What's at Play?

After being commissioned by the author's local psychoanalytic institute, this essay was rejected in November 2016 for being “too political”.

Trump had captured center stage with a new brand of incendiary rhetoric that not only promoted his own self- aggrandizement amidst a whirlwind of lies and contradictions, but substituted a smorgasbord of evasions, disavowals, contradictions, racial epithets, xenophobic commentaries and misogynistic declarations for substantive discussion and debate of critical issues.

When I was asked to write a piece for this newsletter on the subject of play, work/life balance or the analyst at play, I began gathering materials as I usually do in my writing process, and then I wait and see what thoughts begin to germinate along the subject matter lines as time moves forward. By Halloween, I had amassed quite a bit of material culled from PepWeb, my home library and the “Harvard Business Review.” My preliminary percolations revolved around exploring what it means to “play” in psychotherapy or analysis, and what that involves for a therapist or analyst at play. Winnicott's theoretical statement on playing seemed like a fruitful point of departure towards this effort:

Psychotherapy takes place in the overlap of two areas of playing, that of the patient and that of the therapist. Psychotherapy has to do with two people playing together. The corollary of this is that where playing is not possible then the work done by the therapist is directed towards bringing the patient from a state of not being able to play into a state of being able to play.

Dreams and play are universal and both belong to states of well-being and mental health. On the other hand, nightmares, terrors and dreads lead to states of stasis, entropy and non-representation. Both dreams and play occupy central roles in the process of working through emotional experience. The ability to dream and to play helps transform our raw sensory e