From Enactment to Play: Metacommunication, Acknowledgment and the Third of Paradox

My contribution is to ask for a paradox to be accepted and tolerated and respected, and for it not to be resolved. By flight to split-off intellectual functioning it is possible to resolve the paradox, but the price of this is the loss of the value of the paradox itself

[T]he paradoxes of play are characteristic of an evolutionary step… similar paradoxes are a necessary ingredient in that process of change which we call psychotherapy. The resemblance between the process of therapy and the phenomenon of play is in fact, profound. Both occur within a delimited psychological frame, a spatial and temporary bounding of a set of interactive messages. In both play and therapy, the messages have a special and peculiar relationship to a more concrete or basic reality… the pseudocombat of play is not real combat