ABSTRACT
The themes of meaning-making, playing, in an intermediate space/time between mother and baby introduce the parallels between being in psychotherapy and being in the theatre. The compression of all the world to a stage or an empty space for playing in both the theatre and the setting of psychotherapy lays bare the normally less perceptible phenomena of time, space, and meaning-making. As for the concept and nature of the invisible “wall” in theatre-in-the-round, there is a still more powerful tension in the greater proximity between actors and audience. As demonstrated in semiotic theory — the theory of signs — in any human system, organization or “code” nothing can be excluded from this activity of meaning-making or interpretation. In psychotherapy, contending with the inflation of meaning-making and fantasy, there is the urge to accept as “natural” whatever constitutes the ritual, through repetition and through all the features of the setting.
