The Metaphor of Play

Origin and Breakdown of Personal Being

Russell Meares

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135444235
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Medizin
• Subtopic: Psychiatrie & geistige Gesundheit

Personality disorder can be conceived as the result of a disruption on the development of self. This thoroughly updated edition of The Metaphor of Play examines how those who have suffered such disruption can be treated by understanding their sense of self and the fragility of their sense of existence. Based on the Conversational Model, this book demonstrates that the play of a pre-school child, and a mental activity similar to it in the adult, is necessary to the growth of a healthy self. The three sections of the book - Development, Disruption and Amplification and Integration - introduce such concepts as the exceptional field, paradoxical restoration, reversal, value and fit, and coupling, amplification and representation.

This highly readable and lucid presentation of the role of play in the development of self will be of interest not only to therapists but also to those interested in the larger issues of mind and consciousness.

Part I

Development

Chapter 1

Play and the sense of self

Those who suffer a pervasive feeling of emptiness, who live as if on the surface, caught up in a ceaseless traffic with the stimuli of the everyday world, are the main focus of this book. These people sense no core existence and are often without access to true emotions or an authentic feeling of being alive. Such disturbances of the experience of self are common. Indeed, people afflicted with them make up the bulk of those who confront a psychotherapist in the modern age. Their severity ranges from a subtle and unobtrusive disturbance of personal being, to a severely disabling condition associated with repeated hospitalizations, suicide attempts and broken relationships.

Until the 1970s, no major psychology could adequately explain the diminishment and fragility of the sense of existence that affect these people. In recent years, however, an understanding has begun to develop and is attracting increasing interest. In 1980, the most severe manifestation of the disturbance was officially given a name – the borderline personality. The aim of this book is to show how these experiences, in both their lesser and more severe forms, can be understood, and how a way of treating them can be derived from this understanding. The main theme depends upon two paradoxes. The first is that self, which is private, grows in the public domain. The second is that inner life, which we sense as insubstantial, is founded on physical things, such as toys and parts of bodies.

Ideas about self and its origins were being developed in the United States about a century ago. James Mark Baldwin was one of the first proponents of ideas about self. He belonged to a group of psychologists who sought to understand this experience and its evolution. William James was the leading figure in this school. Like his brother Henry, the novelist, William was intrigued by the phenomena of individual consciousness and by the problem of expressing, in simple language, their intricate nature. Others in this group included Josiah Royce, Charles Cooley, and George Herbert Mead in the United States; Pierre Janet in Paris; and Edouard ClapareÁde and others in Switzerland. They influenced each other and also gained from philosophers such as Henri Bergson.

Just before World War I, the American expression of this line of thinking was swept away in what has been called a “radical behaviorist purge”.¹ A new era arose, in which conceptions of man and mind were peculiarly mechanical. Such notions as self that could not be touched or measured were banished from the curricula of academic psychology as unscientific, leaving a vacancy at the heart of that discipline. The dominant psycho-dynamic theory of the time, ego psychology, formulated a notion of mind that was consistent with the images of the late industrial age. Ego was the “psychic apparatus.” This system of thinking included no notions of self until the late 1930s.²

These ideas seemed to be manifestations of something deeper, of a fundamental shift in the way those in the west conceived of themselves and of their relationship with others. This shift was reflected not only in psychology but also in the physical sciences, in political thinking, and in the dominant works of artistic expression. Casimir Malevic, for example, just before World War I, began to paint images that showed the fusion of man and machine. He was followed by a series of major painters, including Umberto Boccioni in Italy, and Fernand Leger and Francis Picabia³ in France, who portrayed man as a mechanism. Furthermore, the dominance of linear and geometric forms of painting over more random, wandering, and, in this way, more human forms of expression extended from Malevic through Mondrian to the Bauhaus School and on to the 1960s in New York with Frank Stella, Barnett Newman and Kenneth Noland.

