What alive means: On Winnicott's "transitional objects and transitional phenomena".

In his reading of Winnicott's "Transitional objects and transitional phenomena," the author views Winnicott as engaged in offering a way of conceiving of the fundamentally human task of creating states of being in which the individual's ideas, feelings, and bodily sensations come to feel alive and real to him or her. The author proposes that the concept of paradox captures something of both the idea and the experience of transitional objects and phenomena. The author then looks closely at the new clinical illustration that Winnicott presents in the fourth and final version of his paper. He discusses what he views as Winnicott's most evolved form of clinical practice. The author also takes up Winnicott's idea of "the negative," a state of being in which the gap, the amnesia, the death is all that feels real, while the presence or memory of the object feels unreal. The author offers an illustration of clinical work in which a significant alteration of the analytic frame provides a context in which the patient is able to begin to experience feelings that feel real and alive to him.