You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Jean Sanville's book, The Playground of Psychoanalytic Therapy, is an exploration of play and its clinical significance for the psychoanalytic psychotherapy of children and adults. Sanville traces her view of play to Freud's idea of transference as a playground. Because of the importance she attaches to the ideas of Winnicott and Balint, Sanville elaborates on the relational significance of play and attempts to integrate into this effort the rich findings from the infant-developmental research of Stern, Emde and Sander, etc. Her work also touches on the meaning of play for interpretation, transference, countertransference, dreams, personal mythology and termination. Sanville also explores the concept of play as drama. Her work is studded with many clinical examples exemplifying the implications of her theory for clinical practice. A few will be summarised and discussed.
Freud (1914) wrote, 'The main instrument, however, for curbing the patient's compulsion to repeat and for turning it into a motive for remembering lies in the handling of the transference. We render the compulsion harmless, and indeed useful, by giving it the right to assert itself in a definite field. We admit it into the transference as playground, in which it is allowed to expand in almost complete freedom and in which it is expected to is hidden in the patient's mind' (Remembering, repeating and working through, S.E. 12). Sanville (p. 86) bases her views on this idea of Freud's; however, she rejects Freud's emphasis on pathogenic instincts which she believes render the playground 'unsafe'. Because of this difference, Sanville defines the playground to be the potentially playful psychic space between the two participants in the dialogue or psychotherapy. Sanville's elaboration of play draws upon Winnicott's (1971) idea that, 'Psychotherapy takes place in the overlap of two areas of playing, that of the patient and that of the therapist. Psychotherapy has to do with two people playing to