ON POTENTIAL SPACE

In this paper, I have proposed that Winnicott's concept of potential s pace might be understood as a state of mind based upon a series of dia lectical relationships between fantasy and reality, me and not-me, sym bol and symbolized, etc., each pole of the dialectic creating, informi ng, and negating the other. The achievement of such a dialectical proc ess occurs by means of a developmental advance from the 'invisible one ness' of the mother-infant unit to the subjective 'threeness' of the m other-and-infant (as symbolic objects) and the infant (as interpreting subject). Failure to create or maintain the dialectical process leads to specific forms of psychopathology that include the experience of t he fantasy object as a thing in itself, the defensive use of reality t hat forecloses imagination, the relationship to a fetish object, and t he state of 'non-experience'. The 'processing' of a projective identif ication is understood as the re-establishment of the recipient's capac ity to maintain a dialectical process (e.g. of me and not-me) that had been limited in the course of the recipient's unconscious participati on in the projector's externalized unconscious fantasy.