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In [[psychoanalysis]], "[[children]]'s play" is [[mental ]] and [[physical ]] [[activity ]] which gradually becomes more [[structured ]] in the course of a [[child]]'s [[development]]. This activity bears [[witness ]] to a [[psychic ]] capacity for "concentration" within a personal mental sphere of [[illusion ]] where [[objects ]] and phenomena in the [[external ]] [[world ]] are transformed in accordance with the [[subject]]'s wishes, so serving the [[internal ]] world and augmenting [[pleasure]].

For [[Freud ]] (1905d, 1905c, 1908e, 1911b), children's play, [[being ]] subject to the pleasure [[principle]], stood opposed to the constraints of critical [[thought ]] and [[reality]]. The opposite of play is not seriousness but reality, even if children like to prop their [[imaginary ]] objects on [[visible]], tangible ones. Such propping is precisely what distinguishes playing from fantasizing; as the child grows up, it is [[left ]] behind. In Beyond the [[Pleasure Principle ]] (1920g), Freud told how he observed his one-and-a-half-year-old grandson [[repeating ]] in an [[active ]] way—by making a wooden reel attached to a string alternately [[disappear ]] and reappear—what he had had to [[experience ]] passively, namely the departure of his [[mother]]; the pleasure derived from this [[game ]] allowed the child to [[work ]] over the unpleasurable experience of his mother's [[absence]]. In Freud's view, the [[compulsion ]] to [[repeat ]] that operated "beyond the [[pleasure principle]]" and the child's tendency to seek immediate pleasure through play were intimately linked. Today it is felt that play indeed helps the child tolerate the absence of an [[object]], that it implies the [[cathexis ]] of a [[representation]]: the boy with his reel successfully converts absence into [[nostalgia]].

Melanie [[Klein ]] was a closer student of the use of play in child psychoanalysis than of the phenomenon of play per se. Following Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, she devised a [[technique ]] of play [[interpretation ]] that treated the ordering of children's play as equivalent to the [[adult]]'s production of associative [[material ]] in [[analysis]]. She was thus able to apply the [[Freudian ]] method to very young children, opening the way to child psychoanalysis (Klein, 1955).

Donald Woods [[Winnicott ]] offered an original account of the [[notion ]] of "play" and incorporated it into [[psychoanalytic ]] [[theory]]. Since play was not subsumed under the [[sublimation ]] of [[instincts]], Winnicott speculated that a [[space ]] existed between the mother and her [[baby]]: since the mother (or her [[substitute]]), motivated by [[love ]] (or [[hate]]) and not by reaction-[[formations]], needed to be able to [[adapt ]] actively to her baby's [[needs]], to be what the baby was capable of finding while also leaving the baby the [[time ]] to find her, a realm of illusion emerged in which the [[infant ]] felt omnipotent (the [[breast ]] being under its magical [[control]]); such [[feelings ]] of omnipotence were necessary if the infant was going gradually to accept the disillusion to come. According to Winnicott, the intermediate area between mother and infant was occupied by "transitional phenomena"—groups of functional experiences, as for example thumb-sucking, the holding and sucking of the edge of a blanket, a repeated gesture, or the production of musical sounds (Winnicott, 1974, p. 4)—and it arose between the period of primary [[creativity ]] and that of [[objective ]] [[perception ]] founded on reality-testing. The "[[transitional object]]," created internally though found in the [[outside ]] world, would be the first tangible [[sign ]] of the [[existence ]] of this intermediate zone where the question whether experience was of external or of internal origin simply did not arise. Transitional objects lay "between me and not-me."

There is a direct progression, in the Winnicottian perspective, from transitional phenomena to play, from the child's ability to play alone in the [[presence ]] of [[another ]] person to the ability to play a game with others—at first with the mother and only later with peers. Until the age of five or six, children play alongside one another rather than with one another, as [[Anna Freud ]] showed in her [[discussion ]] of lines of development. Play involves the [[body]], and the pleasure derived from the functioning of the ego in play activity requires that neither excitement nor [[anxiety ]] be too intense; children's play is a precarious [[achievement ]] within the area between [[subjectivity ]] (not to say [[hallucination]]) and objective perception. The capacity for play, once successfully acquired, will endure in every kind of inner experimentation, in the [[life ]] of the [[imagination ]] and in adult creativity, although, beginning at the [[latency ]] period, the [[individual ]] must become capable of suspending play activity.

See also: Active imagination (analytical [[psychology]]); Activity/passivity; [[Beyond the Pleasure Principle]]; Breast, [[good]]/bad object; Child analysis; [[Childhood]]; "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming"; Creativity; [[Fantasy ]] (reverie); [[Fort-Da]]; [[Humor]]; Illusion; Infant observation (therapeutic); [[Jokes]]; Magical [[thinking]]; [[Metaphor]]; [[Object a]]; [[Visual ]] [[arts ]] and psychoanalysis; Pleasure/unpleasure principle; [[Psycho]]-Analysis of Children, The; Rambert, Madeleine; Richard, [[case ]] of; Squiggle; Technique with children, psychoanalytic; Transitional object, space; Transitional object; Transitional phenomena; [[Unconscious ]] fantasy.[[Bibliography]]