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Freedom to play, dreamand thinkJohan Norman aa Utflyktsvägen 13, S-168 41 , Bromma ,SwedenPublished online: 21 Jan 2013.

To cite this article: Johan Norman (1999) Freedom to play, dream andthink, The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review, 22:2, 172-188, DOI:10.1080/01062301.1999.10592704

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Scand. Psychoanal. Rev. (1999) 22, 172-188 Copyright © 1999 ---THE--­

SCANDINAVIAN PSYCHOANALYTIC

REVIEW ISSN 0106-2301

Freedom to play, dream and think*

Johan Norman

The intention in this paper is to study what we mean when we say that play is a mediator of an inner psychic world. The internal scene becomes furnish­ed with your own impressions from the external world. The passions and the experiences from within have no forms of their own and will use the forms in time and space in external reality. An inner object world will be created, and thus far it is the same process as it is for the creation of the dream image and its furniture. In play, there is a circular movement: the furnishings from the inner world intrude into external reality; the external form and the form of the inner object create a double exposure. We look at the object in the room with a binocular view. The experience from psychoanalysis with three children is presented to give different perspectives on the internal move­ments inherent in play and playing.

Play is a phenomenon, which is peculiar in the sense that it is both self­evident and enigmatic. That play is a mediator of internal reality is obvi­ous, but in this paper, I have the intention to study whether I really could understand what is happening when an inner psychic world is mediated in play. I have the intention to go directly into the question of what we mean by play and playing, and the connection between play, dream and thinking. I will use experience from my work with three children, which will give me different perspectives on the internal movements inherent in play and playing. The children are Catherine, a 4-year-old girl, whose play managed to disturb me in a very fruitful way, Peter, a 16-year-old schizo­phrenic boy who has never played but may be trying now, and Kim, a

* Revised version of a paper presented at 'Open symposium: Play as the mediator of the inner psychic world in child and adolescent analysis', arranged by the Swedish Psychoanalytical Society and Stockholm-Europas Kulturhuvudstad '98, 24 April 1998, Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

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little adopted girl, 1 year and 10 months old, who is trying to rehabilitate and to develop her curiosity and freedom to play.

First, a short vignette. One day, when I was two-years-old, my mother had asked my two elder sisters to go out into the garden and play with me. My sisters really wanted to go off and play with some other children. So they told me that they had invented a play. They drew a line in the sand around the sandbox and said that this play was fun, that I should sit and play and wait for them, and I should not cross the line. My sisters ran off. I suppose they forgot me and when they came back I was sitting in the sandbox asleep. Was this play? My sisters were fooling me. They knew I understood what was meant by play. I played, thinking that I was playing with my sisters. Their absence was an element of the play, like peek-a-boo and hide-and-seek. The line in the sand marked a symbolic boundary, between outside - inside, distance - presence, visible - invisible, between play and real life. I imagine that for me, the play was disappoint­ing and boring in the end, so I retreated into sleep and dream.

A line in the sand and we say that 'this is play'. That is all that is required to constitute a distinctive relation between internal and external reality - what we call 'play'. When you have read my description of the scene - the boy in the sandbox, a line around him - some readers may have formed a visual image of it and you might make yourself aware that you could describe a number of details which are not part of my descrip­tion. The internal scene becomes furnished with your own impressions from different rooms and objects in the external world. The passions and the experiences from within have no forms of their own and will use the forms in time and space in external reality. An inner object world will be created, and so far it is the same process as it is for the creation of the dream image and its furniture (Bion, 1967). In play, there is a circular movement: The furnishings from the inner world intrude into external reality; the external form and the form of the inner object create a double exposure. We look at the object in the room with a binocular view.

CATHERINE, A 4-YEAR-OLD GIRL IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

During the first week of the analysis, Catherine revealed many of the themes which would evolve during the analysis and she was distinct and open in her expressions. In the first session, she started playing with a train, an engine with three carriages which were linked up together with magnets: the carriages had magnets at both ends and the engine had a

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magnet at one end. Catherine lifted up the train and one carriage at a time dropped down. She turned the carriages so that the magnets pushed the carriages away from each other. Then she turned the carriages so that the magnets fitted together and linked the carriages together. She tried to link up the engine to the line of carriages, but it did not work. The magnet on the engine could be linked up only to one end of the line of carriages and would be repelled at the other end, Catherine was trying at the wrong end. The engine and that end of the line of carriages were repelling each other even when Catherine tried with force to link them together. Instead of putting the engine on the other end of the line of carriages, she turned each and every one of the carriages.

