ABSTRACT
When asked by the British Psycho-Analytical Society to prepare a volume of my collected papers it was suggested that I should add some kind of thread that might link them together. I found great difficulty in doing this but eventually realized that there was something too constricting in this image of a thread and the preferable one was that of a tree of which I could recognize various branches. But if a tree, what about the roots? In short, where was I to begin? I decided that as the papers asked for are about the work of being a psycho-analyst I would begin with my earliest serious notions of what work I wanted to do in life. I therefore reminded myself that at the age of 11 I had decided that I wanted to be a naturalist. As I read that naturalists keep notes, I had started a nature diary, writing down anything interesting I saw, found, or heard, adding little drawings, and this went on for nine or ten years. In 1917 I left school after only one term in the sixth form because we had little money for the school fees and I had no thought of staying on to work for a university scholarship. Then, living in the country, in the spring of 1918, I was offered my first job, mornings only, to teach a small Canadian boy how to read. (It did not occur to me to ask why an intelligent boy of 7 had not yet learnt to read. What I did know was that his father was a Canadian officer fighting in the trenches in France.) I was paid seven shillings and sixpence (thirty-seven pence) a week. When the boy got the meaning of a word he was so delighted that he would say, ‘Oh my, oh my!’ After the lessons we would go out on to the heath to look for newts; strange how this so small job seemed to determine my future career. This was because when I told someone how much the boy and I had enjoyed ourselves, she said, ‘Have you read Montessori?’ So I read her. It was a revelation. Here was somebody who actually believed that children could be trusted to know what they needed to learn and to do it by a concentrated kind of play, not just any play but using material especially provided so that the play really become work. Now I thought I could see more of the trunk of the tree whose branches were to spread through my life. In fact the question of what is the creative relation between work and play was to become an interest that finally landed me in the psychoanalytic consulting room or playroom, asking the analysand to say, or if a child, to do, whatever came to mind. In fact to play, whether with words or with toys. My task would be then to listen or watch and try to describe what I thought they might be really trying to say in the context of how they saw the meaning of their lives.
