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This is an ambitious book in which the author hopes to cast our understanding of psychoanalytic treatment in terms of play. To accomplish her goal, she uses a metaphoric style in which the book is a play with a prelude and several acts. Play is its theme and its lens; the psychoanalytic situation is a playground; dreams are private playthings. Psychoanalytic concepts are to be played with; the goal of treatment is to render a person better equipped to live life as play.
Sanville, a training and supervising analyst at the Los Angeles Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies, takes off from Freud's metaphor of “transference as a playground” and Winnicott's elucidation of that notion. She develops her thesis with an extensive review of infant observational research (especially that of Stern and of Emde) and reference to Erikson's ideas. Her sources range well beyond the psychoanalytic to include poets, linguists, anthropologists, philosophers, biologists, and general as well as child psychologists.
Sanville's integration leads her to view infants as stimulus seekers rather than as hiding behind a stimulus barrier. That view pertains through the life cycle and results in a humanistic emphasis on agency as a critical dimension of psychoanalytic psychology. Following Winnicott and Spitz, she places the concept of mutuality next to agency. Psychopathology, for Sanville, frequently involves the derailing of dialogue, and therapy aims at its rerailing.
Beginning with examples from child treatment, first of a child who cannot play, then of one who can, Sanville extends her ideas to adult treatment and acknowledges the work that must often precede play. Looking at space and time from philosophical and literary perspectives, she gives details about her playground/workspace. Trauma and reparation, myth as cultural play,