ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a history of play therapy, looking in some detail at the work of Susan Isaacs, Melanie Klein, Carl Rogers, Anna Freud, Erik Erikson and Virginia Axline and Adam Philips. It was not until the 1970s that child abuse was recognised as an issue in the West. It tends to think of child abuse as domestic, but children are also abused in conflict. Play therapy has become part of the psychology-psychiatry industry and there is an association of play therapists. The key relationship is between the child and the play therapist – a relationship that has to stay confidential just as in adult therapy. The chapter argues that psychoanalysts used play much as empirical psychologists did as a means of measuring children's faults and progress rather than observing and treasuring it. It deals with the increasingly important subject of autism, and the question of whether play therapy can be of help.
