ABSTRACT
The 2006 Creativity Seminar gives one of its principal themes: play, which is central to both Erik Erikson's and Donald Winnicott's work. This chapter takes up the theme of "deep play" within the transference with a very troubled patient. The chapter begins with the story of the anxious, hesitant young woman who could not bring herself to cross the threshold into her therapist's office. It describes the compulsion to repeat is anything but harmless, and forces to remember again Erikson's critical distinction between play and "irreversible purpose". This patient's life seemed lived on the razor's edge of that distinction, and threatened at every turn to cross over into irreversibility. Christopher Fowler brings into this drama and illustrates the therapeutic trajectory from actualised unconscious fantasy, deeply connected to traumatic experience, to the realisation of a hidden story, a therapeutic movement brought about through the medium of deep transference play.
