#wellcome library

[themotherofrevelation]

Wellcome Library, Raksha Kali or Durga

[taxi-davis]

Severe tubercular leprosy (or ichthyosis) of the hand. Photograph: Wellcome Library, London

[klein-archive]

On the prophylactic value of play

17th May 2022

In my last blog post I shared some of Melanie Klein’s notes on friendship, found in file PP/KLE/C.9 of the archive. The material I’ve unearthed this time comes from the same file, but here we see Klein reflecting on the importance of play in the early relationship between the mother and her infant/child, and that between the infant/child and other important individuals in his or her life, including siblings. Klein’s focus here is the impact of the child’s experience of play on their development and overall happiness, and she draws on her work with an adult patient to highlight the suffering that may follow when a mother doesn’t play with her child.

We can see Klein reflecting carefully upon the subtle interplay of external and internal or constitutional factors, which has such a bearing on the infant and, later, child’s subjective experience of the world, environment, and other people. She takes into account, for example, the infant’s ‘responsive attitude’, as well as the capacity of the mother or others to really engage with the infant, for instance by getting down and playing ‘on the nursery floor’. She also points to the mitigating function of happy play, which helps an individual to bear conflict and worry, and lessens the sense of a gap between the generations.

As with many of her notes, those reproduced here are typed up, though clearly still in the process of being thought through and developed, with handwritten annotations, corrections and sometimes lines drawn through words and passages.

The first play therapy – a prophylactic one – starts with the mother’s playing with her child. The baby early responds to a playful attitude on the part of the people around him, and much is gained by this responsive attitude of the baby. Play between mother and baby contributes greatly to their happy relation. Furthermore, the playing together of children in the home, and next, with other playmates in the kindergarten – all the settings in which children play together or grown-ups play with children – are of great prophylactic value.

In the psycho-analysis of grown-ups one can see how these memories of happy play with mother or brothers and sisters or friends make up for much worry and conflict of different kinds, and produce a very strong tie between members of the same family. A home where there is no play in common remains cold, and there will be a wide gap between the child and his parents.

An adult patient of mine, a man who was not liable to cry, had an outburst of tears and cried an hour through when he remembered that his mother had never played with him on the nursery floor. She had been very fond of him, and he had been accustomed to go into the drawing room and was allowed to play there for a while. But that to him was never real play. On the nursery floor one could behave much more freely, need not take so much care to keep clean – actually, one could more readily express one’s phantasies.

Klein notes the important role of play, as well as imagination, in liberating unconscious phantasy. Without such a liberation of phantasy within an environment that can receive and not be too alarmed by it, the personality may remain, or become, significantly constricted. Klein continues:

Play in common increases love and trust, improves human relationships, and helps the child to overcome fears. For instance, let us take the game of a child who is pretending that he is shooting lions in the jungle (represented by a few chairs), or who is harpooning whales, from a couch which represents the ship. If the mother can join in such a game (and she may be asked to do so if the relation between herself and her child is good enough) then not only does she share pleasure with him but she is felt to be a helper, a good figure, as it were, against the bad and dangerous beings of his phantasies, which are represented by lions and whales…. (File PP/KLE/C.9; Images 42/, 43/ and 44/76)

Such experiences of play with trusted others, Klein writes, are:

… of the greatest importance for future relationships to people… It is an invaluable gain for the child’s mental and intellectual development, and for his happiness, if by means of play he can liberate his unconscious phantasies and express his impulses of various kinds. (Image 46/76)

Klein continues:

Every child is in the greatest need of a really understanding love as a support against his fears derived from internal sources. The mother’s love and understanding can hardly be expressed in a more suitable way than by becoming a good playmate to her child. In doing so she no doubt achieves something of which she may very well not be at all aware, that is, that she really understands her child, by which I mean that she unconsciously feels what goes on in the child’s unconscious… Furthermore, the gratifications which the child shares with the people who play with him help him to gain trust in them, and thus become the foundation for an improved relation between the child and grown-ups in general. The grown-up person who plays with the child in a way which responds to the child’s mind… puts himself on a level with the child and does away with the great gap which exists between the[m.] (Image 48/76)

Finally, on imagination and play, Klein writes:

The connection between the child’s imagination and his play is an obvious one. One can easily observe how the child can make a plaything of any object, and that he is guided by his imagination when doing so. That the child’s imagination is more strongly at work than that of the adult has probably always been understood, and the relation between play and imagination more or less recognised. But it has been left to psycho-analysis to discover the wealth and depth of the child’s phantasy life and also the importance of these phantasies for his whole development. Psycho-analysis has found that the child’s phantasies can be developed and play an important part in his later activities and sublimations. So true is this that one can say that a too strong repression of his phantasies inhibits the development of activities and sublimations and impoverishes his whole personality. It appeared that whatever can be seen and observed of the child’s imaginative life is on the whole a very small and weak expression of what goes on in the depths of his mind. (Images 60/ and 61/76)

[achasma]

“A man holding an anatomy book with an engraving of a woman showing her viscera” (detail), 18th century oil painting.

•

Follow for more: Instagram (achasma.art) | Pinterest (achasmaart)

[thefugitivesaint]

‘A crowned fairy king seated on a hedgehog drawn by a young girl holding a giant daisy, accompanied by dancing fairies.’ Source

[criticalliving]

Critical Living (2017) 

Directed, produced and animated by Alex Widdowson

Testimony from a former P.A. house resident, a current P.A. house therapist & Mike Jay, the author of This Way Madness Lies 

Sound design and recording engineer Vicky Freund

Cello score written and performed by Derck Littel 

Made in partnership with the Royal College of Art, the Wellcome Library & the Philadelphia Association

Alex Widdowson © 2017 Royal College of Art © 2017

[triste-le-roy]

More pages from Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros: Anno 1057 (unknown artist/writer, 1775 CE).

(via Wellcome Library)

[lepromatosis]

Death poisons the water of a nearby town with typhoid. 

Part of a series of gouache & watercolor paintings by Richard Tennant Cooper that were commissioned in 1912 by Henry Wellcome for his museum.