Play Changes Us: Playing the Object,Becoming the Analyst

Transit

Four-year-old Jeremy said to me, “Be a dog. Fall down. Die. Fall and shake.” By the terms of our relationship, I did just that, over and over again.

I survived to open the door two days later, and receive a similar directive: “Be a dog. Shake and die.” I trashed. I died. I survived once more. In so doing, I was not only fantastically surviving. I was not only surviving as a bundle of projections. I was not only an object. I was simultaneously other. I was sorted in between material reality (I was at the door) and psychic reality (I was dying).

The command to become the dying dog did not come about until Jeremy and I had been working together for three months. His treatment began with a set of consultations with his parents. Ostensibly, Jeremy was brought to see me because of concerns voiced by his preschool teachers, who described him as “unpredictably disruptive and unruly.” This characterization was at odds with the parents’ experience; they described him as “often removed” and “moody,” but not especially disruptive.

When the dying dog entered the play, I thought back to the first consult with Jeremy’s parents, and in particular to the way in which his mother spoke about falling into a depression after the birth of her second child, when Jeremy was just shy of three years old. Specifically, I was thinking about an incident the mother had described to me. One afternoon, in a heightened state of agitation, she walked out of their apartment. Before she knew it, she was two blocks from their building. When she returned to the apartment, she found both children on the floor of the living room. She did not recall having left them there. The baby was screaming, and Jeremy ran to her yelling, “Stop!”

Thinking about the dying dog, I considered the death of the mother’s departure. One moment in particular stood out, as his mother spoke about her discomfort with nursing her second child, saying she “could not stand the latching,” and shifted to bottle-feeding. It was not her distress with breastfeeding (a common experience for many women) that had stayed with me. In fact, I had not asked about it; she had volunteered. She wanted something about this experience to be understood. Tears welled up as she pushed her arms out and away from her body, as though she were struggling to get something off of her. It was at that point that she told me that her mother had died when she was pregnant with her second child and Jeremy was eighteen months old.

I contemplated the death of the grandmother, and the psychical death of the mother, although, as I got to know Jeremy and his family better, I came to think that we were in the presence of near-death. The life of a near-dead mother is distinct, I believe, from that of a dead mother (Green 1993). This is an idea in need of more explication than I can offer here. But briefly, Jeremy’s mother, in keeping with Green’s observations, was depressed and “absorbed by a bereavement” (1993, p. 149). Distinct from Green’s description of the dead mother, however, Jeremy’s mother was aware of and disturbed by her failures in care and provision. She sought help in trying to address her depression. She joined a mothers’ group and began working with a therapist soon after her mother died. After the incident when she left the children in the apartment, she felt she needed more care and entered treatment with an analyst, along with taking a course of antidepressants. In making this distinction between near-dead and dead, I did not find Jeremy’s mother to be cold, disillusioned, lacking in love, or entombed in her bereavement. She was absorbed and depressed, yes, but not necrotic. There was room with the mother and Jeremy to address the near-death, the loss, and anxiety; it was not freighted by the deadlock that Green describes. ¹

Additionally, when the dying dog entered the play, I thought about whether Jeremy might be re-creating the trauma of abandonment. Young children frequently enact concretized scenes that express their experiences of trauma. This manner of play often follows on repetitive traumas, including physical and sexual abuse. Jeremy’s mother spoke of the time when she left her children in their apartment as a “breaking point,” a signal that things had gone too far. I believe that Jeremy was trying to communicate his own experience of the break. But, more pervasively, I think that Jeremy was trying to express something less specific and distinct: the consequences of neglect. The primitive agonies engendered by neglect rarely gather narrative cohesion; most often, in my experience, the narrative scatters. By the time the dying dog arrived, I had come to think of the mother’s departure as a screen memory. I thought it likely that the abandonment she literalized by walking out of the apartment had been enacted in more subtle ways throughout Jeremy’s early childhood. The mother had reflected similarly, saying she thought Jeremy’s troubles stemmed from an ongoing “vagueness” and lack of psychic contact when she was physically present. When she described the day she walked out of the apartment as a “breaking point,” she did so while repeating her concern about how she was often anxiously removed.

