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One of the consequences of the increase in leisure-time activity,21 from the psychoanalyst's point of view, is that patients bring more material about play into their therapy via free associations and dreams. Increase in the amount of leisure has led to increased time and emotional importance allotted to play, sports and games as part of the overall apportionment of our lives. Psychoanalytic insight should help clarify the latent as well as manifest meaning of sports. Tennis as a sport with which the author has the most experience will be used as an example of a form of play. A recent report21 lists it as the fifteenth most popular hobby in the United States.
Freud enunciated the two main goals of life to be love and work. Anna Freud9 in her latest book extends this approach into her “developmental lines” by considering play as a way station on the way to work. The thesis of my study is that play should have a developmental line of its own and that Freud's succinct formulation of life's goals as love and work should be enlarged to include three parameters: love, work and play.
In 1932, Waelder22 presented a systematic study of play and characterized it essentially as a way of dealing with “an onslaught of more events in a relatively brief period of time than could be endured by the immature … organism.” Playful repetition enables the child to deal with the painful situation by turning passivity into activity. To accomplish this transformation he changes roles (identification