ABSTRACT
I originally intended to write one chapter on play and ended up with two, one emphasizing the shifts and overlaps between enactment and play, the other (Chapter 6) the role of negation. In this chapter I tried to play with and put into the pot ideas cultivated in quite different theoretical territories. It was mostly written from a place of uncertainty and questions and this makes for some unclarity that may be unavoidable. This chapter is divided into three sections. Part I introduces the idea of accepting paradox, and makes use of Bateson’s idea of the double bind, as interpreted for analytic purposes by Ringstrom (1998) who has contributed greatly to thinking about play and improvisation. I discuss how recognition occurs in action through enactment and play, and how we might use the idea of paradox to reconsider the relation of the two. I am thinking here about the movement between enactment and play as parallel to the shifts between complementarity and thirdness. While enactment is known to present dissociated experience in unlinked form, play can allow opposing experience to be accepted in the paradoxical form of thirdness. I consider the developmental origins of the capacity for play and how clinical work addresses deficits in that development. Part II presents a lengthy clinical illustration of some of these ideas; Part III aims to differentiate relational clinical theory from those contemporary theories that emphasize either primarily symbolic or proceduralimplicit modes of interaction, as opposed to recoupling the two foci. I outline how relational thinking pays attention to dissociation and the forms of intersubjective relating, which in turn informs how we put this recoupling into practice.
