Chapter 8 Imagination, Play and Art

Unconscious phantasy underlies and colours all our activities however realistic. But certain phenomena and activities aim more directly at the expression, elaboration, and symbolizarion of unconscious phantasies. Not only night dreams, but also day-dreams, play, and art, fall under this heading. They have many elements in common. Freud showed the closeness between day-dream and dream, and day-dream and art. Klein at times compared play with free associations and dreams, and emphasized the crucial role of play in the whole development of the child, including sublimation, and considered inhibitions in play as a most serious symptom. Art and play, however, differ from dream and day-dream because, unlike those, they are also an attempt at translating phantasy into reality.

Play is a way both of exploring reality and of mastering it; it is a way of learning the potential of the material played with, and of its limitations, and also the child’s own capabilities and limitations. It is also learning to distinguish between the symbolic and the real. The child is aware that to play is to ‘pretend’. The little child who makes pies out of sand sometimes tries to eat them or feed them to others. But it soon learns that pies made of sand are not for eating or feeding: they are ‘make-believe’ pies. In the normal child this will not inhibit his play. He will enjoy the satisfaction of expressing his phantasy of being mother or father cook, and the pleasure of having in reality made a new, attractive object. His play can then become increasingly imaginative: exploring what else can be done with, and be represented by the sand, sand which is not in fact a pie and which therefore can be used in many different ways.

A child’s normal play is a major way of working through a conflict. I remember watching a boy of just under three, when his mother was away for a day giving birth to his first sibling. First he made a complex rail track for his wooden toy train. He filled it with little toy pe