Potential space and love

Potential space is the term that Winnicott uses to describe the space of good parenting, therapy, creativity and aliveness. In this paper we associate this space with love. Love is not subjective, not an emotion that one subject feels for an object or even for another subject. Love is the primordial experience of infinite space; it is not an experience of unity but a meeting of sameness and difference. In order to distinguish love from the desire that a subject might have for one thing or another, infinite space needs to be distinguished from the familiar locational form of Euclidean space. We make this argument through a case study from our research on student–teacher relations, and through the theoretical work of Buber, Winnicott and Merleau-Ponty.