The dying dog did not arrive, as I have indicated, until Jeremy and I endured a few months of play that echoed the parents’ report of the manner in which he was often “removed.” During our first few months together, Jeremy explored the toys and primarily set about to play alongside me. I was not given an opening through which to enter the play. Indeed, the play itself was not given much of an opening; it lacked momentum, focus, and energy. Jeremy built structures with blocks and toys. He did not narrate his play. In general, he said little. I tried many times to see if I could initiate play by animating toy animals. Jeremy looked at me with vague interest, even some amusement, but did not join the illusion.

During these opening few months of treatment, I often thought about the ways in which neglect troubles focus and depletes energy. The links and associations, along with the transit of illusion that fuels play and helps build transitional objects, were not at hand. I also thought back to a moment at the end of my second consultation with the parents. As the mother continued to talk about her experience with depression, Jeremy’s father looked back and forth between his wife and me with an expression of pained concern. Eventually, with my prompting, he spoke about his guilt in having been insufficiently aware of his wife’s suffering, “and now Jeremy’s.” When I asked him about what I took to be his fear in the face of another’s pain, he said, “Yeah . . .” but could not finish his thought.

It was the blank into which the father fell, coupled with the mother’s account of neglect, that I often felt in the first few months with Jeremy. I am sure that I often dissociated. It was difficult to establish transitional space, and the life of transitional objects, which I took to be the pall of neglect, as it cast its shadow and thwarted playing. The play was listless (sifting through the toys, quietly building with blocks, fingering the pages of books, sorting the toys by category). One might say, near dead.

But I found ways to pull myself back, and continued to see if I could open some transitional space. At the beginning of our third month, Jeremy took note of a set of dinosaurs among the toys. To my surprise, he called all of them by their scientific names. I followed along as they roamed the room, ate, slept, and squabbled. In my note that followed this session, I wrote, “Animation arrived!” In the following two sessions, the same play unfolded, although the dinosaurs began to fight in a manner more in keeping with dinosaurs. Still, I remained sidelined. Eventually, in yet another iteration of this play, I gave the dinosaurs names, giving the biggest one my name, and a small one Jeremy’s. He looked at me curiously, but followed along. In the following hour, he immediately took “Ken” and “Jeremy” to the windowsill, where they looked out onto the garden and began “talking” in a way “we don’t know.” Jeremy did not speak for “Ken” and “Jeremy.” He did not make up or speak a language we didn’t know. So I asked, in a whisper, if what they were saying was a secret. Jeremy shook his head no. I then said something to the effect that it is hard to talk about what we don’t know. Jeremy looked at me with suspicion, and went back to building a tower. It fell with barely a thud.

I failed Jeremy with my comment regarding the trouble with knowing and talking. I dropped him by not staying within the experiencing of “Ken” and “Jeremy.” I failed to stay with the paradox, and too quickly sought to resolve the play with my interpretation about not knowing. Jeremy’s response to my failure was to return to the listless object. Winnicott (1971d) describes this object trouble when he details how the infant depends on the animation and devotion of the external other in order to create a transitional object; failure on the part of the external object “leads to deadness or to a persecutory quality of the internal object” (p. 273).

In the following session, I set about to make amends by reinstituting the “Ken” and “Jeremy” dinosaur play. Jeremy hesitantly reengaged. He once again took the dinosaurs to the windowsill. I looked on as “Ken” and “Jeremy” talked in a way “we didn’t know.” Jeremy also began to gather all of the toy animals in my office, and lined them up on the floor beneath the window. It looked to me as if “Ken” and “Jeremy” were on a stage with a high proscenium, one that would prevent the animals from seeing the play. At first I thought we were in a play that not only could not be heard or known, but also could not be seen. I experienced a feeling of being closed in. But as I watched Jeremy carefully line up the animals, as he did in three future iterations of this play, I began to think that the animals on the floor, which I took to be watching, were not the audience; I was. My job was to hold the paradox, and not disturb the circuit of cathexis creating the potential space.

