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Woltmann surveys play therapy and various play techniques, showing what they have in common. He demonstrates by example the cathartic value of free play. All writers on play therapy agree that the child by its use of toys reveals projections of innermost thoughts, drives, and motivations.
Children are referred for treatment for many reasons. Therapy always starts from complaints that something has gone wrong in the child. According to his theoretical beliefs, the therapist may use child analysis or modifications of psychoanalytic technique such as 'release' or 'active' therapy. Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, suggested that play is repetition for the mastery of unpleasant experience, and this theory still permeates psychoanalytic thinking. Psychoanalysis in stressing regressive phenomena has neglected their important counterpart—the progressive element. Play activities are both progressive, showing the desire to go forward, to discover, and to take in the world, and regressive, as typified by Freud's 'repetition compulsion', the compulsion to regress to and replay traumatic events. The child's primary job is to grow; its main tool, play, is therefore in the service of progressive trends.
Woltmann summarizes the contributions of Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, Margaret Lowenfeld, and Erik Erikson. He observes that the greatest barrier to the establishment of universally valid conclusions and inferences drawn from the child's handling of play materials is the lack of correlation between methods of collecting data and those used for evaluation. We try to validate by using the