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Essay on Play Therapy
Psychoanalytic Play Therapy
The goals of psychoanalytic play therapy are many and include helping the child to suffer less (e.g., quelling anxiety and related bodily symptoms, lifting depression, and resolving complicated grief); overcome trauma; adjust to life events, such as divorce; cope with illness and comply with treatment; master phobias; be better able to attend, learn, and work in school; manage personal anger and aggression; and come to terms with a learning disability or physical handicap.
While these goals sound like those pursued by clinicians of other theoretical persuasions, the goals of psychoanalytic play therapy sometimes are more ambitious, aspiring to change not just a behavior or symptom but broader, deeper, and more essential aspects of the child and her ways of dealing with life and its ordeals. Psychoanalytic play therapy may be used to soften an overly harsh conscience in a child who won’t give himself a break. It can help a child integrate various aspects of her personality or help her to master developmental tasks, such as separating and growing up, or adapting to puberty and its changes (Kevin, 1996).
Analytically-informed therapy can help detached or estranged children connect more to themselves and to others. This type of therapy is extremely good at promoting resiliency and adaptability, helping to reduce a child’s vulnerability to psychotic and borderline functioning, especially under stress. It can help an inhibited child grow more spontaneous, active, and joyful; an impulsive child, more contained, reflective, and responsible; and a narcissistic child, less susceptible to wounded esteem and reactive rage.
Psychoanalytic play therapy intends to go beyond the immediate pain or difficulty and clear the way so that healthy development can resume from where it has been halted or detoured by external trauma or untenable internal conflict (neurosis)................
