ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the history of the development of a number of psychoanalytic theories on the imaginative play of children. The first detailed example of observation of a very young child's play and a discussion of its significance is found in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. He emphasizes that it is the unpleasurable experience of the departure that was being played out, but that the pleasure principle still played a part because a passive experience was turned into an active one. Susan Isaacs suggests, in terms fairly similar to Freud's 'mastery and turning of passive into active', that the child's play gave him evidence of his 'triumph in controlling feelings of loss' and consoled him for his mother's absence. She adds that the child 'enjoyed the phantasied satisfaction of controlling his mother's comings and goings. Since Freud, psychoanalytic theory has been much preoccupied with the notion of the absent object.
