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TOYS AND REASONS: STAGES IN THE RITUALIZATION OF EXPERIENCE. By Erik H. Erikson. New York: W.W. Norton, 1977, 182 pp., $8.95.
This newest volume is based on the Godkin lectures given at Harvard University in 1972, under the title of "Play, Vision and Deception." The subject matter deals with the relationship between childhood play and political imagination, between make-believe and belief, between the legitimate theatre and the theatre of politics and war, between playful vision and serious theory, and, finally, between child's toys and aged reason.
Erikson, an energetic exponent of interdisciplinary conceptualization, weaves back and forth between psychoanalytic insights and political themes, always working from a developmental frame of reference. He bridges his conceptual leaps with an ontogenetic view of ritualization. In the first chapter, he illustrates and justifies the jump from play to vision, with perhaps an overly broad and inclusive use of the term "play." Erikson speaks of a "playful element" (p. 23) in the marches and demonstrations against the Vietnam war, and of the "historical playfulness" (p. 24) of the Columbia University students' confrontation with administration and police, and of the role of "games" and "play" in the vicissitudes of war, business, therapy, and family life. With roots in clinical observation, Erikson begins with the play construction and accompanying story of a five-year-old which is seen as the link between the "builder's inner universe and his society's changing world view" (p. 37). This play is a portent of the child's future and occupies a "recognizable place in that life history" (p. 39).
Play continues to be seen, as it was in Childhood and Society, as "the human propensity to create model situations in which aspects