Final Summing Up

This year's colloquium pushes me to organize my presentation this afternoon in a way which I think has a somewhat different character from my summaries of previous colloquia, and which perhaps draws somewhat more on experiences of my own. Although my presentation will not have quite so personal a cast as those of each of the five panellists this afternoon, nonetheless I think you will see where my predilections lie in the way I have chosen to organize the material. I will as usual be making many attributions; I will inevitably miss many others, and some of the points attributed to one person will also have been said by others, for which I hope you will bear with me.

I will organize what I have to say under three main headings. The first has to do with play: play in its broadest sense, a topic which occupied a good deal of yesterday morning. The second heading will be the much more circumscribed one of play as a phenomenon, and as a phenomenon which those who practise child analysis work with and try to understand, an arena in which much knowledge and experience has accumulated. The third topic will deal with the applicability of this, its analogues, in the much-less-charted realm of analysis of adults.

Now what emerged very clearly from the start, with Ed Weinshel's recourse to the Oxford English Dictionary - and from Colette Chiland - was that there is no unifying definition of play. What we had were a myriad of meanings and a myriad of functions, and their ramifications spread in so many directions that almost anything could be described as in some way related to play. And often the meaning of play was defined in terms of its opposite - what play is not - and yet the more we looked at it the more those dichotomies melted away, so that we were dealing not with antitheses but rather with a ‘both-and’ situation in the same way as, in dealing with the unconscious, any assertion and its opposite can exist side by side, are equally true, equally necessary, and in a way jo