The true self and the use of the object By allowing the patient to use him as an object in the transference, Winnicott facilitated the establishment of self states, many of which had only been a possibility. He understood the analytic situation to be a potential space. Its potential was largely the analyst’s creation. If the analyst was inattentive to the patient’s need to create his own transference object, then analytic practice, of sorts, existed, but one could not speak of potential space.
