I started this “newsletter” to have a space in which writing is always happening and being experienced as playing. What do I mean by playing? That feeling of being in the act of doing something in such a focused way that you are simultaneously lost. When I am writing and very much plugged into what I am doing, I feel like I am in a kind of tunnel where I do not get distracted by anything. All of my feelings, along with my brain’s attempt to organize ideas into sentences and to search for the precise words to articulate nuances of meaning, get put in service of writing. My body is usually collateral—shoulders raised, brow furrowed, hips locked in pain despite my expensive ergonomic chair. Some people call this mental and emotional condition “flow,” borrowing from the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who theorized it as a state that was optimal for productivity. I probably don’t need to tell you that this particular resonance of “flow” has many contemporary fans who use it in dubious ways.
When I sang in bands and especially when I acted in plays as a teenager, I remember colloquially referring to being in the zone while performing. I experienced it as the loss of self-consciousness in the act of doing the thing; a felt and rare experience of pleasure.
Sometime in graduate school, I came across the work of British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott and immediately knew there was something that drew me to his work, but it wasn’t until a few years later, when I started seriously contemplating the timing of having a child that I began to read him in earnest. Suddenly he was everywhere and a lot of literary women, in particular, seemed to be, just like me, taken with him and particularly his theory of the “good enough mother.” But this isn’t an essay about the Winnicott of mother-infant relations and parenting, though of course that is everything for him. (I will share such an essay in the future.)
A different way of thinking about “flow,” where it is detached from productivity is through the concept of play. Play is a crucial part of human development in Winnicott’s work. It is inextricable from and therefore necessary to having a “true” or “authentic” self. He theorizes the space of psychotherapy as ideally offering the possibility of being creative. What he means by creative is not something that is the outcome of creative work. It is a process of searching that leads to some feeling of being collected. In the space of therapy, maybe especially in psychoanalysis, we can think and exist in ways that are, to use Winnicott’s word, “desultory.” (A word I love, because I remember assuming as a youngster that it had some relation to “sultry.”) When we think this way, without function and openly, we are playing. This notion of playing is the space in which we are creative and when it happens, we can chance upon something profound—a self.
The crucial part of this play is that it is relational. At just the right moments, someone (a mother, a friend, a psychotherapist) reflects back to us and what they reflect, what they summarize to us, how they see and hear us, does the most foundational thing: it helps us to be, to be found, and to be able to contemplate the existence of a self. This matters very much for anyone who is a writer or artist because, according to Winnicott, it is not through creative output that we find and are able to think a self. In his short essay, “Playing: Creative Activity and the Search for the Self,” he frankly states that successful and acclaimed artists can still lack a self, because the self is not “found in what is made out of products of body or mind.” So what is it found in? Put simply, relationships. His ideas about playing and creativity stem from one of the basic premises of British Object Relations (a branch of psychoanalysis), which is that our subjectivity is formed relationally.
Sometimes I feel like
I’m watching the world
And the world isn’t watching me back
But when I see you,
I’m in it too
The waves come in
And the waves go back.
My favourite part of the essay is his discussion of how therapy should provide opportunity for “formless experience.” He is speaking to his colleagues on matters of clinical practices, but I think it’s a concept worth contemplating for anyone interested in creating conditions in which we can play. When we are in formless experience, we are playing. And playing is not only how we find ourselves, but also how we access a mode of experience between our inner reality and that of the shared reality of the world (which Winnicott describes as external to individuals). The more we access “formless experience,” the closer we get to being in the world this way.
I’ve been thinking about how to create the conditions for formless experience. Wouldn’t it be nice to spend more time in this less defended space? If I try to visualize the feeling and details of formless experience, it’s like a meandering line drawing. A happily restless and hungry worm. It is the long formless days of youth, that go from phone call to brunch to walks to running errands together to just wandering around town, window shopping, talking about your lives, having a thought, hearing it reflected back, and moving into the evening. It is being in water without an objective. It is writing morning pages. It is walking through the house singing. It’s a conversation that can go anywhere if both people are playing and vulnerable. It is a walk out in the world, without a phone in your pocket. Your mind flits around, the topics and their relation illogical to anyone else. But you collect it all in the feeling of being the container for it, the space it can all happen without danger.
We tend to think of playing as fun, but it is a certain kind of hard work. It asks a lot of us. But in return we are spent in the best possible way, like the feeling of eating after a long lake swim (a hot dog is ideal here, in the absence of kabob fresh from the scorching coals). The hunger that arises when the body takes over and the mind is “functionless.” I think we all could use a bit more of that. xo
sara!! couldn’t love this more & know i will be returning to these ideas of play & finding my self in relationship over and over. thanks for beautifully guiding us through this 🪁🌿🫶🏾
I love this, and it makes me think of how I felt teaching and being at the Community of Writers conference last week, socializing so much with such smart people. It felt a lot like college, except I was at once the student and the professor. All of us staff, like the students, were living together in big houses, and we had a lot of work to do, but we also just wanted to hang out and talk, and there was so much storytelling and joking and even silly flirting--flirting without a need/desire for an actual outcome (that outcome being getting a date, making out, etc), flirting for flirting's sake, is interactional play, I think--am I off? One of the other housemates was the wife of a writer there, and she makes violins and plays music and grew up the Northwest part of Canada and is just as cool as you might imagine. She told me that when two people are talking and really into that talking and making connection in this way, their brains light up in this totally different way. The flow state we feel with another person has neurological proof! So cool.