Magical Arts: The Poetics of Play

People speak with justice of the ‘magic of art’ and compare artists to magicians. But the comparison is perhaps more significant than it claims to be. There can be no doubt that art did not begin as art for art's sake. (Freud 1913, p. 90)

Is there such a thing as ‘art for art's sake’? Freud evidently thought not; for him, art always had a psychic function. Freud's comparison between magicians and artists has its parallel in the long-standing link between magic and play. But here too, psychoanalytically speaking, play seems never to be play for play's sake. To take an obvious example: in ‘The psychoanalytic play-technique: its history and significance’, Melanie Klein (1955) looks back at her early work with children during the 1920s and relates how she first made use of a collection of small toys. Finding one 7-year-old girl unresponsive and withdrawn, she writes,

I left her, saying that I would return in a moment. I went into my own children's nursery, collected a few toys, cars, little figures, a few bricks, and a train, put them in a box and returned to the patient. The child, who had not taken to drawing or other activities, was interested in the small toys and at once began to play. (Klein 1955, p. 125)

From this improvised Pandora's toy-box came huge consequences. Klein first conceived the play-technique as a way for children to express their anxieties and unconscious phantasies. Interpreting children's play, she thought, was like interpreting adult dreams; symbolic language saturated every aspect of their toys and games: ‘the brick, the little figure, the car, not only represent things which interest the child in themselves, but in his play with them they always have a variety of symbolical meanings as well' (Klein 1955, p. 137). Play for Klein was not necessarily fun, or creative, or even particularly playful. It was a serious form of meaning-making - often compulsive, repetitive, and anxious, with its own syntax, rules, and narrative conventions.1