My impression was that Catherine was well acquainted with the train and its magnets, a very common toy at day-care centres and in children's homes. So, why did not Catherine change the position of the engine in relation to the carriages?

Before my first meeting with Catherine, I was not totally unprepared, since her parents had told me what was worrying them about Catherine. When Catherine was not quite two-years-old, she stayed alone for a month with her grandmother in the countryside. Catherine had just begun to use the potty for her faeces, but when her mother was not there, she refused. Catherine became constipated and the parents were advised to give Ca­therine laxative. On the first occasion, she was given the laxative via an ampoule through the anus, it induced a painful evacuation. On the next occasion, Catherine was overwhelmed by terror at the mere sight of the ampoule, so her parents stopped the treatment. The constipation con­tinued for four months. Many problems followed. She began to collect everything. Her pockets were full of stones, bits of paper, used pipe cleaners, and other strongly-smelling things. She gathered everything in her room and was furious if anyone tried to clean. She had to go to the toilet and urinate every 15 minutes, which made life complicated. Her day­care centre was turned into a battlefield and Catherine often had attacks of wild rage, and temper tantrums. She was jealous, furious and provoca­tive. Sometimes, she let the children torment her physically. She also had a way of demanding that another child should decide for her. She could ask, for example, "Do I want one more sandwich?" or "Do I want a glass of milk?" and she did not give in until the other had decided. Every night she had a night terror, she suddenly sat up and whimpered, cried and struggled. There was no doubt that Catherine was in a situation full of conflict and psychic pain.

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Catherine's play with the train seemed to be rich in meaning and full of ambiguity, but could we say anything about the inner psychic world, more than guesses? Yes, what we could say is that Catherine had a ca­pacity to symbolise. She seemed to use the train as a toy but still in her special way, as if it belonged to the furnishings of the internal scene with a symbolic meaning of something. In spite of all the rather alarming symptoms, we could say that Catherine in that way was a healthy child: the capacity to symbolise is the essential feature of the vitality of the inner psychic world. But how can we understand the meaning of the play? It might be tempting to find formulations about connections between what we have heard about the child's problems and what could be observed in the play, but these formulations would be guesses of no use as they would be ready-made, unreliable constructions with no scientific value, neither for understanding Catherine nor for the elucidation of the question of the relation between play and inner psychic world. What more must be added before we can say with conviction that play is the mediator of the inner psychic world?

We had begun the analysis and Catherine worked with great intensity. She was playing, drawing, talking and, more important than anything else, she was trying to involve me. We had sessions Monday to Thursday and we had now come to Thursday in the first week of the analysis. Catherine did not want to be left by her mother, so her mother was present at this session. She painted a picture of a TV and I asked Catherine, "What is the program on the TV?" Catherine gave me an appreciating look. The cap on the pen she was going to use was stuck and she held it out to me. We each pulled at our end and I said that if we help each other it goes better. Catherine said, "It is about a car. It is burning, the whole wood is cracking, the whole world is cracking." I said that I understand that she thought about a terrible disaster. Catherine was going to make another drawing. She tried to draw a shoe. She said that "the shoe is too small, she can't get it on, it cracks and blood comes out - red and green blood". Catherine pretended that she was beginning to slide down off the chair, crying, "Help! Help!" and I said, "I will help you, but you have to tell me what it is that is so frightening and troublesome for you." Catherine turned towards her mother and rushed at her, hissing like a snake, burrowed her head down into her mother's lap. Catherine then lay down on the floor, and, with slow movements, kicked with her feet and beat her arms, it was as a demonstration - a theatrical expression of a temper tantrum in slow motion.

I felt that this first week with Catherine was a very rich and promising

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start of the analysis. She had really told me very much; I had the feeling that I had received her confidence and she had begun to involve me in her play. This was the last session of the first week, it was on a Thursday and the next session was to be on Monday; I had not made myself clearly aware that this week-end was our first break. Sometimes it can be a long time between a Thursday and a Monday; it is four nights and in fact longer than between Monday and Thursday. This can be felt as a hard blow to the analytical relation.

