ABSTRACT
Pretend play has offered much grist for the mills of developmental theories. One is hard pressed to find a major theoretical framework – especially of the grand genre – that has not offered an account of where pretense fits within its larger perspective. And so, from the perspective of Piagetian theory, we become oriented to the cognitive (or, more exactly, the counter-cognitive) aspects of pretense and, from the psychoanalytic theory, we become oriented to the affective-emotional aspects of this behavior. Vygotsky brings us to words or gestures in relation to meaning and Bateson calls our attention to the paradoxical nature of communications about communications. (See Fein [1979, 1981b] and Sutton-Smith [1982] for additional discussion of these theoretical variations.)
