Play, Myth, Theater, and Psychoanalysis

… the play is going on now — at any rate we are acting it, the old Professor and I. The old Professor doubles the part. He is Hercules struggling with Death and he is the beloved, about to die. Moreover he himself, in his own character, has made the dead live, has summoned a host of dead and dying children from the living tomb.

I should like to interweave some of the analagous, associative, and intrinsic relationships between play, myth, drama, and psychoanalysis. I take for granted the many substantive differences between these broad entities. Ultimately, my purpose is to demonstrate that there is a basis for approaching myth, theater, psychoanalysis, or psychoanalytic therapy through psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott's (1971) concept of illusion, play, and playing. This will involve a look at the “play” of the theater and at some structural and functional anthropological connections between ritual, myth, drama, and the contemporary therapeutic “mini-theater” of the psychoanalytic situation. First, it is necessary to show a number of ways in which myth is structured intrinsically within psychoanalysis. Consequently, the specific analogies between play, the (theatrical) play and illusion involved in public and private mythology and the psychoanalytic situation can be more easily demonstrated. It will be necessary to examine some of the more recent attempts to move away from a natural science model for psychoanalysis. Prominent within this trend are models in the areas of history and the literary narrative.