I think the break was a hard blow for Catherine, as when she came on Monday, she was cranky, reluctantly accepting that her father sat in the wait­ing room. She drove the train, took two carriages which were linked together, turned one of the carriages and tried to connect the carriages, but the mag­nets repelled each other. She turned the carriage again. This time the mag­nets were attracted to each other and the carriages were connected. I tried to make a comment about the feeling to be unconnected over the week-end, but there was no space for comments. She went quickly on and said that we should paint, saying to me, "You must paint!" I asked what she was thinking about. She painted a red line, looking demandingly at me, saying, "Paint! You must paint green!" and she showed the red line. I said that I understand that I must paint green when she paints red and I did so. She drew first, with her red pen, praising me as I followed along with the green colour. "Very good!" she said with appreciation, patronisingly. The work was going slowly ahead a little bit at a time with her red line and my green, as she made small, encouraging comments to me. The session proceeded at a snail's pace. "This will be like a wood" she said and her red line went slowly back and forth on the paper with my green following after. I made some attempts to say something to describe the situation but Catherine interrupted me immedi­ately: "No. You must paint!". I was apparently involved in her play and I was interested to get to know what it was about, so I had to wait to get more impressions. However, the monotony and feeling of extreme control from Catherine was beginning to be very boring for me. I was really very split as I wanted the play to go on; I was interested, but she was using me in a way that gave me a feeling that I would like to revolt. Winnicott passed by in my thoughts, something about that the analyst must be involved in the play and that not until it is fun to play together, will the child be able to accept inter­pretations- but I thought this was boring and no fun at all. Then I reminded myself that I was going to discuss my work with a colleague and wondered what she was going to say when I would tell her that I thought this was bor­ing and meaningless. As my thoughts were running away with me in this

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manner, I became aware that Catherine was very effectively putting me into a mental state of submission, and loss of the sense of my own worth and judgement. Now, when I became aware of it I looked at the relationship be­tween us with new eyes and I thought that Catherine was probably very fam­iliar with the state of mind which I had suffered. To Catherine's domineering way of relating to me, I responded with an image of myself as subordinate and with the feelings of revolt which are inherent in the superior-inferior re­lationship: my superiors- Catherine, Winnicott, my colleague at the top in the balance of power of the play, and I, inferior at the bottom.

In my receptivity as an analyst I invited Catherine to play on the strings of my psyche; this is the best way to get to know her inner world. I would suppose that my choice to include in this presentation the vignette from my childhood, with myself sitting and waiting in the sandbox, might be indicating something about the emotional strings in myself that Catherine managed to play on. The emotional strings in me which Catherine played on were active in my psyche until I became aware that this state did not correspond to my present psychic world; my object relations are usually not like that. I could say to myself, retrospectively, that Catherine had touched an unconscious phantasy in me, and that this was a countertrans­ference in myself. My alien mental state - boredom, irritation, wish to revolt - could then become transformed by my re-established awareness and symbolisation. With my "pure, newly washed eyes" -as the poet Gun­nar Ekelof has described it - , I saw my own psychic metabolism taking care of what the analysand was doing with me and I felt relieved.

I asked Catherine, "What are we doing, you and I?" Even Catherine's mood seemed to have lifted and she replied that she was drawing a road and I was a worm creeping on the road!

With me, Catherine created a clear and forceful scene to describe her attempt to avoid the feelings of separateness which struck her because of our first break of four nights and days, from Thursday to Monday. She let me experience, suffer the pain, and deal with the psychic reality she couldn't tolerate and which she otherwise acted out in her everyday life. The transference was quickly gathered into the analysis.

However, freedom was limited in Catherine's play with me. It was rather of inner necessity that she created the "worm on the road" in order to overcome anxiety which she could not manage herself. When my symbolis­ation had time to metabolise what I was experiencing, a change occurred which opened up verbal exchange and interpretation. This was liberating for both of us, and Catherine also became free to think and talk and play.

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The next session told us more about this, but now without Catherine having to prepare me mentally. Catherine drew with a red pen and I had to follow with a yellow pen. However, there were some red lines I was not supposed to follow: these lines were snakes laying asleep. Two snakes were laying in their own room, sleeping. I said that then no-one needed to feel lonely. Catherine gave me a surprised look and nodded in agreement. She was surprised that I could understand her sense of loneliness. This frag­ment of understanding and sense of being understood, made her free to go on to the next play and in the following sessions, this play continued and came closer to her anxiety about her own body. The first piece of understanding was based on Catherine's capacity to use the form of an object in the room, the train and my emotional strings. She clothed her feelings and experiences in that form and created a disturbance in my mind on the one hand, and on the other hand, activated my capacity to become aware of and to metabolise the disturbance, and to create an imaginative conjecture. This is a work of symbolisation and a matrix for verbalisation and interpretation which, in Catherine's mind, opens up a freedom to invent a new play, and thus the analysis evolves in its circularity from disturbance and not-understanding to pieces of understanding, im­aginative conjectures and interpretation. The connection between play and psychic reality is not then an intellectual construction and guesswork. In the here and now of the session, the analyst will get an immediate experi­ence in his own psyche of the inner psychic world which the analysand's play is the mediator for.

