What does it really mean to play—not just in childhood, but as adults with busy lives, old hurts, and well-worn habits? It’s easy to dismiss play as frivolous, something for kids on a carpet with blocks, but D.W. Winnicott, the British psychoanalyst, insisted it’s much more. For him, play roots itself at the very core of creative living, of real relating, of mental health itself. It happens in what he called “potential space”—not just fantasy, not just cold reality, but in some uniquely human in-between.

We’ve all seen it: Children lost in their invented worlds, loose and absorbed, the clock somehow stretching to make room for their story. As a child, I remember this freedom vividly—the way time seemed endless, and the air around me felt charged with possibility. Winnicott saw this not as a trivial childhood phase, but as a psychological achievement—a territory where the self gets to be creative........

© Psychology Today