Studies in the Interpretation of Play: I. Clinical Observation of Play Disruption in Young Children: Erik Homburger Erikson. Institute of Human Relations and School of Medicine, Yale University, New Haven. Genetic Psychology Monographs, XXII, 1940, pp. 557–671.

This monograph reviews specimens of a psychotherapist's experience. Observations of the first play enacted by young patients in the therapist's office are described in detail. What are the outstanding attributes of observation of play and what conscious considerations lead to the 'meaning' on which diagnostic decisions are based? In the introduction it is emphasized that little attention to the analysis of play was given by Freud who gave so much consideration to dreams, slips of the tongue and wit. The English school of thought is criticized and with reference to Melanie Klein: 'The author of this paper cannot at the present time overcome a suspicion as to the final adaptation of the child cured by this method to any environment except that which cultivates a special type of psychoanalytic outlook.' Melanie Klein's interpretations are called 'fairy tales stripped of all artistry'.

The clinical descriptions are model examples of clinical observation, and concern 'a six-year-old boy's secret; a neurotic episode in a girl of three; orality in a boy of four; and destruction and restitution in an "epileptic" boy of four'. The psychoanalytic attributes of this material are on the whole the mechanisms of resistance, transference and regression. They appear in the interplay of social, verbal, spatial, and bodily forms of expression. It is in the metaphoric and symbolical use of toys that all these defenses are first caught off guard by the observer. In the microsphere of play the child does what it does not dare to do in reality.