Magical arts: the poetics of play.
Psychoanalysis and history January 1, 2005 Mary Jacobus
In British Object Relations psychoanalysis, play and magic are closely linked, revealing that aesthetic concerns have always been central to the field. Magical thinking appears from the start in Melanie Klein's play technique and early aesthetic writings, as well as in Susan Isaacs' educational experiments and theories of metaphor. Marion Milner's clinical work connects primitive rituals from Frazer's "The Golden Bough" with a patient's creativity through war-games. In Donald Winnicott's concept of the transitional object, play becomes a theory of culture and private madness, serving as a paradigm for psychoanalysis itself. Tracing these non-positivistic, mystical, and poetical elements shows that aesthetics is not just entangled with psychoanalysis but constitutive of it in its mid-twentieth century forms.