A Play for a Bereaved Brother: Mutually Playing with the Child Survivor of a Sibling Suicide

In this work, I elucidate Winnicott’s principle of ‘mutual playing’ with reference to the treatment of a highly traumatised twelve-year-old boy, whose elder brother had committed suicide. Lamentably, he had discovered his brother’s dead body and following this experience became electively mute, lost contact with his friends, and was compulsively preoccupied with images of murder and death. It seemed that in unconscious fantasy, he believed his envy had killed his brother. He appeared to have lost the ability to imagine, and, in lacking enough contact with reality, was unable to creatively transform his unspeakable pain to comprehend the trauma. I suggest that my use of the countertransference and improvisation supported this young man’s efforts to convert the trauma into living play images. In every session, it was as if I had to become both the playwright and the supporting actor in ‘playing’ the traumatic experience with him. This form of mutual playing helped the patient regain his own ability to play, and his emotional state improved considerably. I utilise and extend Ogden’s concept of ‘talking-as-dreaming’ and suggest that a therapist often has to play from the feeling tone and imagery of the child’s experience, not about it. I suggest that with this approach, playing becomes the dream of the trauma in waking life.