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The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. By and . New York: New York Review Books, 2001 (originally published in 1959), 417 pp., $16.95.
Why the Wild Things Are: Animals in the Lives of Children. By . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001, 236 pp., $27.95.
Psychoanalysis has two basic models for how play develops. Freud (1908) described play as continuing in the adult in the form of daydreaming, which retains the wish-fulfilling, pleasure-seeking, and unrealistic qualities of play, but without the link to action in the world. He further described creativity in writers as being like daydreaming that is shaped so that it is pleasing to the group, not merely to the day-dreamer. Winnicott (1953, 1967) gave us the idea that play develops out of early transitional experience, and that play then evolves into later forms of transitional experience—art, religion, and culture, the entire inherited tradition into which one is born. Thus, Freud directs our attention to the relationships between pleasure and reality, and between thought and action, as play develops, and Winnicott directs our attention to self-experience and the differentiation/integration between inner and outer reality; both indicate that later transformations of play are increasingly an experience shared with the social group.
The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, by Iona and Peter Opie, is a treasure trove of naturalistic observations of children that can help us think about the development of play. The Opies were folklorists who collected all sorts of oral lore from British schoolchildren, ages six to fourteen, and published it in 1959; their book has now been reissued. The lore appears to have been gathered without any definite