Psychoanalytical Aspects
This leads us to another determining reference, that of psychoanalysis, which, in its attentiveness to libidinal development, identifies several roles for play in the constitution and support of psychic and political life.
Although Axelos often evinces suspicion towards the work of Sigmund Freud and his inheritors, even at times almost condemning what he sees as a kind of crudeness in their vision, psychoanalysis remains self-confessedly crucial to him insofar as it offers a developmental account of the becoming-human that simultaneously integrates play and libidinal drives on a terrain that is constitutionally unconscious and therefore extra-volitional. One does not simply choose to play or not to play; the questions of pleasure, desire and drive are always in play with those of suffering and trauma; one is never not being-played.Perhaps the most famous of Freud’s examples of a child playing is found in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920):
This good little boy, however, had an occasional disturbing habit of taking any small objects he could get hold of and throwing them away from him into a corner, under the bed, and so on, so that hunting for his toys and picking them up was often quite a business. As he did this he gave vent to a loud, long-drawn-out ‘o-o-o-o’, accompanied by an expression of interest and satisfaction. His mother and the writer of the present account were agreed in thinking that this was not a mere interjection but represented the German word ‘fort’ [‘gone’]. I eventually realized that it was a game and that the only use he made of any of his toys was to play ‘gone’ with them. One day I made an observation which confirmed my view. The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied round it. It never occurred to him to pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at its being a carriage.
What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skilfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive ‘o-o-o-o’. He then pulled the reel out of the cot again and hailed its reappearance with a joyful ‘da’ [‘there’]. This, then, was the complete game - disappearance and return.[23]Freud himself gives a number of possible interpretations of this game, of which we will only mention a few. By turning a passive experience into the activity of a game, the child essays to master the trauma of his mother’s absence by staging her going-and-return in another way, at once effecting an instinctual renunciation and issuing a defiant revenge on the mother. Freud notes that such a libidinal invention, in which repetition is essentially deployed as a binding of trauma, is not necessarily mimetic (in the sense of re-enacting another real situation); moreover, it does not in itself enable any ‘evidence of the operation of tendencies beyond the pleasure principle’.[24] It does, however, provide a yield of pleasure even if what it repeats is founded in unpleasure. Moreover, as Jacques Lacan will later emphasise, this game also evinces the fundamental differential function of language as such: the division itself (between fort and da - ‘there’ and ‘here’) is what comes to be repeated and expressed in other signifiers, other circumstances, as the vicissitudes of desire.[25] In this frame, the role of play is paramount not only as psychopathology but as political foundation.
The ‘compulsion to repeat’ discernible in such games is to be distinguished from the organic implications of the trauma-dreams of shell-shocked war veterans, whose own compulsive repetitions - insofar as they exhibit no aggregative aspects, or whose repetitions rather perhaps express the continued failure to bind trauma - suggest another, more secretive operation altogether, that of the death drive. Freud famously articulates this speculation as ‘an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things’.[26] This would mean, in other words, that there are at least two kinds of ‘compulsive’ repetitions at work in the organism - erotic binding and mortifying undoing - which can hardly be told apart.
One sort of repetition would be inherently tied to the erotic world of play; the other, if it does indeed exist, would be play’s graveyard, its extinction.In any case, the inventions of children at play become one of the key sites of development for psychoanalysis, not merely as a form of instinctual renunciation-in-invention as the motor of ontogenesis, but also as a primary means of creating imaginative-real zones to enable psychic and physical transitions from one stage or position to another. In this regard, the work of the object relations theorists has been extremely influential, perhaps above all that of D. W. Winnicott.[27] In a famous essay, Winnicott notes the gap between the neonate’s typical use of a part of their own body to simulate maternal satisfaction (e.g. thumb-sucking) and the transition - a key term here - to playing with dolls or with another external object of some kind.[28] For Winnicott, what is of interest is the development of an intermediate psychic zone ‘between the subjective and that which is objectively perceived’.[29] The transitional object is accordingly ‘the original not-me possession’, and, as such, it is not only critical in enabling for the child variations in affectregulation (protection, soothing, reassurance and so on) but, in being part of psychological development in shifting from pure fantasy to real movement, conditions a simultaneously liminal and integrative relationship to the external world, with ongoing consequences into adulthood.
Psychoanalysis establishes play as an essential part of development, which serves a number of related functions, including moving from passive to active, from fantasy-dominance to reality-testing, from the primacy of disordered wishes to the renunciation of instinct. Yet it also therefore tends to see play and games as not only founding the possibility of civilisation more generally, but of sustaining and shifting culture as well. Hence Freud will speak of the sustenance of infantile fantasies of omnipotence in the realm of art, of its links to rituals, magic and sacrifice, and to festival - and it is this role of play in enabling (and undermining) such articulations that is determining for Axelos too.