And then the dying dog was announced, with no fanfare or introduction: “Be a dog. Fall down. Die. Fall and shake.” It seemed that the dinosaur play had served as some kind of link to the dying dog, some bridge to Jeremy’s creation of a usable potential object, which I could not see. I could not know the language that was being spoken between “Ken” and “Jeremy.” Instead, my task was to stay with the unknowing as Jeremy made the link.

As the dying dog, I was given instructions. I took up my part by falling and shaking. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to seek recognition, or die alone in a corner. I panted and whined. Jeremy told me that dying would take a long time. So I relaxed onto the floor. But he poked me with a toy car. I took the poke to mean that the “long time” might mean suffering. I struggled to get up on all fours, and limped across the room. I growled (thinking about the teacher’s description of Jeremy as disruptive). I growled more loudly. When I stopped growling, I was poked again. I growled some more.

Midway into the fifth dying dog session, I was revived: “Get up. You’re not dead anymore. You’re a doctor.” And so I did. I was awakened. I was given lunch (three red Legos). I ate. I was called “Lucky” (perhaps at that moment a doctor-dog). Lucky, as I see in hindsight, to stay within the transit of playing, as the object was being created, but was not yet possessed.

Slowly I spoke with Jeremy about our dying dog play, a scene that was repeated and elaborated over the course of about five months. At first I simply commented on my metamorphosis from the dying dog to Lucky: “I was dead, and now I am alive.” Then I added, in a later revival of feeding that had become part of the scene, that a dying dog needed someone to feed him. Feeding became more elaborate. I was given pizza and was told it was my favorite. Next, I “spoke” within the play, indicating that the dying dog was cold. I pulled a blanket off the couch, and covered myself. At first, Jeremy removed the blanket, but in the next iteration he carefully covered me.

I then spoke about how a dying dog might need someone to hold him and make him warm. I was given hot soup, but I was told that I did not like it. Next I indicated within the play that I was tired. I closed my eyes and snored. I was poked, this time by a brontosaurus—interestingly, not one from the realistic set of dinosaurs, but by a cartoon version. I persisted, and was allowed two, then four, snores before the brontosaurus woke me. I startled. Jeremy told me not to be afraid, because the brontosaurus was a “good guy.” At that juncture, I was once again turned back into Lucky, and while I was being fed, the brontosaurus joined us. I talked about how he was big but good, and how Lucky needed someone big and good, someone alive and happy to take care of him. The brontosaurus gobbled my pizza and my arm.

This exchange of care and destruction would happen over the course of six more sessions. As Winnicott (1968c) would suggest, “in the process of becoming destroyed because real, becoming real because destroyed” (p. 359). Eventually I spoke about how difficult it was for the brontosaurus to live with his need for others, and to trust that they would stay alive. I talked about how he got “biting mad,” and sometimes “wanted to hurt people.” Through these comments, I was aiming to focus on how the aggression in the play emerged around moments of care and revival. In particular, I noted the biting aggression that surfaced around the care of feeding. In this way, I attempted to speak to a dynamic I have often noted when neglect has informed a person’s early life: they bite the hand that feeds them. In such moments, we have an opportunity to observe the complex interchange between the depriving and persecutory near-dead internal object, and the corresponding persecutory biting response to reparation. I focused, as well, on how the “remove” of this persecutory and aggressive dynamic sustains near-deadness as it inhibits coming into life. The manner in which Jeremy’s parents initially spoke of him as “removed” left me to wonder where the removal originated, and what he was left to hold. As the dying dog play evolved, I often thought about the anger and rage the neglected are left to carry, and “remove.” The errand of removal serves to take one out of the accumulation of growing and living. Near what would become the end of the dying dog play I spoke with Jeremy about how hard it was for Lucky to stay alive. He was dead and then he was living over and over again. I said, “Maybe he is afraid to live?”

Jeremy began to lose interest in the dying dog around that time. He would start the scene and then abandon it. It seemed to me that he was reaching for a new object. He would look through the toys and fall into playing with them as he had at the beginning of our work together. But there was something different about this iteration. He would sit nearer me, often leaning on my leg, as we both sat on the floor. Twice he found a Dr. Seuss book, and asked me to read it to him, as he climbed into my lap. For several sessions I was tasked with blowing up balloons, on which I drew faces, although they did not animate. Mostly Jeremy was culling and sorting, perhaps looking for the rhythm and elasticity of transitional space, the transit to create.

