Chapter 14.Conclusion

The two of us, both child clinicians and educators, conceived this volume as a response to conversations with students at all levels of training and from the full array of mental health disciplines. In addition to the students’ pragmatic concerns about furnishing their offices, choosing toys, and managing the logistics of a child practice, they expressed uncertainty about what to do when young children enter their offices: How do you make them play? How do you play with them? How is it different from “just playing”? How does it become therapy? Won’t their parents be dissatisfied, since they don’t believe that playing ever changed anything before? We heard these anxieties as a reflection of the trainees’ relative inexperience and lack of confidence in the practice of play therapy; the freedom to play in the therapeutic encounter depends on one’s conviction in its potential benefit to the child. These trainees did not yet know the wonder and the wildness of entering a child’s “conceptual world” through the theater of play (Cohen and Cohen 1993), where a story can evolve over weeks to months, peopled with developing and familiar characters, and punctuated by the representation of events and experiences, all of which reflect the child’s inner life as co-created with the therapist. Here the clinician can share in the discovery of the child’s fears, sadness, delights, and anxieties as conveyed through characters, narratives, plot twists, catastrophes, resolutions, and happy endings emerging through the play. Here the therapist can gradually modulate the child’s experience by giving voice to the aspects of the patient that are repudiated and the impulses and desires that are denied, in addition to enacting the aspects of others that are frightening, unavailable, or seductive and facilitating the child’s comprehension. In displacement in play and in the safety of the therapist’s office, the child can slowly reintegrate these elements in a more adaptive way.