ABSTRACT
I elaborate how play is featured in different elements of my responsiveness to patients. One of the things that has made play so difficult to define for different analysts is that at one level of theoretical discourse it can be seen as the underlying logic that makes psychoanalysis possible. If it is everywhere, how may it be seen? I suggest that playing is an activity on the part of patient and analyst, a particular way of examining and responding to transference-countertransference. Playing involves a deeply personal responsiveness to each other, which allows new opportunities for viewing transference, including the fixed rules of transference-countertransference enactment. It often emerges in a different affective register or with a slightly new semantic basis from within elements of the transference-countertransference, the very intersubjective engagement that it seeks to illuminate. I suggest a broad application of the play concept in psychoanalytic work, including the mourning process.