After a month of this undetermined play, Jeremy gathered together a group of four animals: the brontosaurus, a horse, a small polar bear, and a tiny black cat (the smallest toy in my collection). I was charged with being the cat. I was told that she was the baby, and that she didn’t know anything. I lagged behind, and meowed piteously. I was ignored and left behind as the brontosaurus, the horse, and the polar bear raced across the room and climbed up onto the couch where they hid under the blanket. I was given strict instructions not to look under the blanket, or to let the cat look either. Several times I was instructed to blow up a balloon, which joined the threesome under the blanket, where it was popped.

Two weeks into this new scene I connived, as the cat, to join the play. I was turned away, whereupon I cried over my sorry lot: left alone, while the three of them played. Jeremy shook his head in a wild “no,” and simultaneously fell back on the couch laughing. Something about the slapstick made me laugh, and led me to say, “I see you living.” Jeremy covered his head with the blanket, and began a game of peekaboo, a kind of fort da; living, gone, living, gone, as if to establish living’s ongoing living.

Wrangling with Jeremy’s newfound desires for his parents, real and not real, and his rivalry with his sister would primarily occupy the final year of our work together. My task at this juncture was primarily to hold and preserve his repair in illusion, and to offer the integration of a living framing structure. Jeremy no longer needed much help in traversing and sustaining transitional space. He needed help living with the transit of potential.

Play Changes Us

As I look back, it was the time prior to, along with the time spent playing, the dying dog that proved to be the most meaningful in my work with Jeremy. It is the playing that changed us. By way of discussion, I contemplate the work I did in bringing Jeremy to the point of play, and consider what we might learn from that undertaking. I then move to think further about what it is about playing that promotes change. In particular, I focus on the transitive qualities of playing, and on illusory experiencing as it builds potential.

In his later work, Winnicott (1968b) went so far as to replace the capacity to know with the capacity to play. Playing, not knowing, underpinned living:

On the basis of playing is built the whole of man’s experiential existence. No longer are we either introvert or extrovert. We experience life in the area of transitional phenomena, in the exciting interweave of subjectivity and objective observation, and in an area that is intermediate between the inner reality of the individual and the shared reality of the world that is external to individuals [p. 179].

When we cannot play, we are left out of illusory experiencing, and the restorative realm of transitional phenomena. We cannot rest in illusion in order to regroup in reality. Shared reality is thereby not actually shared, but dominates in such a way as to inhibit and oppress. Our relations become impoverished, lacking in creative dexterity and mental freedom. Outside of the transitive hospitality of playing, we don’t have room to move, to associate, link, and rupture in order to find potential and change.

At the beginning of our work, Jeremy and his family were laboring under the shadow of loss, and the pall of depression and neglect. Play could find no purchase. I worked to animate and create transitional space, although my efforts fell flat. Instead, I think it was ordinary attention and devotion, including falling out of that holding and calling myself back, that opened the space.

Within this newly found transitional space, Jeremy was able to take possession of a created object, the dying dog. There is a kind of amplitude and oscillation to transitional space that Green (1997) captures when he stresses the importance of considering the navigation of transitional space, prior to the creation of transitional objects: “Let us remember, the transitional space is not just ‘in between’; it is a space where the future subject is in transit, a transit in which he takes possession of a created object in the vicinity of a real external one, before he has reached it” (p. 1072).

By emphasizing the amplitude of transitional space, Green in effect slows down the object. The future subject (the subject who has yet to arrive) has yet to possess the object. The transit of the subject prior to creating the object becomes the focus, not the object, or its possession. This transit and possession take place in the presence of a real external other, who, through their care and devotion, afford the “future subject” an opening into transitional space.

