Introduction to Play Therapy

Ann Cattanach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135452773
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Psicoterapia

Play therapy is a popular and important intervention for many children with psychological problems and traumatic life experiences. Written by a renowned expert in the field, Introduction to Play Therapy provides a basic grounding in play therapy intervention, answering questions such as:
· Who can play therapy help?
· What are the best settings for play therapy?
· How should you train in play therapy?
A variety of models of working with play are explored, and an evaluation of the meaning of childhood is discussed in clear language, illustrated with clinical examples.
This book will help adults who communicate with children in any role, be they parents, teachers or therapists.

Chapter 1
The meaning of childhood

My Baby

I’m the father of an infant,

Baby mine, baby mine;

He won’t let me rest an instant, Baby mine, baby mine;

He won’t do a thing he’s bid,

How I wish that I was rid Of that awful sassy kid,

Baby mine, baby mine; Of that awful sassy kid, Baby mine

Sung by Charlie Bacus c. 1880

Lullaby

Little baby, lay your head

On your little cradle-bed:

Shut your eye-peeps, now the day

And the light are gone away;

All the clothes are tucked in tight;

Little baby dear, good-night.

Jane Taylor 1906

Children – our clients

Play therapy is a way of helping troubled children cope with difficult life events. Play is used as the medium of communication because it is the way children make sense of their world. It is the play of the children heard by a sensitive therapist and the relationship of trust and care between the two, which can help children manage their lives. This book describes aspects of play therapy and explores the ways play therapists might work with children.

In the many years I have practised play therapy and taught students about the subject, I have been interested in the narratives adults have about children. Before we can consider helping children it is important to reflect on the thoughts, ideas and feelings about the child and childhood which permeate our society. Many adults talk about children as though they were a different species. Some adults seem quite unconnected to their own childhoods. When they talk about children they seem to be talking about imaginary beings or a different species so perhaps that is a good place to start.

Imaginary beings

In 1967 Jorge Luis Borges published a delightful book called The Book of Imaginary Beings. He defined these beings as strange creatures conceived through time and space by the human imagination. He includes in his list such creatures as banshees, brownies, fairies, the eastern dragon, the unicorn and the western dragon. All beings with particular attributes and tasks to perform. Perhaps one of the imaginary beings not listed should come after the Cheshire Cat and before the Chimera. This imaginary being would be The Child. Over the years I have heard many descriptions of this imaginary creature. Perhaps a definition would run as follows:

The Child

An imaginary creature known the world over.

In Western society, first given special status after the Middle Ages.

Often portrayed as a shy, vulnerable, innocent creature but sometimes defined as a wild beast to be tamed.

The creature is often found in domestic settings and can sometimes perform domestic chores rather like the Scottish bodachs who help the household at night when everyone is asleep.

(Watch out for the fairies, they often steal children and take them underground or swap them and leave a changeling. They also steal dogs because humans train them better.)

Some children go to school to learn to be grown-up.

Children live in a special time called childhood, which is supposed to be idyllic.

In time all children transform into adults who are real creatures and use rational thought.

Adults mostly forget what it is really like to be a child.

Adults make up stories about children because they think children are different and they want childhood to be magical.

They forget that children are people first and foremost.

What are children for?

‘What are children for?’ is the heading of an article by Mary Riddell in the Observer (9 September 2001), which describes her views of the exploitation of children of the Ardoyne in Northern Ireland who had to walk to their Catholic school through streets crowded with Protestants shouting and screaming. The children were clearly terrified. The writer questions why the adults should use children to support their beliefs in this way and criticises the use of these iconic images of children as a way for adults to elicit sympathy for their causes. She then explores the place of children in our society and comments on the lack of support for the implementation of a childcare strategy. She states that not only do we risk losing sight of what children want but also of what childhood and children themselves are for. She suggests that adults cling to a Disney vision of childishness not only through nostalgia but also because they want to annexe it for themselves. What remains is the sentimental fantasy world adults first contrived for children and then seek to reclaim for themselves. She suggests that at this time, adults clinging to the desire to stay forever young, have rarely resembled children more closely or understood them less well. A few days after this article appeared, the Human Rights Watch produced a report called Easy Targets, which described the global scandal of beatings, torture, forced labour, sexual assault and murder against children by police or other law-enforcement officials, employers and teachers.

On 11 September 2001 when terrible attacks were made on New York and Washington, 35,615 children died of malnutrition in the poor countries of the world. While the world rightly recognised the horror of the attacks in America, there were no TV programmes, no minutes of silence or public mourning for the children who had starved to death. Perhaps we feel helpless, the information is too overwhelming to contemplate. The sense of who these children are does not fit into our world or our ideas about childhood. And we cannot connect our childhood to theirs.

Adults working and caring for children

For all of us as professionals working with children or as parents and carers of children it is helpful to think of and evaluate our own ideas and constructions about children. Many prospective students who want to study play therapy do talk in terms of a Disney vision of childhood and themselves as adult rescuers of children. However, this construct changes with learning and experience as students meet and work with children in distress.

Gittins in her book The Child in Question (1998) considers ‘the child’ as a myth, a fiction and an adult construction. We experience representations of childhood from advertisers, television producers and photographers. These images are often used to sell products or elicit donations to charities. Yet we have all been children and memories of our own childhood inform our ideas about who we think we are, who we think we once were, what we believe children are and what therefore we believe the child and childhood should be. So the term ‘the child’ encompasses a set of complexities and contradictions, which means that there is not such a thing as one child, one childhood.

