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Listening to an adult's description of his life, we find that a clear vista into his past is limited by horizons: one is the onset of puberty, with its nebulous "screen memories", another the onset of the so-called latency period through which, in retrospect, memories appear inaccurate and obscure, if at all. In our work with children we meet another horizon, the period of language development. "The material which the child furnishes us," says Anna Freud in her Introduction to the Technic of Child Analysis, "supplies us with many welcome confirmations of facts which up to the present moment we have only been able to maintain by reference to adult analysis. But … it does not lead us beyond the boundary where the child becomes capable of speech; in short, that time from whence on its thinking becomes analogous to ours."1
Associations, fantasies, dreams, lead in the analysis of the adult mind to the land beyond the mountains; in child analysis these roads lose their reliability and have to be supplemented by others, especially the sequences which occur spontaneously in the child's play.
It seems to me, however, that when substituting play for other associative material we are inclined to apply to its observation and interpretation methods which do not quite do justice to its nature. We tend to neglect the characteristic which most clearly differentiates play from the world of psychological data communicated to us by means of language, namely, the manifestation of an experience in actual space, in