Analysts have long recognized that in the treatment of chil - dren, play and nonverbal communication in the form of play (including their own self-involvement) provides the communications required to understand the child's struggles. Yet even here, the aim has frequently been to translate the knowledge gained from the play with dolls, soldiers, or other fantasy games of traumatic experiences, into verbal interpretations of the unconscious wishes and fears that were talked about outside the pretend world . Without a verbal statement, child analysts feared the playing out of inner turmoil would have little or no effect. Furthermore, the recognition of an extensive idiosyncratic, nonverbal language that was discovered in work with psychotic patients required a reassessment of the limits of verbal discourse as the only relevant mode of analytic communication (Sullivan, 1962; Atwood, 2001) .