ABSTRACT
A child's ability to play and to talk stems from his being able to symbolize, to make one thing stand for another: a doll represents a baby, a stethoscope a doctor, the word "table" stands for the object table. Babies of quite a young age will often stop crying when they hear the sounds of their feed being prepared or the sound of their mother's voice. In a sense, these images of what is missing can be thought of as early forms of symbolization, and as time goes on and parents become slightly less adaptive to their baby's needs, the baby will begin to rely on these images as sources of comfort to fill the gap between his wishes and the satisfaction of those wishes. A huge amount of toddlers' play is about separation; about losing and re-finding someone or something.
