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PLAY HAS NOT HAD A PROMINENT ROLE IN PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY, except for childhood play. This stems from Freud's view that play is normally restricted to childhood and, in the course of development, is replaced by fantasy, transformed into creative activity, or subordinated to the reality principle. Play, however, is an activity of central importance throughout life. It is universal, not only in man, but also in many higher animals. It exists in all known cultures. In this paper I propose to develop an ontogeny of play extending throughout life and to consider some implications that such a revised role of play has for the psychoanalytic view of conflict and adaptation.
Freud saw play as helping the child master anxiety through action. The child experiences play as unreal, yet "linked to reality."
It would be wrong to think he does not take that world seriously; on the contrary, he takes his play very seriously and he expends large amounts of emotion on it. The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real. In spite of all the emotion with which he cathects his world of play, the child distinguishes it quite well from reality; and he likes to link his imagined objects and situations to the tangible and visible things of the real world. This linking is all that differentiates the child's play from 'phantasying' [Freud, 1908, p. 144; my italics].