ABSTRACT

Play is an essential part of every human’s life. Children can play alone and through the play they can handle emotional reactions raised by their reality. Play can be experienced as dangerous, strange or even forbidden, but it certainly has the power to create change in psychotherapy. “Psychotherapy takes place in the overlap of two areas of playing, that of the patient and that of the therapist. Psychotherapy has to do with two people playing together. It is a consequence of the integration of two different mental states: psychic equivalence and the pretend mode. S. H. Foulkes, the founder of group analysis, described the different levels of communication in a group. “Play is a voluntary activity or occupation, executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted, but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness that it is “different” from “ordinary life”.