Working Through Transformations in Play

For Bion, one of the aims of analysis is to increase the transformation of negative emotions so that they do not exceed the personal capacity to contain them. Ferro described a transformation in playing as the possibility of giving the patient an emotion contained in action or a concrete situation, intuiting the underlying dream. A possible hypothesis to deepen the “transformations in playing” theory is that they can be a valuable tool to explore the relational area that escapes the word. Through transformation into play, the unthought can find a way to establish an invariant, a profound relational continuity that can move toward elaboration. The frequent clinical entanglement between transformations in play and reverie suggests that these are clinical phenomena that can take place in an area of analytical work at the frontiers of dreaming (Ogden, 2001). In this process, reverie seems to reveal itself both as a possible endpoint of a potential transformation in dreaming and a starting point of a possible transformation in playing. Transformation in play defines an intersubjective area where one can experience how the transformative capacity of the two subjects can establish continuity even between unmentalized sensory and emotional experiences, enabling the development of the embryonic dreams contained within them. Unlike transformations in dreaming, those in play preserveas wrote by Ogden; in ”Conversations at the frontier of dreaming” the features of playing, namely, bodily sensations and movements and the preservation of paradox.