Playing in Developmental Psychology and in Psychoanalytic Theory

The title of Winnicott's (1971a) book, Playing and Reality, calls attention to the primary importance Winnicott placed upon playing as an activity in normal development and as an activity in the psychoanalytic situation.1 Indeed, playing as a concept was so central in his late thinking that he suggested a revision of the place of playing in the history of psychoanalysis:

I want to draw attention away from the sequence psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, play material, playing, and to set this up again the other way round. In other words, it is play that is the universal, and that belongs to health: playing

Dr. Anderegg is in the private practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy in Lenox, Massachusetts. This paper was the recipient of the 1988 Post-doctoral award of Division 39 of the American Psychological Association. A short version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, August 22, 1986. The author wishes to thank Drs. Daniel P. Schwartz and Christopher Bollas for comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

1. In this paper, the “psychoanalytic situation” refers to both psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

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facilitates growth and therefore health; playing leads into group relationships; playing can be a form of communication in psychotherapy; and, lastly, psychoanalysis has been developed as a highly specialized form of playing in the service of communication with oneself and others. The natural thing is playing, and the highly sophisticated twentieth-century phenomenon is psychoanalysis. It must be of value to the analyst to be constantly reminded not only of what is owed to Freud but also of what we owe to the natural and universal thing called playing [1971b, p. 41].

How Winnicott understood “the natural and universal thing called playing” is the subject of the present paper.

Since the publication of Playing and Reality, there has been increasing attention to the phenomena, including play, subsumed