“Red Rover”: An Expression of the Psychic Struggle toward Separation-Individuation

I will attempt in this paper to apply the psychoanalytic object-relational perspective toward understanding the game of “red rover,” commonly enjoyed particularly by latency-age and preadolescent children. Several games have been studied through the analytic focus, such as the “doctor game” (1), “the teacher game” (2), “peek-a-boo” (3), and the “jinx game” (4). Such analyses have revealed generally that the specific forms of play engaged in correspond to the child's developmental needs. The rituals or mechanisms of red rover suggest that it, too, plays an important role for the developing preadolescent.

Freud (5) noted the psychosexual significance of game playing when he wrote “that children repeat in their play everything that has made a great impression on them in actual life, that they thereby abreact the strength of the impression and so to speak make themselves masters of the situation.” He also noted (5) that play is influenced by childrens' “dominant wish … to be grown up.” Later, Waelder (6) pointed out that games are a means for the child to assimilate “piece meal an experience which was too large to be assimilated instantly at one swoop.” Erikson (7) described play as an “infantile form of the human ability to deal with experience by creating model situations and to master reality by experimenting and planning.” Piaget (8) viewed play as an aspect of intelligence. Peller (9) observed that repetition in games not only allows the child to again deal “with the painful situations,” but also “to turn from passivity to activity.”

Play aids the child in gaining mastery over earlier unpleasant or insufficiently resolved and integrated experiences by enabling the child to control the experience as opposed to being controlled by it. The peek-a-boo game, for example, is believed to serve as a playful rendition of the anxiety-provoking experience of being abandoned by the mother (3). It is thus especially helpful for the child during early periods of development when