Petrification, Chaos, Primitive Triangulation and the Therapeutic Power of Game-Play

This article discusses the use of traditional structured games such as Monopoly, Draughts, War and UNO, in psychoanalytic psychotherapy with children in severely disturbed states of mind. The author focuses on two opposite poles of disturbance: states of psychic petrification, typical of children on the Autism spectrum, and states of chaos, typical of children in psychotic states of mind. It is suggested that these structured games can serve as a vehicle for what Alvarez terms the language of “fatherese,” a call to psychic growth, structuring, and communication with the outside world. Drawing on Houziel’s and Rhode’s thinking on the bisexuality of the psychic skin, it is proposed that structured games combine male elements of structure and solidity with female elements of emotion, uncertainty, and porosity, thereby enabling work on a primitive level of triangularity. Two clinical examples are presented: the first where the therapist introduced a process of negotiation into a game of Monopoly with a child adhesively addicted to petrified game-play; the second where the therapist initiated a game of SET to introduce psychic structuring and a space to think. These clinical examples are analyzed in terms of Bion’s concepts of the Establishment and the Messianic and Amir’s concepts of psychic tonality and atonality.