We cross over into transitional space and illusion with the help of others. But I would add, and emphasize, that while ordinary devotion facilitates the possession of transitional spaces, it is the unquestioned joining of illusory experiencing that constitutes the transitional object. In this respect, Winnicott (1968a) emphasizes the necessary preoccupation of playing within illusion, as opposed to quickly focusing on and naming play content: “In the total theory of the personality, the psychoanalyst has been too busy using play content to look at play content to look at the playing child, and to write about playing as a thing in itself. It is obvious that I am making a significant distinction between the meanings of the noun ‘play’ and the verbal noun ‘playing’” (p. 46).

By repeating play content (“using play content to look at play content”) Winnicott folded obsessive rumination into his critique of what he took to be psychoanalysts’ obsessive focus on play content, driven by their diligent quest to find unconscious derivatives, to know and busily interpret. Some thing, Winnicott tells us, is missing: “playing as a thing in itself.” He does not elaborate on this point, beyond describing playing as a “verbal noun.” Doing and being are coupled in an intermediate state, in which playing is noumenal, not phenomenal. Playing is inferred through experience and the self-evidence of sense and presence, time and space. There is a generous and ineffable strangeness found in playing that suspends reality and knowing.

A relatively simple example of the capacious nature of play can be found in the transit of lending and turn taking. Consider Winnicott’s trademark Squiggle Game, described by Marco Armellini (2016) as a “space for madness and incontinence, for unexpected forms and meanings” that is initiated by “the therapist’s active stance, his lending himself to the game, accepting uncertainties and failures, giving meaning to the child’s contribution, that keeps the game going and keeps the child’s interest alive” (p. 14). Armellini admirably captures play’s magical realism, its lack of self-restraint, and the swirl of its undertow. In keeping with play’s pull, he emphasizes the ways in which the therapist must actively lend his or her self to the game. This lending is guided by the interchange of playing in the overlap of therapist and patient.

In play, we find ourselves in spaces of turning, a kind of pivot or transformation. There is the trading of places, via turn taking, and the overlap and exchange of imagination. For example, Winnicott (1971e) turns a snake into a snake charmer, and the serpent becomes a hypnotist. The objects need not be tethered to material reality; they often transform and traverse material boundaries (a fish eats a turtle, and predation is reversed). Significantly, the squiggled and played creations often serve as associations that allow children to turn out of the game toward talking about their troubles and their dreams, leading to additional exchanges about fears, anxieties, and primitive agonies.

In keeping with Armellini’s characterization of transitional space as allowing unexpected meanings to emerge, the therapist at play has to stay suspended in the paradox that ignites playing, while also responding to the cues offered by the patient. For example, my experience as I played the dying dog was not anything organized or easily formulated. I found my way into the dying dog as a ricochet of tongues and states. Playing is a collection, most often a repetition; an accumulation of affect states that transit and discover the object and the future subject. The transition from one state, one being to another, and one body to another exceeds conscious choice. It is often a confusing and oscillating experience that atomizes subject, object, space, and time. As Derrida (2007) suggests, “Translation must twist its tongue to speak the nonlinguistic conditions of language” (p. 139). The dog was a volley of tongues and nonlinguistic affects: fear, hunger, rage. The dog was a collection of objects: the near-dead mother, the near-dead baby, the dead grandmother, the floundering father.

I was the host. I had to catch on, and pick up the aesthetic cues, in order to join the transit. I was tasked with sorting out the dog’s mood, his tone, his volume, and his corporeality. Play, like choreography, is carried forward through “corporeal transmission,” to borrow a phrase from André Lepecki (2013), a theorist who studies choreography and performance. Lepecki employs ideas about telepathy and what he calls the “teleplastic” to account for the transmission of states and embodiments that cannot be narrated or explicitly described. Lepecki’s theorization of the teleplastic, which is to be distinguished from telepathy as simple thought-transfer, reverberates with much that is to be found in Winnicott’s theorization of playing. Consider the ways in which cross-identifications and intercommunications navigate transitional space to create the play in play: the passage, the leap, the sensation, the madness.

