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Children's play has been the subject of scientific discussion for many psychologists of various schools of thought, Child psychology, as it is taught in our universities, has occupied itself with the remarkable phenomenon that a considerable part of a growing child's day is taken up with play and has undertaken to make various contributions to the interpretation of this phenomenon. It will now be our endeavor to see what psychoanalysis has to contribute to the question of children's play.
Comparing the literature of academic psychology with the more casual psychoanalytic publications dealing with the subject, it will immediately be noticed that each draws attention to a different group of games. Academic psychology studies chiefly what one might designate "official" games of children—games which are typical and played by all children. In psychoanalytic literature, on the contrary, interest is chiefly centered on games of a different type—those of a more individual nature, to which the child clings for a certain time only. Naturally, it cannot be said that academic psychology is not interested in the individual games or that psychoanalysis is not concerned with the traditional, typical ones; but it is hardly possible to overlook the fact that the two place the stress differently.
The psychoanalytic theory of play is not able to supply a unitary explanation for the phenomenon called "play", by which all games and all manifestations arising from them can be interpreted. On the contrary, here, as is usually the case in psychoanalysis, a single phenomenon may have various meanings, may perform various functions and cannot be explained by a single general interpretation: in short, as we say in psychoanalysis, the