I will now approach play from an other viewpoint.

THE TRAGEDY OF NOT BEING ABLE TO PLAY

Children play. We take that for granted. But there are children who do not play. The child may accompany other children who play but seems to have difficulty thinking it is fun to tuck dolls into bed in a pram and pull it around, or gather sticks or leaves, dig down a couple of stumps in a sandbox, sit up in a tree to be on the look-out, pick grass for the floor in a little house, etc. Why does that child not play?

I met such a child, Peter when he was 16 years old. I think that he has never played. He had broken down in a schizophrenic psychosis, and in a long analysis with him, I became well acquainted with him and the myster­ies implied in the question: "Why does that child not play?"

A clinical vignette from the beginning of Peter's long analysis. On his

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first visits to me, he talked only laconically. He held a hand in front of his face, made gestures with the fingers of the other hand, the thumb against the index finger, the thumb against the middle finger and the index finger, the middle finger over the index finger, and then he pulled his hand into the sleeve of his sweater, like a hermit crab.

Before the sessions, Peter often stayed outside on the lawn for a long time with his hand in front of his face. In fragments, I got to know that the reason he stood still was so as not to feel his clothes against his skin for if he felt them, it was as if they intruded into him. He often went barefoot because when he was putting on his socks in the morning, the sock intruded into his foot. He could describe how his body got stuck on the couch in my office because the floor, the couch and he himself merged on the same level, on a two-dimensional surface.

Peter's way of handling disturbing impressions, thoughts, emotions that he felt intruded into him was to throw them away, quite concretely throw them into a corner, against a wall, and there he left them in a bloody mess. It was not only the disturbing intruder, however, but also a part of his own ego that was thrown out and this left a sense of vacuum and death in his inner world. Most frightening for him was that the remains of what he had thrown out, the bloody mess, did not remain inactive. Instead, the fragments of the rejected self and the objects joined together in bizarre, hallucinatory images of reality and forced their way in, as if greedy for revenge; they wanted to intrude into and recapture the place in his person­ality from which they had been thrown out.

For the first two years of the analysis, there was very seldom an inner men­tal space for thoughts and emotions, and I myself seemed to be two dimen­sional, without depth. However, after two years, something in our relation changed. Peter began to attack me with furious charges that I did not want to help him, that I was arrogant, stupid, mad, I was not normal, rather 'ab­Norman'. In these attacks, there was an embryo of an interaction where Peter began to use my emotional presence and receptivity. In that way, he created a link to me and I was able to understand something of his state of mind. However, when I tried to put into words my metabolized, detoxicated version of what he himself could not manage, I was immediately met by a 'No!' Often I did not even have a chance to say any more than "I was think­ing ... " "No"! answered Peter quickly. I came to understand that it was a sud­den impulse of terror which made him back away.

Peter rejected his thoughts and experiences from within with the same instant naturalness as when a flock of small birds fly up from the ground

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to safety, spread out in a tree, when danger appears. In Peter, this emotion­al shock was an almost imperceptible signal, each time releasing a psychic catastrophe. However, compared with the delusions and hallucinations which were previously formed, the current situation with all its attacks was relatively productive because the problems had become localized in a human context in the interaction between Peter and me. After many years of analysis, Peter took up his high school studies again and was managing them rather well. However, there was one kind of problem that was beyond his capability and that was, to write a story. On one occasion, for example, he was given the start of a story about a girl and a boy sitting on a stone by the sea, talking with each other, and the task was to continue this story. No matter how Peter tried, he could not think of a continuation of the story; his head was completely empty. The problem remained impossible for him to solve and he failed that subject.

