ABSTRACT
In the early 1950s, two very intelligent and far-sighted people, one in England and the other in California, were both thinking about play. The two people were Donald Winnicott and Gregory Bateson. Stephen Porges focuses on a group of several cranial nerves which all originate in the same area of the brain: an area which, in the early aquatic ancestors, was concerned with the function of the gills. Porges's work is largely concerned with the crucial transition from physiology to feeling. In his paper on play and fantasy, which was a key document in the development of systemic family therapy, Gregory Bateson argues that play in humans and other mammals is structured through meta-signals conveying the message "this is not what it seems". A key element in what defines therapy as play seems to be the frame within which it takes place. Bateson sees the embodied metacommunication of play as providing the template for these metalinguistic rules.