The ideas of James, Baldwin and their colleagues could not exist in such an intellectual atmosphere, which, for heuristic purposes but not entirely fancifully, we might date from 1913 to 1971. James died in 1910. His influence waned soon after. Baldwin was forgotten. In Paris, Bergson's great books had all been written, and Janet, who before the war had seemed likely to become the greatest psychiatrist of his time was destined to become instead a footnote in the history of psychodynamic thought, his major works never translated. Only in Switzerland did the tradition live on. In very different ways, Ludwig Binswanger and Carl Gustav Jung pursued the problems of existence and self; Jean Piaget, who called Janet “my Professor” until the end of his life, conducted influential studies on psychological development of the child.⁴ Nevertheless, in the United States, the rout was so complete in the field of psychology at least, that when in 1972 Arnold Buss came to study the subject of private consciousness, perhaps the most fundamental fact of which we are aware, he found no single reference to it in the literature of psychology.⁵

The tradition began to revive in America in the 1940s under the influence of Harry Stack Sullivan, who acknowledged his debt to George Herbert Mead. It was not until the 1970s, however, that the extraordinary situation discovered by Arnold Buss began to be rectified.

The concept of self was welcomed beck to the scientific fold. At the same time, mother–infant interaction emerged as a major field of study. It seemed an awareness had arisen that, in some way, self evolved through the child's engagement with the nurturing environment. The work of Heinz Kohut had arrived at his conclusions by a pathway very different from his predecessors, gaining his insights from clinical material. His explorations were paralleled in England by D.W. Winnicott, whose developmental approach was based on observations of children. This book belongs to and is indebted to this broad tradition.

The second paradox upon which the book is based, that of self as substance, first presented itself to me in a much more personal way.

About 35 years ago, I encountered a young woman, Miss A, a waitress, ill-educated, and intensely shy.⁶ What she said was often puzzling and hard to grasp. Yet it was important, since she struggled to portray the reality in which she lived. One day she said something that seemed to be of fundamental significance. She was finding, as she usually did, that it was very difficult to talk. She tried to explain: “I suppose I'm scared that if I talk, there'll be nothing left to say. Say I told you all my thoughts, ideas, and whatsit, it'd be like me piled up beside us, with nothing left to say.”

Miss A seemed to feel that she was composed of a series of ideas and that should they be lost, she would cease to exist. It was as if she attributed concrete substance to her ideas and experienced her thoughts as the stuff of her existence. Their loss implied the threat of dematerialization. As a consequence, at our first meeting, standing in a corner of the room, she told me that she did not want to speak. Subsequently, in groups she remained silent. For her, there would be no idle chatter, since conversation served only to reveal her inner world of “thoughts, ideas, and whatsit.”

Miss A was aware that her sense of personal fragility had something to do with her relationships with others. She strove, in halting phrases, to describe this apprehension: “If I began to speak – it's too big – like stepping on a merry-go-round – no, it's like stepping stones across the sea – having to go on to the end. The stepping stones are like situations, incidents more likely. I can't quite manage them. I scramble from one to the other. How I got from this morning to here was most unpleasant. I felt things were demanded.” Her inner world of thought and emotions was constantly demanded in the encounters of daily life, when a part of herself was shown to another person and momentarily occupied a precarious existence outside her. She implied that to expose one's thoughts is to risk a kind of personal damage, through a faulty response of others. On another occasion she seemed to say that the sense of damage was like a wound to her physical being.

The frailty of Miss A is not shared by everyone. Nevertheless, for most of us, there are threads of thoughts and images that are felt as intensely personal. They are valued and perceived as a kind of inner core. They have a creative potential and are also the locus of a sense of self.

From where do such experiences come? At the heart of this book lies the idea that the play of the preschool child, and a mental activity similar to it in the adult, is necessary to the growth of a healthy self. Seen in this way, the play of the child is not mere diversion. It is vital to the evolution of mature psychic life.⁷

Play takes place in a space that is created by the atmosphere of another. The play space, part real, part illusory, provides the basic metaphor through which the experiences of Miss A and others who suffer disorders of self might be understood.

