Definitions of Play and Play Therapy (what is play therapy?)
By Andrew Guthrie, Ph.D.
In the last century play has been defined in a multitude of ways: as the child’s best loved and most absorbing occupation, as the universal, inalienable right of childhood, as the basis of the whole of man’s experiential existence (Davis & Wallbridge, 1981), as a universal form of action that facilitates growth and therefore health (Newman, 1995), as a therapy as well as a basic form of living, as children’s work (Winnicott, 1968), and as the way that children learn what no one can teach them.
For Kleinians, child’s play is equivalent to the adult’s free associations (Klein, 1927), and for play theorists it is simply the child’s natural medium. While play is communicative, it should not always be considered equivalent to a direct communication from the child’s unconscious that may then be translated or interpreted into words. Play is characterized by intrinsic motivation, and satisfies an internal desire or need in the child. It is pleasurable, spontaneous, and does not require an aim or end product. Playing leads to positive feelings, puts children at ease, fosters their willingness, and should be free from external rules (Schaefer, 1993; Winnicott, 1971b). It is considered by some to be the most natural thing children do, and it cannot be taught. Through playing, children learn to live in a symbolic world that furnishes the child with opportunities to “act out” situations that are disturbing, conflicting, and confusing to him. That is, play is a bridge between concrete experience and abstract thought (Piaget, 1962). In play, the child performs sensory-motor actions with concrete objects that are considered symbols for direct and indirect experiences. Play attempts to organize unmanageable experiences into manageable play through symbolic representation. It is central to healthy development and is considered children’s symbolic language of self-expression. It is capable of representing the past, present, and future, exemplifying the human propensity to create model situations in which aspects of the past are relived, the present re-presented and renewed, and the future anticipated.
In place of being a sense-maker or a surrogate parent, as the interpretive and relational schools view the role of the psychoanalyst (more or less), play theorists consider the psychoanalyst a “participant observer” (Mook, 1994) or a “polite guest” who studies play as the child’s most serious occupation. Play is fundamentally a symbolic process through which unintegrated experience is transformed into communicable, understandable, thinkable “thought.” Children use play, as adults use talk, to work through anxieties. Experiences are reworked in pretense, and nearly all children use play to enact a theme that is traumatic or negative for them, such as starting school, being hospitalized, or the departure of a parent. As early as 1933, it was recognized that “ . . . in pretend play, children are attempting to understand and control strong emotions, to repeat negative experiences in order to make them more predictable, and to rehearse and look for solutions to unresolved conflicts” (Waelder, p. 210). Through fantasy characters and plots, children create an embodiment of unfocused fears and can distance themselves from fears as they deal with them. By actively controlling the event rather than being a passive victim, the child transforms from victim to aggressor and gains control over the rate and amount of incoming stimuli. Play can also be used to escape temporarily or avoid an ongoing situation involving challenge, conflict, or problem. In addition, play can serve as a vehicle to struggle with, integrate, and master concerns about death, destruction, and injury. “These . . . concerns are intimately connected to painful feelings of powerlessness and anxiety. Efforts by the child in analysis to master these issues involve the elaboration of themes. Often the play has a repetitive aspect suggesting trauma and efforts at mastery” (Ablon, 1993, p. 297).
One of the reasons why play is a safe method for children to approach a problematic part of themselves is because the point of conflict is personally disavowed and identified as residing in the toys or the psychoanalyst within the play narrative. “The child most often chooses play for communication because the allusive and illusory nature of play provides rich means of representation, and the suspension of reality in play provides relative safety and control” (Solnit, et al, 1993, p. 241). Through the repetition of a child’s past conflict within the present play, an external trauma that was internalized is re-externalized, and solutions to the original conflict may materialize within the story of play and bring relief, but not conscious insight, to the child’s internal and external situations.
Closely aligned with the play model is the relational notion of the importance of the relationship that springs up between the psychoanalyst and child as they play together. Playing not only integrates problematic, dissociated parts of the child’s mind, it also occurs in the context of an interpersonal relationship with a psychoanalyst who plays with zest and measured spontaneity (Frankel, 1998; Caspary, 2003). Implicit in this notion is the assumption that children learn to represent inner experiences because they are first made real by another person’s recognition of them. “Just as there is no vision without stimulation by light, so play does not fully develop without an adult taking it seriously” (Solnit, et al, p. 252). The ability to express emotions and the ability to tell a story using symbolic play are closely related to the quality of a close relationship with another person. In the original situation this person was the child’s mother, and in the analytic situation it is the psychoanalyst who supplements what the mother originally provided, or provides for the first time what was never available. “Like the mother, the therapist helps the young child make sense of the world by helping the child develop the tools to label and narrate its many dimensions and to give feeling and life to its many inhabitants” (Slade, 1994, p. 97). And, like the mother in the first months after the birth of her baby, “ . . . when we play with a child, we let the child know that we are there to be told” (p. 95).
Although playing can have a development-promoting impact with a minimum of verbalization and interpretation, it is important to remember that, for some theorists, play by itself may not be enough. The play must occur with “ . . .a psychoanalytic therapist who is empathic, attuned to his patient’s moods and fantasies, and available as a player as well as an active psychological-emotional transference presence as the child plays out . . . the inner drama, longings, attitudes, motives, and characteristics of this impaired development” (Cohen & Solnit, 1994, p. 50). In addition, there exist some proponents of play who also believe play must on occasion be accompanied by interpretation, but that the analyst must carefully decide when to play and when to interpret: “Play serves both developmental and analytic goals. It serves the former best when it is allowed free reign to proceed toward consolidation, and it serves the latter best when the activity of play can be converted into verbal channels. As a consequence, the child clinician is often confronted with the task of determining when to sustain play as play in order to provide the necessary concrete experiences that establish nuclei for the emerging hierarchies and when to shift play into words to facilitate access to the unconscious” (Solnit et al, p. 222).
