Book Review

The Many Meanings of Play: A Psychoanalytic Perspective

N Engl J Med 1993; 329:1972December 23, 1993

Article

The Many Meanings of Play: A Psychoanalytic Perspective
Edited by Albert J. Solnit, Donald J. Cohen, and Peter B. Neubauer. 321 pp., illustrated. New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1993. $35. ISBN: 0-300-05438-6

As these psychoanalysts -- all from Boston, New Haven, and New York -- make clear, a child at play is a child, ironically, working quite hard -- anxious to explore and fathom the world, to test its possibilities, to give expression to all sorts of wishes, worries, and fears, and not least, to connect with others in various ways, for the good and sometimes the bad (in friendly games or mean-spirited ones). As we grow older, we are apt to forgo play for work, for study (which is, itself, hard work), for a compliance with the constraints imposed on us, day after day, by this rule-bound world. The vigorous, wildly exuberant play of many children who are, say, four or six gradually becomes a far more controlled kind., and soon enough, most of us, if we are lucky, are playful with words and remarks, or in athletic games. All this is a far cry from the imaginative, idiosyncratic leaps of mind and body that children at play can demonstrate.

Each of the authors in this wonderfully instructive, at times compelling, book has a particular angle of vision to share with us, a way of approaching the phenomenon of play in children and its persistence in different forms among adults. Some of the authors favor abstract discussion; others are inclined to clinical presentation and discussion; a few (a distinct pleasure for the reader) are willing to give us a more wide-ranging kind of reflection. All the authors, of course, stand proudly on Sigmund Freud's shoulders, though many are willing to call on others, again and again, especially Anna Freud and D.W. Winnicott.

Unlike some psychoanalytic textbooks, this one reaches for the general reader; its contributors know the worth of clear, unpretentious language. At its best, of course, psychoanalysis offers us a sustained look inward -- a careful appraisal of how we get to be the kind of people we become. Most of these essays owe their cogency and suggestiveness to the youngsters whose troubles prompted their parents to seek psychoanalytic counsel. Again and again, a child's choice of a game, an imaginary story, a particular activity, enables his or her psychoanalyst to understand not only a particular patient, but also those larger matters that get called “child development.” As several of the authors are willing to acknowledge, psychoanalysis itself is a kind of play -- with both the analyst and the analysand suspending the usual rules of politeness, privacy, and civility that characterize our behavior with one another (outside the home, especially) in favor of a special kind of candor and intimacy. (In analysis with children, of course, the analyst is often a boy's or girl's playmate.)

Especially valuable and interesting are the broader speculations some of the authors permit themselves to make. We are reminded that writers and artists manage to retain a playfulness others may lose -- and use it to obvious good effect. In that regard, I wish some attention had been given to scientists, many of whom have their own ways of being creative and, in doing so, having much fun, to the profit of the rest of us, who end up knowing more about how things work in the body, in the world, or even in the cosmos. In a memorable and touching essay, Eugene J. Mahon extends the notion of play, of creativity; he wonders why we “sing the praises of creativity in childhood” or, for that matter, in the adult world of the arts, yet “never even conceive of creativity in a parent.” He tells us that “the indelible but invisible marks of parenthood on the evolving canvas of childhood clamor for equal attention.” He asks, rhetorically, whether “some form of recognition [is] not long overdue” for what he calls “creative parental playing.” It is an especially thoughtful, poignant moment in a book that deserves our grateful respect.

Robert Coles, M.D.
Harvard University Health Services, Cambridge, MA 02138