Of particular note is the way in which transitional spaces open onto what might be called the potential of madness. Temporal and spatial configurations of the analyst and patient can be broken by chaotic activity. Deeply lived experiences that inform identifications are sometimes found in moments of instability or breakdown. Playing invites us into a mad space that is removed from common reason, and heightened by paradox. Indeed, it seems that mania (flight, grandeur, omnipotence, disparagement, mayhem) may open the door through which other desires, and different trajectories of affect, can be introduced and played. Mania is not always a matter of defense or omnipotent denial. Mania is not always or only an act of unconditioned freedom bucking a conditioned life; it belongs to being alive. The limits of reality can create necessary disillusion, and a break with the unbearable is often found in mania. Psychoanalysis rests on openness to such connections, especially when they are not expected. The invitation of paradox sets us up to listen for those moments of improvisation and rupture that shake the chains of material reality and historical consequence. Staying with the paradox allows us to hone in on the madness that not only confers pain or rage, but also points to a break on the horizon that summons a better world in a form we cannot yet imagine.

Perhaps such imagining is what Winnicott (1968a) had in mind when he wrote that “it is good to remember always that playing is itself a therapy” (p. 310). In other words, the intimacy of playing is itself transformative, a vehicle driving toward change. In a similar register, Winnicott (1968a) positions playing as “a basic form of living”; as such, it establishes “the basis of what we do” when we do psychotherapy (pp. 310–311). The doing of playing rests on the aesthetic employment and capacities of the analyst. Affects, corporeal states, object traces, symbols pass through the analyst as they join the potential of illusory experiencing. In this way, as Green (1993) points out, the analyst transforms into “a potential object inducing transformations” (p. 276). The analyst plays the object and becomes the future; the capacity of the analyst to hold this paradox, as they play, is the foundation of analysis.

Our modern discourse on psychotherapeutic action poses some intriguing questions about the foundation of playing and transformation, including the therapeutic action of playing/being vs. interpretation. Psychoanalytic theorists like Thomas Ogden (2015) and Bruce Reis (2020), following on Wilfred Bion, make a case for the symbiont psychic experience of being and playing as mutative, eclipsing interpretation. Bion (1967) posits, “What the patient is saying and what the interpretation is (which you give), is in a sense relatively unimportant” (p. 11). Ogden (2015), offering a close reading of Bion’s proposition, emphatically points out, “The analyst and the patient have already been changed by the experience of jointly intuiting the unsettling psychic reality with which they have been at one” (p. 295). In a similar vein, Reis (2020) holds that the joined unconscious relation between analyst and patient “subtends the content of any conscious exchange and provides the basis for a non-rational production of knowledge through non-interpretive mutual intervention, the operation of which represents the very heart of the treatment” (p. 3). By Reis’s account, the aim is not to interpret, or to create coherent narratives, thus perpetuating the privilege that analysts have often granted to symbolization, but rather to privilege the creative repetition of dreamlike play as an end unto itself.

These propositions resonate with Winnicott’s thoughts about the centrality of playing over knowing, and of playing vs. interpreting play content. One can also hear Winnicott’s well-known rumination near the end of his life about the need to wait before offering interpretations: “It appalls me to think of how much deep change I have prevented or delayed . . . by my personal need to interpret. If only we can wait, the patient arrives at understanding creatively and with immense joy, and I now enjoy this joy more than I used to enjoy the sense of being clever” (1971c, p. 356). Perhaps the resounding “joy” in this context can be understood as a moment of manic rupture, a breaking through, as the patient moves with creative depth to link and express an understanding of where the pair have been living together in play, and, more to the point, where they might head.

Winnicott, like Bion, prizes transitional being over conclusive knowing or interpretation. He bids us to accept paradox without resolution. But as anyone familiar with Winnicott’s clinical writings knows, he in fact often interpreted, and regularly in a manner that rang with a classical tone. For Winnicott (1968a) the privilege granted to playing does not banish interpretation; rather, interpretations have to be offered within the “ripeness” of playing (p. 311). The reflection, linking, and formulating of interpretation is harvested from play’s unfolding, where knowing and being are equivalent. Interpretations offered outside the overlap of the patient and the analyst’s playing together are a matter of coercion; they are the negation of paradox, and the opposite of playing.

