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One way to distinguish therapeutic sensibilities is by how clinicians think about human inventiveness. Freud (1894, p. 54), for example, started with the idea that, because we can never have what we
really want, serial substitutions must be found. For Freud, one might say, necessity is the mother of invention. In contrast, Russell Meares, Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Sydney, suggests that not necessity, but play, supported by a particular form of relatedness, is the source of what makes us most fully human. In two recent, lucid, and enormously valuable works, The Metaphor of Play and Intimacy and Alienation, Meares follows Winnicott's (1982) lead in suggesting that the central organizing thread of development is not the regulation of desire, but the experience of aliveness and the consequences of disruptions to the continuity of being.
Meares allows himself to range far and wide, gathering bits and pieces from diverse thinkers to build a model of psychotherapy based on evidence from child development, memory research, and clinical experience. He certainly has his heroes, foremost among them William James, James Mark Baldwin, Hughlings Jackson, and Pierre Janet. These four can be seen as pioneers of a science of self: James the chief describer of self-experience, Baldwin the student of its development, Jackson the investigator of its neurological foundations, and Janet the cartographer of the consequences of its disruption. And standing on the shoulders of these giants are Piaget, L. S. Vygotsky, Robert Hobson, Heinz Kohut, and D. W. Winnicott, all of whom add important empirical, dialogic, and clinical elements to Meares's understanding of what can go right or wrong in human relatedness.
The nub of Meares's argument can be stated simply: central to both human psychology and the therapeutic enterprise is the experience of what it means to be “myself.” Play, particularly symbolic play, provides the principal metaphor for the emergence of self