ABSTRACT
According to Sigmund Freud, there is much to be learned from play and pretense, which are so prominent in early childhood, as well as from the developmental course of such tendencies. Beyond early childhood, play and pretense become less prominent because of cultural influences involving inhibition and redirection. Today's developmental framework for updating Freud's insights will lead to a series of contemporary scientific themes. Thinking about play as mastery in a broader motivational way was given impetus by a good deal of research in a number of developmental disciplines. The child distinguishes play from reality quite well, according to Freud's 1908 observations. The sciences of developmental psychology have only recently demonstrated that young children can tell the difference between pretense and reality. Child therapists also make use of what the child shows in play that indicates a knowledge of a wider zone of the way things work.
