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IN HER WRITINGS AND TEACHING, BERTA BORNSTEIN REPEATEDLY emphasized the need to understand the core conceptions underlying clinical work. Children in analysis communicate by means of their dreams and daydreams, their stories and dramatizations, and their play. I have chosen to focus on Berta Bornstein's thoughts about play in child analysis, its clinical use and the theory which illuminates it.
In adult analysis we ask our patients to free-associate. Through this process our patients reveal themselves. While play is the substance of child analysis, it is not "free association," nor is it the child's "free association." It is the natural medium for the child. Berta Bornstein believed that children do not employ free association because it threatens their ego organization. For the child, free association represents a temptation to regress to the primary process. She wrote (1951): "It is only with great difficulty that the child learns that contradictions exclude each other and that contradictory thoughts must be kept apart in conversation… Any newly acquired accomplishment can easily be undone by regressive processes and the child senses that this would occur were he to attempt to express whatever comes into his mind." She believed that free association is possible only after children have developed the capacity for introspection, and that this "hardly ever occurs before prepuberty when the superego approaches a state of consolidation" (p. 279).
"In contrast to his feelings about free association, the child is not