We all play in one way or other – but does your playing expand your life or keep you stuck in the same loops, asks Mark Vernon

The psychotherapist within me is much drawn to the notion of play. Those of you who are at all familiar with anything psychotherapeutic will know of one of the great British psychoanalysts as the go-to person for the notion of play, and that is the figure of Donald Winnicott.

Winnicott is particularly known for his work with mothers and their young children and babies. He’s known for comments like, “There’s no such thing as a baby”, i.e. we’re always in some kind of relationship. And he developed particular notions of play, of which the summary is that as children, we don’t really play, we’re just practising so that, with luck, as adults, we really can play and play well.

What he meant by this was that play is the ability to navigate what you might call the circumference of your life. So if you imagine a circle, and in the middle of the circle is what you’re sure of, what you know, what you rely on, what you trust, who you love, and so on. And then outside the circle is that which you’re unsure of, you’re afraid of, you don’t know, it takes you into your areas of discomfort.

Winnicott argued that play is the ability to stay on the circumference of the circle, so that on the one hand, you do have some sort of rootedness in that which you can trust, that which you can be sure of, that which you can have faith in. But, if life is to expand, you need to have another foot in that which you’re less sure of, less certain of.

Play is, therefore, that ability to move between these two zones, so you don’t go rushing off into the furthest reaches of that which you don’t know and are terrified of, which is going to cause you to break down, but neither do you, as it were, hide under the duvet of your life, with no play, staying only with that of which you’re certain.

He felt that you can spot how the capacity for play is developing in the young child, and then help that serve them better when they’re adults, in order to keep this sense of expansiveness.

He developed this particularly with a practice he called the “squiggle”. He would get children, with their mothers, to write on bits of paper, looking at how the child did this, Winnicott could get some sense of whether the child was developing the capacity to explore, via the world of the page with the pen and the paper.

“Squiggling”, therefore, becomes a metaphor for how we might live our adult lives as well.

This helps us think about the electronic devices and games and gizmos in our lives. Because you can ask yourself the question: is it helping you play, in this rich sense? Or does it keep you stuck on repeat, pursuing the same desires, the same dissatisfactions, the same loops in your mind. Or are you able to use these devices, these gizmos, to take you to the edge of that circle and bring new possibilities in, help you to explore, make contact with difference, even that which might make you feel a little fearsome, but if you know how to relate to better, might be expansive of your life.

The advice Winnicott would give now is, how might our gamifying life, our play, be contracting or expanding our souls? Do your gizmos keep you stuck in loops, or do they take you to new vistas? Is your play leading you into adult life, or is it actually secretly keeping you regressed in your childish fantasies and fears, and therefore away from all that life might bring?

Mark Vernon present a new Thought for the Week on “A Drink with the Idler”.

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