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In this small volume, the prolific Erikson relates his observations of children's play to the rituals of adult daily life and to national hopes and objectives. He talks primarily as a psychoanalyst, but also as a mature scientist ready to give his summative opinion of mankind in general.
Erikson delineates the features and values of childhood play and shows how they are necessary to, and incorporated in, adult living. The daily rituals must contain the elements of playfulness or stagnation and despair result. He views the “ritualization of everyday life throughout the life cycle” as the offspring of the ontogeny of play (p. 25). He looks at the relation “between the playing child and the playacting adult; between make-believe and belief; between the legitimate theater and what we call the theaters of politics and war; between playful vision and serious theory: between the child's toys, then, and aged reason” (p. 26). He establishes these relationships in a point by point manner, so that he can talk of a “maturing playfulness which is endowed with adult competence, heightens the sense of reality, and enhances actuality in spheres of activity where facts are facts and acts count. This is the lasting heritage of childhood play” (p. 63). All of this playfulness is embodied, in Erikson's view, in ritualization in everyday life (p. 69). As a result he can talk of the “meaning of ritualized interplay for the development of the individual ego” from which we may “proceed from the political element in games to the game element in political action” (p. 73). The ensuing ritualization “represents a creative formalization which helps to avoid both impulsive excess and compulsive self-restriction, both social anomie and moralistic coercion” (p. 82). “… each element of ritualization which later becomes the core of a major human institution is rooted in a distinct age of childhood, but is absorbed by and renewed in all subsequent ones” (pp. 97-98). These derivatives of play, in Eriks