Some Notes on Play and Playfulness

When asked to join this panel, I told Hansi Kennedy that I would prepare something in writing. I have added some details derived from these two valuable days of discussion. In yesterday's plenary session Dr Valenstein illustrated the difference between the dishonesty of pretence and the pretending involved in play, by quoting a version remembered from his childhood of ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ which had a partially happy ending (I think it was a Victorian bowdlerization in verse by Browning). The prose translation which I read and trembled at as a boy had a very different denouement of unrelieved horror. Instead of the children being led to the Garden of Eden (separated from their parents but happy), they were seduced into following the piper to death in the sea, and presumably to hell. Our childhood contains both—utter and total bliss and intense affective hell, and in effect we make a journey which is the reverse of that in Hamelin—provided, that is, that we can master the primal affects of an adult existence in which the rats within and without cannot be eliminated, but are usually kept sufficiently in control to make life bearable.

I want to define play as activity, and the quality of playfulness as an attitude in relation to doing, thinking and feeling. I believe, with Ed Weinshel that (contra Freud and Waelder) play, and particularly playfulness, are phenomena which not only pertain to childhood but do and should continue into adult life. Imaginative and creative play represent a happy, albeit a much reduced, retention of the child in the adult. Although, as that proto-psychoanalyst Wordsworth says in a poem that should be required reading for all analytic candidates2: