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According to Bender, there is no conclusive evidence that a child's participation in a session of play is a therapeutic experience. Studies of adolescents and young adults treated by play in childhood show that they were not much influenced by it. The kind of technique is unimportant to the child and important only to the adult observer. To the extent that the technique can reveal the child's inner life by projection, it represents the content of the child's fantasies and emotional problems. To the extent that it can be used to demonstrate the child's capacity to organize material in the play, the child reveals its maturational trends and achievements, its tendencies to inhibition, regression, and withdrawal. The technique may indicate also the capacity for object relations. Repeated observations show the child's capacity for maturation or 'improvement'. There may be, of course, therapeutic factors in the child's relation with the adult in play. If the play technique used is important to the adult and helps him understand the child and be friendly to it, the play will undoubtedly contribute to the relationship. In child psychiatry play has had a role similar to that of hypnosis in adult psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and psychotherapy. Hypnosis has in the past been important in understanding the unconscious and fantasy life, especially in their relation to psychopathology. It is a valuable and dramatic means of demonstrating to students the reality of the unconscious. But no therapist has ever been dependent on hypnosis as a technique for very long, and all therapists agree that most patients are treated more effectively without hypnosis provided the therapist knows what the patient's problem is and has some technical procedure for dealing with it. In a similar way, play has been important for understanding projective phenomena in the maturing child, for learning its capacities to reveal its inner life and its problems, and for demonstrating its capacity t