When we approached this difficulty in creating a story, Peter gave me a long, detailed account packed with facts of the reason for his problem, i.e., that he could not think when he had eaten the wrong food. It was extremely time-consuming and expensive to get hold of the particular fruit and vegetables which were the only foods he could stand, and he was desparate as he faced these difficulties. His account was lucid; it seemed sensible and coherent, providing a logical explanation of his difficulties in thinking. The problem was just that it was a mad construction, a delusion, where he used his thinking to combine facts in a way that robbed these same facts of their meaning, and the logic went in circles.

Is it possible to find a starting point for the production of a delusion? The clarity and certainty of a delusion is in marked contrast to reality, both exter­nal and psychic. Visual images in psychic reality imply uncertainty. They can never be measured or weighed, they can never be unambiguously under­stood; and objects in time and space can never be understood in absence of psychic reality. The feeling of freedom in a delusion lies in a 'freedom from' the uncertainty in the experience of thoughts, feelings, fantasies, and from dreams and from play. Delusion lacks symbolisation or includes fragments of broken symbolisation which have combined in such a way that meaning is destroyed. Without symbolisation, there is no playing with thoughts and no imagination, for play and fantasy assume an "as if" relation. Symbolis­ation provides freedom from fact-tyranny.

Once again, a session where Peter and I came back to the story of the boy and the girl on the stone: Peter thinks that there is a lot of damn nagging about this meaningless story. I ask, "Is it meaningless?" Yes, Peter

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thinks so; it is totally meaningless. Moreover, he has never liked sitting on a stone because why should you do that? The story says nothing to him; his head is completely empty.

Despite Peter's stubborn resistance, I suggest that it is nonetheless poss­ible to imagine a continuation of the story.

Actually, a visual image of a sandy beach came to me. The boy and girl were walking along the beach toward a harbour, and it wasn't hard for me to recognize a beach in the south of Sweden where I was going to go the next day. Peter asks me if I have thought of a continuation of the story and I answer, "Yes, I have. Have you?" Peter says, "No, yes, no:' He thought of the boy and girl sitting on the stone, and he asks me what I thought of. I say that I visualise them walking along the beach up to a harbour. Peter is not very satisfied with my contribution. It is not really a story. I ask him what he thinks it looks like- in the story I have told - and he stubbornly insists that there is no more to it than what I said: They walk along the beach to a har­bour - there is not any more, it is plain to be seen. I say that it is as if he is afraid that there might be something else in his own images, as if only facts were allowed and nothing could be his own reverie. Peter says he does not know what I am talking about. I think I believe him.

I ask what the boy and the girl looked like. For some reason I had imagined them dressed in old-fashioned clothes, at the end of the 19th century. After a lot of hesitation, Peter says that he thinks the boy and girl are rather young and have nice-looking, modern clothes, and that the harbour is built of big stone blocks, and there are some other things, the kinds of things you find in harbours. But now Peter begins to protest, trying to reduce his symbolisation to nothing, to conceal it. "But it is perfectly obvious that they have to have clothes on when they are walking on the beach, and the time is the present, so it is completely natural to choose modern clothes, and harbours are always built of stone - almost always - and 'harbour' means that there are certain things there, otherwise you can't call it a 'harbour'." Peter talks intensively for a long while and I say that he seems to be struck by dread and pain when he reveals to himself and to me that he is playing with his thoughts and visual images, as if it were fatal for him to have a mind of his own; he is talking as if it were for his own defence in front of me as an all-powerful court which turns everything against him, misunderstanding and distorting. This ses­sion ends with this.

Basically, the epistemological drive, the drive to get to know, is directed toward an acquaintance with distinctions. The acquaintance with a not-

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ego is a prerequisite for the development of an ego which can sort out the distinctions between different realities, physical and psychic, sense im­pressions and fantasy, and be conscious of itself. Peter was fighting against distinctions which he couldn't control himself. Distinctions seemed to be connected with a sting of dread which cut off thoughts and the experiences from within; they were thrown away from the mind and symbolisation remained undeveloped. The forms of the internal world remained empty and couldn't be distinguished from external forms. Since the distinction was not there between external physical form and the furnishings in the internal world, it was not possible to play with reality either. The circular movement of play couldn't take place.

The child's relation to the world is often passionate and if all goes well, curiosity and the thirst for knowledge can develop into a creative relation to the world, characterized by what the old English poet John Keats called "Negative capability," "when a person is capable of living in uncertainty, mystery, and doubt without irritably reaching for facts and reasons." I will now turn from Peter to another child, a little girl who seemed at first to have some similarities with Peter.

