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This paper is an effort to bring the light of psychoanalysis to the teacher game. Though the doctor game has often been noted and scrutinized by psychoanalysts, the equally ubiquitous teacher game has received less attention.
Freud (1920) describes the first identifiable play activity of the infant as a defense against anxiety. This is the well-known throwing-away and bringing-back play of the baby in his crib who retrieves with pleasure the toy he casts out, a play interpreted as letting the mother go and then bringing her back. In this and in the peek-a-boo game, the child maintains control of the situation he has learned not to like, i. e., the disappearance of the mother. If the adult in the play makes it too realistic and disappears for a longer time than the child can sustain, the fun breaks down in excessive anxiety and sometimes he will refuse for long periods to engage himself with the parent or other adult who offers to play peek-a-boo. With repeated trials, he may give up his anxiety and rejoin the partnership, or with continued disappointment, suffer a blow to his object relationship.
Waelder (1932) in his psychoanalytic interpretation of play shows that play characteristic of the developmental phases is imbedded in the anxieties specific for the period: in the anal period, for example, concern with putting in and taking out (the dump truck is a favorite toy), giving and withholding, piling up blocks, pleasure in messiness and so on.
These activities are followed in the phallic-oedipal period with more elaborate acting-out fantasies, largely defensive against fear of castration. The child who plays out a painful dental experience on his teddy bear, the child who abreacts a motor accident in fantasy