When the Patient Cannot Play. On the conception of the Psychoanalytic Process as Play

According to Winnicott, the place where we feel alive and enjoy life creatively, ‘the place where we live,’ is a potential ‘third area’ between our inner psychic reality and the commonly accepted external reality. It is in this transitional space, which embraces paradox and breathes with the dynamic tension between imagination and reality, the private and the public, and creation and discovery, that play – or playing – cultural experience and psychoanalysis are potentially grounded and creatively expressed. The psychoanalytic process is a specialised form of playing that takes place in the overlap of two areas of play—that of the patient and that of the therapist—and, according to Winnicott, ‘if the patient cannot play, then something needs to be done to enable the patient to become able to play’.

This article features some thoughts concerning the ‘something that needs to be done’ and focuses on the function of the therapist, who attempts to create a balance between traditional technique and spontaneity, the institutional and the analytic superego, and solitary and collective action.