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The editors have brought together a body of literature in this large book to explore the emergence of evolutionary trends in play. These
are studied in the primate order and compared and contrasted with qualities found in human play. Each section of the book therefore contains articles demonstrating phylogenetic continuities together with articles highlighting the striking discontinuities consequent to the emergence of symbolic and linguistic behavior. Psychoanalytic articles are excluded with the rationale that these would be well-known to the reader of this volume!
In a key article, Bruner, one of the editors, suggests that a lessening of instinctive patterns along strict social lines in the great apes combined with the long period of dependence of the young on the mother is the matrix in which a developmentally early period characterized by playful activities emerges, ultimately serving "learning." K. Lorenz, going further in "Psychology and Phylogeny" (p. 85), points out that one crucial factor in the emergence of play in both animals and human beings is the capacity to function independent of momentary physiological needs; play requires the hypothesis of an "objectivating function" (p. 88). Lorenz, like P. C. Reynolds (p. 621), attributes this capacity to the evolution of "foetalisation," that is, the "persistence of juvenile characteristics" (neoteny). Reynolds calls this phylogenetic trend toward delayed maturation in primates the "flexibility complex" and stresses that it allows for the emergence of object use and of observational-imitative and conceptual learning. In another article, G. Bateson hypothesizes that "play marks a step forward in the evolution of communication" (p. 119). The presence of play requires the assumption of a "communicated, paradoxical, psychological frame," characterized by a special interpenetration of "primary and higher secondary conscious mental processes." Signals are exchanged and denoted which are in a certain sense