The play of the very young child has peculiar characteristics that include the nature of the relationship with the other, the form of language, and an absorption in the activity that is similar to that of an adult who is lost in thought. The field of play is where, to a large extent, a sense of self is generated. These and related developmental ideas make up Part I of this book.

Part II of the book considers disruptions of this normal development. These frequently arise through the fragility of the play space, which is easily broken up by the faulty responses of others which do not “fit” the child's fundamental reality, which has its basis in feeling. These disjunctive responses have an alerting effect, causing the child to orient to the outer world. For a child who habitually lives in such a situation, the field of play is never adequately established, so that there is little chance to elaborate those experiences that form the core of self. The individual is left with a sense of nothing much inside, no “real me.” A second and related form of disruption is more active, and can be understood as traumatic. A common kind of this experience is that which Miss A seemed to fear, that is, the sense of harm that comes with attacks upon the feeling of value which is at the core of self.

In Part III, the final chapters outline the therapeutic approach. The task of the therapist who works within this system is, first of all, to establish, in a metaphoric sense, the field of play.

Chapter 2

The secret

As soon as we try to understand how a disturbance in the sense of self might come about, we strike an obstacle. What is self? How can it be defined? These difficult questions must be given some kind of answer before we go on. An approach to the problem of conceiving so elusive and abstract an entity as self can be made in a negative way. Although it is hard to say what self is, we can say, without doubt, that it is distinct from not-self. This simple dichotomy provides a starting point. In making a distinction between self and not-self, we draw a line between not only our bodies but also a whole range of experiences, such as thoughts, feelings, and memories that are felt as one's own and as part of an inner world that is distinguished from an outer world. We are led to a fundamental idea – self depends upon the concept of innerness. The development of this concept is shown through the child's understanding of secrecy.

We are not born with a self. For some time, the child seems to conceive the boundary between his or her world of feelings and thoughts and the world of others as incomplete. Children seem to believe that those who are close to them will know of these feelings and thoughts, even their dreams. For example, one of Piaget's 5-year-old subjects is asked: “Could I see your dream?” “No, you would be too far away.” “And your mother?” “Yes, but she lights the light”.¹ Piaget wrote that “it is indispensable to establish clearly and before all else the boundary the child draws between the self and the external world”.²

Despite the evident importance of the development of self-boundary, there has been little actual study of it. We do not know, for example, the age at which the concept is attained. Mahler and colleagues suggest that it is between 2 and 3 years of age;³ Piaget's findings imply that it is considerably later, from 7 to 9. One supposes that the lack of data arises through difficulties inherent in studying so subtle a notion as self-boundary. Pierre Janet, however, gave us a way of approaching the problem.

Janet was the star of a school of psychiatry that was evolving in Paris towards the end of the nineteenth century. The story of his rivalry with Freud, his eclipse, and his death, which passed without public notice, is wonderfully told by Henri Ellenberger.⁴ He points out that Janet's hypotheses and clinical insights, many of them brilliant, have been lost, or are largely neglected following his fall from influence. Among his ideas was the notion that the child's discovery of the concept of secrecy is an event of enormous significance since it heralds the birth of an inner world. When the child learns that thoughts and ideas can be kept within himself and are not accessible to others, he realizes that there is some kind of demarcation between his world, which is inner and that which is outer. Seen in this way, a study of the age at which children know what it means to keep a secret may allow us to infer the age of self-boundary formation.

We used Janet's idea in a study of 40 preschool children in Western Sydney, Australia.⁵ The children came from all socio-economic groups. The study depended upon the child's responses to a large colored photograph of two adolescents, called Cathy and Paul. Cathy was shown with her hand cupped to Paul's ear, as if she were whispering. The child was asked: “What are Cathy and Paul doing?” The questions that followed were designed to elicit the child's knowledge and use of the word secret, the content of secrets, those who were recipients of secrets, and those with whom one cannot share a secret.

Another test consisted of the simple presentation of a moral dilemma in order to investigate the s...