Wherever someone I've personally known is, even off on their own, whenever someone is not, even gone from this Earth, I can remember them.
Wherever someone I've personally known is, even off on their own, whenever someone is not, even gone from this Earth, I can remember them.
Narcissistic fantasy results from being unable to process the terror of abandonment.
Winnicott observed, though, how playful relating turns imagination into a power. The wonder worked out in the play brings self-relation, recalling and admixing the presence of those who are gone. The play is deadly serious at the same time that it frees -- through reconstituting a world with others in memory along the orbit of self-consciousness.
As we grow, communication around absence -- talk into the void -- becomes the infrastructure for relating, internalizing ways both to hold community and to give others and oneself new chances. Communication is a relational bond that reasoning and feeling people must have with others and concerning themselves as an Other. This bond presumes that we are never alone and then promises oneself to establish this relation. A person can keep others in mind wherever they are (not). Doing so opens the space of humanity, which Winnicott realized is essentially playful relating.