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In his presentation Jay Frankel, Ph.D., Adjunct Associate Professor in the New York University Postdoctoral Program, Executive Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, co-author of the book Relational Child Psychotherapy, offered a comprehensive examination of the role of play across species, and following along the lines of Winnicott, demonstrated how play is an important underlying structure of psychoanalytic treatment.
Frankel began with the clinical example of a child therapy case to show how the play structure emerges in a therapeutic setting. Six-year-old Lisa, a moody, withdrawn, and at times, behaviorally aggressive child began treatment with Frankel under the condition that his office door remain open. Eventually, Lisa allowed the door to be closed but she remained withdrawn and expressed underlying aggression. Only when Lisa unexpectedly created a tent out of the furniture in Frankel's office did her behavior begin to positively change, both in therapy and the outside world. Frankel understood the tent to be Lisa's attempt to symbolize, contain and integrate conflicting feelings she had been struggling with; it expressed her need for boundaries, while at the same time, creating a safe place where she could maintain a connection to Frankel. For Frankel, “Lisa's tent” supported Norbert Freedman's idea that the symbolization of un-integrated aspects of experience is at the core of the transformation process in psychoanalysis.
After illustrating how play can be central to therapeutic treatment, Frankel developed the concept of play through an ethological framework. Beginning with Darwin, Frankel offered an impressive survey of the empirical research on play in order to unfold how something which has made no obvious contribution to survival, has in fact survived the test of time. He eloquently unraveled its mystery by offering compelling data that link play to learning, and to the similar forms of play found across different species, such as play-fighting, finger-wres