This Winnicottian influence can be noted in the work of several contemporary theorists of play, including Peter Fonagy and Mary Target (1996a,b), who locate play between psychic and material realities, and argue for the clinical utility of integrating them. Such integration serves as a kind of scaffold from which to reflect on one’s thoughts and feelings, along with the feelings and minds of others. Fonagy and Target speak fantastically within the play. But at the same time, they begin to link the play with the troubling realities that inform a patient’s life. This work is often undertaken alongside ongoing family therapy.

Similarly, Jessica Benjamin (2004, 2016) focuses on patients’ capacities to meet the other, with a keen interest in the play or rhythmic movement between similarity and difference. Without the rhythm of play, Benjamin argues, we come upon the stasis of enactment, or the blankness of dissociation, and the necessary work of examining the lack of give and take (the to-and-fro of play). Like Fonagy and Target, Benjamin moves from enactments, or the recovery of dissociated material, to consciously reflect on the intersubjective and relational breakdowns revealed in the play.

Seligman (2017), focusing on the psychic work of illusion, pays particular attention to the play of transference. He argues for the potential of transference interpretations when they are found, created, and offered within the paradox of illusion and play. In so doing, Seligman advocates for the creative aspect of transference vs. the presumption that transference is mostly a matter of displacement or defensive projection (see Cooper, Corbett, and Seligman 2014).

The emphasis on recovery, creative repetition, and reflection can also be noted in Steven Cooper’s intersubjective contemplations of playing (2018, 2019). Of particular note in Cooper’s observations is his attention to the aggressive, even terrifying, dimensions of playing. Terror can and must be played, but requires the holding and the limits that reflection and interpretation offer. In this way, Cooper offers interpretation as a part of play. Interpretations become part of the play to be batted about, as Cooper makes a case for the ways in which conscious thought is not simply a way to hold play, but rather an element in play.

My own thinking about how play changes us rests on the transfiguration of illusion, and the paradox of illusory experiencing. Illusion can be difficult to stand by. It ruffles the curtains, creaks the floorboards, and often leaves us in the gap between what we can experience and what we in fact can name. My work with young children has taught me to live in that gap. They are generally eager to keep playing, and reluctant to step outside the illusion. I have gratefully learned from the supervision offered by many of my child patients when they demand, “Stop talking! Keep playing!” (see Corbett 2004, 2009, 2014). They have helped me appreciate how patient and analyst relive and reorder in illusion what Winnicott calls the “third part of life” (1971d, p. 267), a domain not bound by the dictates of reality’s clock or map.

Playing is itself transformative, prior to any reflection or interpretation that may follow. I find that interpretations can often result in a kind of bloodless replay of the change that has already taken place in playing. Repair does not always happen in reality—indeed, perhaps it rarely does. At the same time, it is not unusual that patients (both children and adults) look meaningfully to the analyst to join them in linking and reflecting on where their creative discoveries and repetitions have taken them. There is a kind of bending back—from reflectere, the Latin root of reflection—a space for thinking-playing (perhaps the shadow twin of dreaming-playing), as such thinking precedes feelings, binds feelings, and/or joins the play.

I locate this thinking-playing space within the Winnicottian tradition of transition. Communication within the overlap between patient and analyst, for Winnicott, is a state of transitional knowing, inspired by the virtue of being always inconclusive. I don’t imagine he would enter this discourse about what is mutative (playing or interpreting?) with much intent to settle the score; playing, as well as interpreting, can be transitional.

Winnicott would say it is this crossing that matters most, because that is where future subjects are found amid the kinds of intimate psychic and physical realities through which analyst and patient live and transit as one. We slowly gather ourselves playing with others; we play them. If we cannot play, we cannot find the object, we cannot join our patients in the expanse of illusion, we cannot imagine their sanity, their moods. We cannot live our destructiveness, or our efforts to repair; we cannot endure what cannot be repaired and so must be borne. If we cannot play, we cannot improvise, making noise on the threshold of the past and the present as it clatters toward the future. Without that clatter, and someone to hear it, we cannot find our way into the vitality of potential space, and life as it may be otherwise livable.