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(1988). Bulletin of the Anna Freud Centre, 11:128-145

Playing: Its Role in Child Analysis

Audrey Gavshon

Introduction

A group of children between the ages of 5 and 8 years of age were asked to define the meaning of play. Most of them said it was ‘having fun’; some said ‘it's working’; one 6-year-old echoed Winnicott by saying, ‘playing is doing’ (Winnicott, 1968, p. 598).

How does this apply to playing in analysis? Is all non-verbal material (doing) playing? For small children the use of action instead of words is age-appropriate, but uncontrolled motor behaviour is difficult to harness for the analytic work and must be contained. The child's inadequate defences and undeveloped capacity for verbalization challenge the analyst to find ways of engaging the patient so that fantasy can be structured and playing used to understand, clarify, verbalize and interpret unconscious material.

For the analyst, the child's behaviour can provide meaningful observation.

The analyst can use pieces of behaviour to extract unconscious meaning from them, for example to

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