last book D. W. Winnicott prepared, published in 1971 just after his death. It sets out his idea that psychological health and cultural life both grow out of a third realm of experience, neither purely inner fantasy nor purely outer reality. Winnicott was a pediatrician who became one of Britain's most original psychoanalysts. He opens with his classic paper on transitional objects: the teddy bear, blanket or scrap of cloth that an infant treats as both self-created and found in the world. That object, he argues, marks the child's first use of illusion and the start of an "intermediate area" or "potential space" between mother and baby. Play happens there, and later art, religion and creative thought grow from the same space.
The chapters build on that foundation. Winnicott insists that playing is valuable in itself, not merely a disguise for instinctual wishes. He describes psychotherapy as two people playing together, and says that a patient who cannot play must first be helped to do so. He explores creativity as the feeling that life is worth living, set against compliance with an imposed world. He discusses the mother's face as the infant's first mirror, and the difficult developmental step in "the use of an object," in which the child discovers that another person survives its destructiveness and is therefore real. Clinical vignettes run throughout, written in Winnicott's characteristically informal, exploratory voice. The book has shaped thinking well beyond psychoanalysis, in education, literary criticism and discussions of how people relate to toys, media and technology. It is a short, suggestive work about where a sense of being real comes from.