Lately, I’ve been listening more attentively to the murmur of my six-year-old as she plays—her running monologue aimed at no one in particular. The other day I eavesdropped as she conducted a board meeting of unicorns, scolded a dragon for bad manners and then proceeded to count to a hundred in a singsong, looping back to repeat the numbers that pleased her most. I’m more attentive because I’ve noticed this sweet self-talk, so characteristic of early childhood, beginning to fade. Soon the self-conscious silence of adulthood will muffle my youngest, just as it has my two older children.
As a parent, I expect each new milestone to feel poignant, but the petering out of her private soliloquy makes me especially wistful. And as a philosopher, I want to know why. What makes this first narration of consciousness feel so luminous, so charged with meaning? What, exactly, do we lose when that running babble falls quiet?
The British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott offers a clue. He wrote that play unfolds in an intermediate space—a zone of experience between inner fantasy and external reality. In infancy, the “transitional object”—a blanket, a toy, a scrap of cloth—inhabits that threshold. It belongs to both worlds at once: created and found, mine and not mine.
Winnicott’s insight extends Freud’s: where dreams repair the inner world, play reconciles it with the outer one, allowing desire and reality to coexist without cancelling out one another. Through this gentle negotiation, the child learns to bring the outer world under imaginative sway without quite denying its independence. And the running monologue that accompanies play is the music of that encounter—the mind’s first attempt to find harmony between what it desires and invents and the world outside.
The other day my daughter announced that when she grows up she will be a unicorn-kitten with wings. She described the creature’s mane in painstaking detail—the precise sequence of colours, the way it will sparkle when she flies. I smiled. Behind the touching absurdity of her vision lies serious work. She is practising how to feel real in a world that combines what she finds and what she makes. We say that children “lose themselves” in play. Winnicott thought the opposite: that only through this creative work can a child come to affirm, with her whole being, “I am, I am alive, I am myself.”
More and more now, when I walk in on my daughter mid-soliloquy, the spell breaks. She goes silent, embarrassed. The self-consciousness that defines adulthood flashes across her face like a shadow. If I am present, she cannot help but see herself from my point of view, and the freer, more unbounded self she was experimenting with retreats. It is precisely this fluid, exploratory approach to self- and world- making that I will miss: that creative plasticity that stiffens once the judging gaze of the other becomes internalised, and once the authority of the outer world comes to script the inner.
The day is nearing when my daughter will trade her unicorn-kitten with wings for the goal of becoming a vet or a pilot. And with that shift, her speech will narrow to its officially sanctioned purpose—communication.
Contemplating this change feels like watching the door close on a magical kingdom. The older I get, though, the more I think that kingdom never disappears completely; it just becomes harder to find our way back to it. Winnicott agreed. He thought that writing, painting, singing and praying all offer a return, however fleeting, to the original porousness we experience between our inner states and the complex, objective world we inhabit.
This, too, is what art redeems: the conviction that expression is fundamentally an encounter—the mind touching matter in a way that seems, miraculously, to transform both. Such moments remind us of one of life’s glorious mercies: that the border between imagination and reality is never wholly fixed, only tended.
The other evening the house was quiet. I passed my daughter’s door and heard only the scrape of Lego, no voice. Soon this silence will be complete—a Tuesday or a Thursday, say, unremarkable except that it will be the day the talking stopped. When that happens, I will miss the hum that once stitched her world together. Above all, I will miss the reminder it gave: that the imagination is not, essentially, a way of leaving the world behind but of finding our place more securely within it.
Not long ago, having reluctantly accepted that magic is “not real”, my daughter asked whether it used to exist in ancient times. Her hope was perfectly logical: if it once was, perhaps it could be again. I told her we couldn’t rule out the possibility. She grinned, unconvinced, and went back to her unicorns. But her question lingers. For it reminds me of a truth we adults tend to forget: that the self originally sings its way into being, drawing freely on what is made, what is found and, above all, what it dares imagine.
