ABSTRACT
This chapter emphasizes on child analysis and the critical role of play in it. A child at play is involved in an investigation of the interface between his or her internal world, which is at once magical and “gothic”, and an external world that has a mind of its own, so to speak. Sigmund Freud believed, as noted earlier, that play and fantasy are equivalent, except that in play the child links his or her fantasy to concrete objects in the real world. The division of the mind into consciousness and unconsciousness is what characterizes adult psychological conflict, but even by age three people can appreciate how an unconscious portion of psychological existence has already been established. An adult analysand could probably contain all these components of Oedipal conflict in one sequence of verbal associations, a tribute to the adult ego’s facility with language, frustration tolerance, renunciation of instinct, sublimatory channels.