KIM: FROM AUTISTIC DEFENCE TO EXISTENTIAL INSECURITY

Kim was one year and ten months old when I met her. She had been in Sweden only a few weeks, brought as an adopted child from an Asian country. As a newborn, she had been left on the street and was taken care of in an overcrowded orphanage with extremely limited resources. Kim had developed behaviour which seemed to be autistic defences; she had a large wound on her head from banging it against the wall. When she wanted to look at someone, she held her head against something hard -it could be the floor, the arm of a chair, a table. Sometimes her attention fastened on some detail of a whole, for example one of my hands. Her gaze and attention seemed totally fixed on my hand, conveying a sense of terror, as if my hand were a being with a life of its own, a hand with its own bizarre existence, as in a horror film. Kim herself and her world appeared sometimes to be fragmented. To press something hard and cold against her body served as protection against a sense of fragmentation and annihilation; but it was also possible to catch her attention in a more communicative relationship. The autistic defences did not seem to domi­nate her mental world, a part of her attention seemed to be free and mobile - and it is on attention that psychoanalytical work rests.

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My work with Kim was carried out together with an infant centre in Stockholm. Kim, her mother and I, together with a psychologist and a midwife, participated in the once-a-week sessions.

At the very first session, it became clear to me that Kim was able to work in the analytical situation. Toward the middle of the session, I began to feel a quiet rhythm in my comments to Kim- "Well, mother is sitting there. You are looking at her. You have your head against the hard part of the chair and you are looking at mother. Yes, and now you are crawling away, a little distance. You give me a quick glance and look at me when I am talking to you. Yes, like that. We do not know each other yet. My name is Johan. Yes, you are looking at mother. That is mother sitting there. I see that you are curious. You want to know, but ... " I interrupted myself as I had become aware of a not strong but very distinct sense of fear in myself and noticed that the hair on my neck was standing on end, and I continued " ... but, you give mother a long look and turn away ... Yes, Kim, you turn away, head against the wall, a frightened Kim who does not find her mother. I sense that there is a lot of fear in the room now."

Kim's mother called to Kim, "Come, Kim. Come to mother." I said, "Little Kim, there is your mother. You are so afraid." And mother talked to Kim, "Come, now, Kim. Come to mother." Suddenly Kim crawled at full speed to mother, up on to her lap. Kim snuffled with relief and we all relaxed, and became aware of how tense we had been.

Kim noticed that she was the one the session was all about. My com­ments followed what she was doing and what I myself experienced, the analytical situation was established. After a little while, Kim was down on the floor again and a similar sequence of events repeated itself, but instead of banging her head against the wall, Kim lay down on the floor. She looked at her mother, holding up her hand in a peculiar gesture, bent her index finger in under and up toward her middle finger so that it formed a bow. She climbed hastily back up on to her mother's lap, as if she had become aware of a dread.

Her mother told me that the hand gestures had not been seen since Kim, a month ago, came from the orphanage in the Asian country where she was born. They reminded me of Peter's gestures with his fingers. The gesture with the fingers might look like play, but I understood it as an autistic defence which Kim demonstrated now when we had created a space for it. Kim couldn't withstand the temptation to express herself, her dread and her defences.

Kim sat a moment on her mother's lap but then crawled away to a chair,

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investigated the wooden arm and some shiny screws. Then she crawled in under the chair, looked at her mother, it turned into a peek-a-boo game. Kim held her head against the arm of the chair, looked at me, at a lamp, at the window. I followed along with my comments, and it became very quiet in the room. I said, "Kim, you look very thoughtful. Maybe you are wondering where you are. You are looking at me. My name is Johan. We do not know each other so well yet. The window. A branch is moving out there while it is absolutely still in here, inside your little self."

The stillness in this session was now not at all calm, it was on the borderline of a silence of death. But when Kim sneezed, movement started and relief set in. But Kim continued with the chair, her head against the arm, looked at her mother, crawled in under the chair, as though it were a little house. Kim looked at her mother but then turned away and her mother called her. It was a thin thread of contact, but Kim did not come so her mother lifted her up on to her lap. In con­trast to the relief Kim expressed when she herself had recreated her con­tact with her mother, she now whimpered with displeasure when her mother took her back. The contact on this occasion was not her cre­ation. Now a muddled situation came into being in the session. Ques­tions and answers interrupted the analytical situation, the listening, the rhythm. I took out a mother doll and a baby doll and said to Kim, "We can say that this is you, the little baby-Kim, and this is mother. Kim is sitting on mother's lap but crawls away. She looks at mother, mother is looking at baby-Kim." While I was talking and showing the dolls, Kim was very attentive, looked at me, at her mother, surprised and eager. She emitted small exclamations of surprise, pointing to the dolls. With words, gestures and dolls, I told her my imaginative conjec­tures that a baby-Kim had felt lost and had built her own world, like her own house all to herself where everything should be quiet. However, mother saw that baby-Kim was very frightened and needed help so mother came and took baby-Kim up on her lap.

