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Paula Bernstein began by framing the panel: through the lens of “play” it would explore interactive processes currently at the forefront of psychoanalytic theory and clinical discussion. It was Freud who chose the metaphor of play to explain psychoanalytic process to physicians seeking to learn psychoanalytic technique. “We render the compulsion [to repeat instead of remember] harmless, and indeed useful, by giving it the right to assert itself in a definite field. We admit it into the transference as to a playground, in which it is allowed to expand in almost complete freedom and … to display to us everything in the way of pathogenic instincts that is hidden in the patient's mind” (1914, p. 154). Beres and Arlow (1974) added that “a measure of the analyst's empathic capacity lies in his ability to be stimulated by the patient's unconscious fantasy when the analyst himself is not yet aware of the existence or the nature of the patient's unconscious fantasy” (p. 45); Arlow (1979) wrote that “psychoanalysis is essentially a metaphorical enterprise” (p. 373).
Bernstein emphasized that the analytic pair communicate by way of metaphors delivered and received both consciously and unconsciously. It was Winnicott (1971), the pediatrician analyst, who described a transitional space in which meaning is reciprocally created. “Psychotherapy,” he said, “takes place in the overlap of two areas of playing, that of the patient and that of the therapist…. Where playing is not possible then the work done by the therapist is directed towards bringing the patient from a state of not being able to play into a state of being able to play” (p. 38).