ABSTRACT
My personal relation to play was formed in the context of being with babies and children, especially my own. The idea of play was appealing to me in the abstract as an undergraduate reading the radical Freudians (Marcuse, Brown), Nietzche, and Schiller, and later when I read Winnicott and Milner, but I was not yet sure what play could mean in adult analysis. Play as a developmentally crucial part of infancy I encountered when I discovered infancy research and the studies of face-to-face interaction in the work of Stern & Beebe (Stern, 1974a & b; Beebe & Stern, 1977). But my felt sense was of having rediscovered the ability to play, as if my experience of play with my own parents came back to me when I had a baby of my own.
In particular, there were songs. My father sang, finding an appropriately themed song for every possible occasion, and so I found myself inventing songs for my child as a way to soothe and comfort, but also to narrate and enliven our shared daily life. One of the songs I made up for my rapprochement toddler son was the song to thematize the “No!” (see Spitz, 1957). The tune of the theme of the Lone Ranger (otherwise known as the William Tell Overture), also beloved in childhood, fit my intentions and it went something like this: “A No and a No and a Yes Yes Yes; a No and a No and a Yes Yes Yes! No and No, Yes and Yes, NOOOO… and YES YES YES! No and No and No and No, and Yes and Yes and Yes Yes Yes …” And so on. This song expresses best the spirit of this paper, which celebrates the joy of No when Yes is its background—and vice versa.
For this chapter, the Both/And and the Yes/And discussed in Chapter 5 needed to be sublated (aufgehoben—modified and integrated) with the equally important and sometimes paradoxical relation of Yes-And-No. In Part I of the chapter I propose the importance of embracing the No as part of the movement already highlighted from enactment to play. The recuperating of the No, using it to amplify rather than foreclose meaning, restores the tension between the two sides of the opposition, thus creating the Third. In Part II, the clinical discussion, I consider a treatment involving much negation and intolerance of being with the Other. It also illustrates the war between dissociated selves, in which at first it seems that Only one can live. This then necessitates a dramatic enactment in relation to the patient’s history of violent trauma in which the moral Third could 182be encountered and the experience of a lawful world could be authenticated. I am deeply grateful to “Jeannette” for sharing her story and her words, for teaching me.