The analytical situation, the rhythm, the attention, the listening, the flow of emotions became restored. I told Kim that now we were going to stop for today. I put the dolls in my bag. "Bye-bye;' I said, waving to Kim and she waved back in a friendly way with a smile. And we ended the first session.

In the following session, Kim was at first sitting on her mother's lap but was soon down on the floor. She was standing with one hand against her mother's knee, her head against the hard arm of the chair, giving her mother several long looks. There was a sense of hesitation for a moment,

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but Kim then discovered a little stool with a hole in the seat; it is a small hole fitting the grip of a hand. Kim looked down through the hole. She was very eager and curious, sticking her hand down into the hole. She looked again, looked under the stool, over and over.

The hole in the stool often interests infants and serves as an opening into another reality. Through the hole, the floor or the carpet is seen with the clarity which delimitation gives sense impressions. Under the stool, the same floor or carpet is seen - but without delimitation. Two pictures of the same reality. Infants are often very interested in a basic question of knowledge - to understand the relation and distinction between sense impressions and reality.

Kim investigated the stool but then turned towards the wall, scratching it with her nails. I understood it as a kind of autistic defence. Mother called Kim but now Kim chose another way. While it did not feel fruitful to allow Kim to devote herself to her autistic alternatives, it wasn't a good idea either just to pick her up unless she herself had recreated the relation. As some kind of compromise, I took a little ball out of my toy bag and rolled it over to Kim, who was immediately interested and fetched it and set it in motion again. She managed to direct the ball to one or the other of us who all rolled it back to Kim. I commented, "It is like Kim and mother, coming and going to each other, and mother picks up little Kim­ball when she comes rolling along. You roll it over to me, and here it comes back to you, and to mother. Now mother has the ball and then Kim crawls up onto mother's lap."

The session continued in this way until Kim rolled the ball in a direction where no one was sitting. The ball bounced back a little to Kim who rolled it away in under a chair in a corner. I said, "Kim rolled the ball away, and still farther away. You are rolling the ball in a direction where there is no mother. Is it because you are afraid that there is someplace where there is no mother?" There was a sense of fear in the room. Mother fetched the ball and rolled it to Kim, who rolled it to me, and I said, "Kim is afraid, but we are always going to pick up all the pieces of Kim so that no part of her is left without her mother. All of Kim will be with us," and then I rolled the ball to Kim. Kim crawled in behind her mother's chair. Her mother called her and she got up onto her mother's lap. The session ended this way.

Kim' mother was advised to develop a piece of cloth into a transitional object by having it in her bed a few days without washing it. Kim accepted this offering from her mother.

At our next meeting, our third session, a surprised and proud Kim

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showed us her piece of cloth. She held it against her face, sniffed it, waved it around and busied herself with it. As usual, I followed up everything with my comments, "Well, little Kim, you are playing with your blanket, showing it to me. Standing by the table, peeking under the table at mother and then over the table at mother. Mother looks so happy when you play with her. You are looking under the table at my shoes. Yes, they are my shoes. And now you are looking at mother's foot. Yes, that is mother's foot, it goes with mother. Aha. Now you look at the stool. First you feel it by laying your forehead against it. Now you are looking down through the hole, and then you pull your blanket in under the stool and see your blanket through the hole, and you look under the seat; yes, there is your blanket and you look through the hole again and, yes, there is your blanket. You look at your mother, and at the blanket under the stool and the blanket through the hole. You look at mother, at me, we are sitting here wondering what kind of play this is. You seem to wonder a lot. We are such big human creatures and you are probably wondering what we are thinking about. Probably mother thinks a lot about you, Kim, and you think a lot about mother."

