Imagining While Playing

Abstract

Children’s wild imaginations dominate the events in this chapter. Powerful themes of birth, death, rebirth and magic are played with as together children co-create dramatic imaginative stories and repeat aspects of real-life events in fantastic ways and with feeling. The pretend nature of this socio-dramatic play blatantly integrates thinking with feeling in playful and sometimes frightful activity. Any attempt to separate emotion from cognition loses the holistic nature of this integrated and imaginative dream-like play. Imaginative pretend play can allow children to express and think about hidden feelings and to work with significant unconscious themes, often symbolically veiled in dramatic pretence. Thus the act of playing creates a transitional third space among and between the players where complex themes can be safely explored, thought, felt, and played with (Benjamin J, Psychoanal Q LXXIII(1):5–46. doi: 10.1002/j.2167-4086.2004.tb00151.x, 2004; Ogden T, Psychoanal Q LXX111:167–195, 2004; Winnicott DW, Playing and reality. Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1974).