Continuities of Tongues: A Developmental Perspective on the Role of Play in Child and Adult Psychoanalytic Process

Winnicott has emphasized both the ubiquitous presence and therapeutic importance of play in child and adult analysis. This paper proposes that play is an essential component of psychoanalytic process and that a developmental viewpoint permits one to see how play is similar and how it is different in child and adult analysis. The paper describes how it is heuristically valuable to define play as a free-ranging voluntary activity that occurs within certain limits of time and place, according to accepted rules.

Play is accompanied by feelings of tension and joy and the awareness that it is different from ordinary life. Three kinds of play are described and distinguished: exploratory, imaginative, and for amusement. These may or may not overlap in life and the clinical situation. From this vantage point Freud's view that as the child grows up play is replaced by fantasy and daydreams is only partly true. For adults play evolves to a considerable extent from thing play to thought and word play. Adults use language to invoke play such as puns, humor, metaphor, synonym, irony, sarcasm (expletive) on the substrate of word symbols such as dreams, legends, mythic figures, and icons of popular culture. In a way similar to the play of children, the play of adults serves to promote development, awareness, organization, and mastery of affects facilitating a living rather than a recounting of experience and transference so that there can be a naming, a renaming, a recursive reworking that is intensely felt and transforming.