Kim looked at her mother and there was doubt and anxiety in the air. Kim stood by the table, on one leg, as if she was doing acrobatics. I asked her, "Are you doing this because it is hard for you to find your way to your mother? Are you a little afraid? Yes, you have your blanket but you do not find your mother?" Kim turned toward her mother but fixed her gaze on mother's white stockings. Her mother called Kim. Kim looked at her mother's outstretched hands and very doubtfully allowed herself to be lifted up only to immediately slide down to the floor again and the same scene continued. Kim looked seriously and expectantly at her mother, felt the cloth on the chair with her hands, put the blanket against her face, her head against the wall and banged it slowly several times with her gaze fixed on her mother. Her mother held out her hands and called, "But come now, Kim." When Kim sent me a quick glance I said, "You want to be persuaded by mother to go to her but you are hesitating." Kim crawled cautiously to her mother, but she did not stretch her hands out toward her mother. Instead, she stretched her head forward toward her mother's hands and slowly touched the hands with her head. Instead of the hard wall against the head, she felt mother's soft, warm hands. Kim then stretched up her hands to her mother, who lifted her up into her arms. And then the scene totally changed. Kim cheerfully threw away her blanket. She looked at it laying on the floor. I said "Yes, you can play

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with the blanket and throw it away and find it again and then you crawl away and pick up your blanket, and come back to mother again." Kim threw her blanket and crawled at full speed to pick it up and back to mother. Our third session ended this way.

It was impressive to see a small child like Kim in her eagerness and her earnestness, working to analyse the bewilderment created by her life and then face the enigmas which life is inevitably full of. Kim was using every­thing and every person present in the room as furnishings in her internal world and clothed her experiences from within - her curiosity, fear, rejec­tion, desire - in these forms.

She created a double exposure and could play with two pictures of the same reality. With one eye, Kim could see that the hole in the stool was like the mother's eye, which she wanted to look into, go into, so as to escape the existential isolation and sense of separateness. With the other eye, Kim could see that the stool, the hole, and even mother were objects in a room which you can look at but can never enter. We can imagine the polarity in Kim between the two exposures of reality. On the one hand, we have the attentiveness and curiosity of the epistemological drive, the desire to get to know, and the liveliness and eagerness to find forms to express her passions and inner experiences, and on the other hand, the fear and psychic pain in facing the objects of the room and the inevitable existential isolation and separateness. There is a battle going on between playfulness and the autistic defences.

PSYCHOANALYSIS ENDS AS PLAY

In my attention to and communication with the analysand, I am enriched by impressions through all my senses and the conscious and unconscious channels which constitute the breeding ground out of which my words, tone of voice and gestures emerge. If I think about it, I may become aware that what I have got to know about the analysand is endlessly full of details. In the same way as you yourself might have become aware that your visual image of the boy in the sandbox with the line around it was furnished with elements of external forms from other situations, I create my visual images and imaginative conjectures about the analysand with the help of furnishings from other external forms. Every new impression adds to and revises my images of the analysand and the analysis, and the more I get to know about the situation, the more emerges as unknown. When a space for play has been created and re-created many times in the

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analytical situation, a more stable thinking object will be established at the core of the analysand's reality ego, which at every moment re-establishes awareness, symbolisation, psychic metabolism and the furnishings of vis­ual images and imaginative conjectures. At that point of the analysis, one might say that psychoanalysis has turned into play, an earnest, sincere, sometimes frightening, sometimes funny, always interesting kind of play with imaginative conjectures which are communicated between a couple of people close to each other. The psychoanalytical experience is an aes­thetic object which never will be known, and this is true also for play.

However, play is also just what it is: a distinctive phenomenon which we only partly understand and which puts the "negative capability" to the test both for those who want to join in and play and for those who want to understand play. We have to look with "pure, newly-washed eyes". Here I will end my presentation with a short vignette, from my childhood:

One day, one of my sisters and I played together. I was, I suppose, three years old and my sister five. We had a tame cockerel and we put it to bed in a small wagon so that only his head stuck out. We picked flowers so that we had small bouquets and we were going to give them to passers-by. With the wagon and the cockerel and the flowers, we walked to the nearest street corner and gave a flower to anyone who passed by, and the cockerel lay kindly in his wagon letting himself be admired. If anyone had asked us what we were doing, we might have answered only, "We are just playing."

REFERENCES

Bion, W R. (1967) Second Thoughts. Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis. London: Kar­nac Books, 1984.

Johan Norman Utflyktsviigen 13 S-168 41 Bromma Sweden

Copyright © Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review. 1999

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