So the words ‘child’, ‘childhood’ carry great complexity and a multiplicity of meanings. There is a cultural diversity in the way we view childhood and yet we have all been children. Our memories of our own childhood are often reconstructed to fit into the narratives of society. I don’t really hear my generation talk much about being a small child in the Second World War. How we spent nights under the stairs or in the Anderson shelter listening for the bombs. One kind of bomb was called a breadbasket and I had an image of a wicker box dropping from the skies. I do remember my Mickey Mouse gas mask. How I loathed that mouse face quite dark and frightening, and the smell of rubber when it was fitted over the face. Did the adults really think that Mickey Mouse would be less frightening or make it better? I liked the ordinary mask much more: it was less frightening, but I recognised I had to appease the adults and reassure them so I said that Mickey Mouse was fun.

Some years ago I ran a reminiscence group in an old people’s home and reminiscence about childhood was a popular subject.

Initially the descriptions of childhood seemed to be idyllic and romantic until one day one old lady asked the group to stop talking. She wanted to say that her childhood had not been idyllic at all. She had been abused and battered by her father. She described the fear and the misery. She looked at the group with a wry smile. ‘There’ she said ‘I have never spoken about this before.’ There was a powerful silence and we were all aware that having let go of her secret sadness perhaps at last she could rest with dignity and honesty. She died three days later. We hold onto our secrets if we feel they conflict with the received view.

Many adults use children to satisfy their own fantasies but do not acknowledge this, so they are unable to negotiate with children. Just last week I was talking to two children who were describing their attic to me. It has a rail track and trains and their daddy spends such a lot of time there. Daddy’s track and daddy’s train although ostensibly bought for the children. They didn’t want the train but wanted to appease their parents. They would have liked a playroom with toys and beanbags to throw and lie on, not trains, which they are not allowed to touch let alone use for play. So the children play outside on their bikes or with the stones in the road while daddy sits in isolated splendour with the trains and the track. The children are tolerant of his needs more than he is tolerant of theirs. When he is angry he says they are ungrateful. ‘Look what I’ve made for you,’ he says.

Adults often communicate with children as though they are a different species and children often recognise this and respond by playing at being children to appease the adults. The French philosopher Baudrillard (1993) was aware of this when he described the relationship between adults and children as subtlety. He writes that the strategies adopted to make this relationship are twofold. The adults make children believe they, the adults, are adults, while children for their part let adults believe that they, the children, are children. Of the two strategies, the second is the subtler, for while adults believe they are adults, children do not believe that they are children. They are children but they do not believe it. So daddy plays with his train believing he is an adult and has created the train for these children and the children play at being children to appease their father so he can use them as an excuse for his desire to play trains.

Baudrillard states that childhood haunts the adult universe as a subtle and deadly presence and it is in this sense that the child is other to the adult: the child is the adult’s destiny, the adult is his most subtly distilled form.

Definitions of childhood and children

To return to Gittins’ definitions, the child is a myth, a fiction, an adult construction. So is childhood. Both have become symbolically central to our culture and psychologically crucial to our own sense of self.

She states that the child denotes an individual, embodied being, that is, in one way or another, not adult. The child is a transitory being, changing, growing, developing and this leads to confusion when defining the child. What fits a 3-year-old is different to a 17-year-old. While the child is defined as an embodied being the term also connotes dependency, powerlessness and whatever a culture uses to define the non-adult. In some cultures for example, women, slaves, the insane have been defined as not fully mature and so like children. However, once we begin to generalise about the group, individual differences can be lost.

One of the delights of tales and stories is the way the child is described as an individual coping with the strange complexities of the adult world. Read Master of All Masters and ponder who is the child.

Master of All Masters

A girl once went to the fair, to hire herself for a servant. At last a funny-looking old gentleman engaged her. And took her home to his house.

When she got there he told her he had something to teach her for that in his house he had his own name for things. He said to her ‘What will you call me?’

‘Master or mister or whatever you please, sir’ she said.

He said: ‘You must call me master of all masters. And what would you call this?’ pointing to his bed.

‘Bed or couch or whatever you please sir.’

‘No that’s my barnacle. And what do you call these?’ said he pointing to his pantaloons.

‘Breeches or trousers or whatever you please sir.’

‘You must call them squibs and crackers. And what would you call her?’ pointing to the cat.

‘Cat or kitty or whatever you please sir.’

‘You must call her white-faced simminy and this,’ now showing the fire ‘what would you call this?’

‘Fire or flame or whatever you please sir.’

‘You must call it hot cockalorum, and what is this?’ he went on pointing to the water.

‘Water or wet or whatever you please sir.’

‘No pondalorum is its name. And what do you call all this?’ he said pointing to the house.

‘House or cottage or whatever you please sir.’

‘You must call it high topper mountain.’

That very night the servant woke her master up in a fright and said

‘Master of all masters get out of your barnacle and put on your squibs and crackers.

For white-faced simminy has got a spark of hot cockalorum on it’s tail and unless you get some pondalorum high topper mountain will be all on hot cockalorum.

That’s all.’

While ‘the child’ carries many contradictory meanings, childhood is by definition a social and cultural concept, and becomes an idea as well as a category but never refers to an individual embodied child. So childhood indicates an ill-defined period of time as variously defined by adults. Gittins suggests that a culture might have a word for ‘child’ without necessarily having a concept of childhood.

Childhood suggests a different, separate, other group. Baudrillard suggests that adults use this ‘otherness’ and that we live not through our own energy but through the energy we subtly spirit away from the otherness of children.

In Managing Monsters (1994), Warner describes childhood as special and magical, precious and dangerous at once. In our society, this special sphere of childhood has grown as a social concept, as a market possibility, as an area of research, as a problem. She considers that contemporary child mythology enshrines children to meet adult desires and dreams and we call children ‘little devils’, ‘little monsters’, ‘little beasts’ with the full ambiguous force of the terms, all the complications of love and longing, repulsion and fear.

Perhaps we need to explore the history of...