ABSTRACT
Are psychologists bothered by studying play? I have suggested that this may not be such an outrageous idea because of the picture that psychologists have about themselves and their work. Psychologists tend to see themselves as serious, scientific students of human behaviour. Throughout their training, they are taught that their task is to unearth laws of human behaviour. Theories differ widely, of course, but they share a common reality. The soft psychoanalyst who has never deigned to carry out an experiment and the hard experimentalist who believes the only proper ‘insight’ would be a brand of perfume share the faith that their work is serious. There are not many jokes either in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology or in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. The study of play may well feel wrong. Should intelligent adults devote so much time to observing and analysing how children mess about?
