Discussion

Freudian theory contains drive-discharge features, structural features, hermeneutic features, transformational features, and object relations features. It is this rich vantage that enables us to account for the multiple forms, functions, and outcomes of ongoing experience. The three papers we have just heard sensitively demonstrate this sophisticated understanding of modern psychoanalytic theory, and I am delighted to have the opportunity to explore and expand upon their understanding.

Psychoanalytic theory has always had a substantial interest in play — not only theoretically (in contrast to what is real) but methodologically, since play is the technical cornerstone of our psychoanalytic interventions with young children. I would like to make a few comments on the development of play, with a particular reference to the nature of the powerful experience of surprise, which is so central to the games of peek-a-boo and hide-and-seek. Then I would like to develop my comments to include the relationship between surprise and trauma, and to note its role in the developmental mastery of trauma.

The earliest precursors of play lie in those interactions where the parent teases the infant and both participants exchange looks, touches, and sounds that give them mutual pleasure. Bergman has reminded us about some of the ways in which these early interactions “serve an important function in the task of every human being to create an internal world with a variety of self and object representations.” As the baby develops capacities for imitation, identification, and symbolization, we can begin to observe the more highly developed and structuralized capacities for play that Dunn beautifully describes in her presentation. But play is not only a precursor of more elaborated actions, play is also a precursor of more highly