Play and Game as Metaphor for Technique

We should keep our seriousness for serious things and not waste it on trifles, and … while God is the real goal of all beneficent serious endeavor, man … has been constructed as a toy for God, and this is, in fact the finest thing about him. All of us, then, men and women alike, must fall in with our role and spend life in making our play as perfect as possible.

I'll have you know—and all of those in this room who have treated children will have you know—that play is serious business.

Metaphorically referring to almost any interaction between people as a “game” is not unusual, although use of that word does carry a somewhat pejorative connotation, and Freud twice compared aspects of psychoanalytic technique to the game of chess. In the chapter on the psychotherapy of hysteria in the “Studies on Hysteria” (Freud, 1895), he says that the “irregular and twisting path” of the patient's latent thought content makes the analyst's reconstruction of pathological psychical material resemble

a broken line which would pass along the most roundabout paths from the surface to the deepest layers and back, and yet would in general advance from the periphery to the central nucleus, touching at every intermediate halting-place—a line resembling the zig-zag line in the solution of a Knight's Move Problem, which cuts across the squares in the diagram of the chess-board. (Freud, 1895, p. 289)