The human being, child or adult, is only able to be creative when playing. In the game explores his whole personality, not just the most neurotic part. In the game explores its resources, finds solutions to problems.
In being creative he discovers himself for what he really is, in his total authenticity.
The game has a profound seriousness. When the child plays, he knows that he can let himself go, that he can trust the adult who provides the space for the game. It is that feeling of trust that we try as children to make ourselves feel safe when we grow up. The child loses himself in that space, where he brings his body, his emotions and, after the age of 6, his thoughts, the planning of the game.
I could talk hours about the game, starting from the spontaneous game, and then moving on to the symbolic game, but we go by steps.
Not all children can play: there are circumstances in life that make it impossible for the child to play. Since we approached adoption I am even more sensitive to the subject and I know that many adults, even if they have not experienced major traumas, are unable to be creative because they did not play as children.
The child expresses himself through play, not through language. He projects the characters of his inner world into objects and stages his defense mechanisms.
The game is the place of experience of reality, the space in which the contacts between the inside and the outside take place. The place where we rehearse, train, prepare for life.
When the experience of the game is missing in the pre-school and school age, the adult struggles to feel pleasure in the game, struggles to let go, to imagine. He struggles because he hasn’t experienced it in the first 7 years of life, so he doesn’t really know how to do it.
He will have other qualities, he will have compensated with various kinds of skills, but when he looks for his authenticity and creativity he meets a difficult path.
The game is an as if, just like the metaphor.
Try to think about the power that the metaphor has: it describes the experience and reorganizes reality. The as if put into action in the game, suspends us for a moment from the ordinary and makes us see reality with other eyes.
So those who did not play as children can forget to be creative?
We can recover that experience, that safe place.
In the studio I provide people with a number of objects: balloons, balls, ropes, pillows, wooden boxes containing various types of colors, brushes, various types of paper sheets and manipulable material.
Online I ask at the first meeting to get some play material.
The play material helps us to establish a relationship with ourselves, allows mediation. Tools of exchange, aggression or seduction, objects of desire that are charged with emotional value. The material meaning is replaced by the imaginary meaning. This is how a relationship initiated in a playful form can lead to an important revelation, full of emotions and sensations.
When in the figure emerge parts that are not yet integrated, parts that are not initially recognized as their own, then the objects, drawings, representations come to our aid.
When we allow ourselves to enter the game, it is easier to project the non-integrated part onto an external object, just as children do with their toys. Objects can withstand all projections, we don’t make them suffer as we do when we dump them on other human beings.
Do you understand why it is so important to know how to play?
