Mark Solms, Play, Drives, Psychological Defense, The Unconscious, Models of the Mind, Free Association, American Psychoanalytic Association
Mark Solms presented, as he often does and I have often chronicled, at the American Psychoanalytic Association meetings this year. He was once again discussing a case that an analyst was presenting, but this time it was a child analyst presenting her work with two five-year-old girls both of whom had divorcing parents and both of whom she helped through play therapy. And play therapy, I think, turned out to be a fast ball down the middle of the strike zone for Solms to talk about how neuroscientific results can impact psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, but also how our knowledge as therapists can expand our neurological understanding, and, for me at least, how neuropsychology helps me understand the human condition.
Solms began with some introductory remarks about play. These felt both familiar – I have heard him talk about play before – but also somewhat novel. I think he has developed his thoughts about play since he last presented in person three years ago, and maybe it was different for me to hear them in a new context.
He started out by pointing out that, by definition, play is not real. When it becomes real, when a dog actually bites another dog, it is no longer play. He went on to state that play is one of theseven “psychological” drives that include two attachment drives, aggression, seeking, and etc., but that, unlike the other drives, neuroscientists have not been able to articulate a particular neural location for the play drive (there are also lower physiological drives of hunger, thirst, etc.). Partly this is because it is a superordinate drive and recruits the other drives in the process of playing – but also, so it seems to me, it is a drive that may be a later drive that developed later - it may be unique to mammals (and perhaps birds) – and thus might have a different neural “location” than the other drives – more on my naïve theory making in a moment.
Why is play a drive, then, if Solms can’t locate it in the brain? Partially this is definitional. Neuroscientists describe drives as homeostatic systems. When we play, we are driven to win. But if we win all the time, other people don’t like to play with us. So, we have to manage our play so that the others get to win and so that we get to win – there is a sweet spot that we need to find between winning all the time and having people to play with. From Solms’s perspective, all play is hierarchical, so when we are wrestling (most mammals wrestle), the other player has to win some of the time, but if we are playing doctor/patient or teacher/pupil, the other player has to have an opportunity to spend time playing the dominant role.
Play is also considered a drive because all mammals play. And, if we deprive a rat or a dog puppy of ½ an hour of play today, they will play an extra ½ hour tomorrow as if to make up for this pre-determined need. Play is both a drive, but also a means of satisfying the drive; like aggression, which is both the drive and the means of satisfaction of the drive.
After his brief introduction to the terms, a child psychoanalyst presented two examples of her work. Each example was, to my mind, brilliant. And, in each example, the critical intervention(s) that helped move the child from being a non-patient to someone who was working with the analyst to address their problems had occurred when the analyst was a.) able to engage the child in play b.) accompanied by the statement from the analyst that she didn’t quite know why she made the intervention that she did, but she could see, in retrospect, that it was a very helpful intervention.
Both children were having difficulty at school and were surly in one way or the other. The analyst’s interventions invited them to take what they were doing in the room, which could be interpreted as hostile – and, indeed, seemed to be intended to be hostile, and treated the actions as if they were a kind of game or, more precisely, made them into a game.
One of the little girls started throwing the therapist’s toys out of the 2nd story window of the therapist’s office. The therapist turned that into a game of constructing Kleenex and string to attach to the toys as a parachute and the game became whether this parachute worked or not, and whether the character that was being thrown deserved to have a gentle or a hard landing.
Solms was able to demonstrate how redirecting the aggression into the play turned it from an action directed against the analyst into a symbolic action that the analyst and the patient could appreciate together. He also clarified that play and language serve similar ends, they allow for an “as if” quality to occur – and when the therapeutic relationship has an “as if” quality, then problems can be worked out without having to, in fact, engage in activities that are dangerous or that solve one problem (harming through aggression the figure that the child is angry at) while creating another (threatening the relationship with a needed figure without whom the child feels panic).
In this interpretation, Solms equated play and language. They are both a means of manipulating symbols rather than manipulating things. When we make this transition – and Solms was playfully asked by the presenting analyst to address the ways in which play develops across the lifespan – when we can symbolize in play and in language, we gain a tremendous amount of power – but it is power in a different realm. We don’t have to hurt the other to establish dominance. We don’t have to construct something in order to see if it will work – we can construct it in words or on paper and we can create equations to test its strength. Of course words and play are also both means of communicating with another - and we can see from their response the impact of our speech/play on them.
Play, then, is Solms’s key to civilization. There are consequences in words and ideas that don’t – indeed shouldn’t be – worked out in actuality. We should play cops and robbers to be able to learn right and wrong – we shouldn’t have to go to jail to learn not to do certain things. Similarly, the Oedipal situation, one that is viewed by so many with a kind of disgust because of thinking that we actually want to kill our father and have sex with our mother, is viewed that way because they are seeing it through a concrete lens of actual action – at which point it is no longer play, but something else – trauma and/or tragedy. For the Oedipal situation to be successfully navigated, the child and the parents need to be able to play with it, and the sexual and aggressive drives need to be sublimated.
For Freud, sublimation was a process of keeping the drive out of awareness through defense. It could then be “enacted” in a dream or in some version with a therapist (in my version, played out with the parents. In both cases presented, the parents were divorcing or divorced at the time of the engagement- and they were not playing with the patient). For Solms, sublimation is a process of play – acting on the aggression – throwing the toys out the window – but doing that in the context of a relationship with someone with whom you want to maintain that relationship – this strange woman who is happy to throw her toys out the window if they are given a means of floating rather than hurtling to the ground is a keeper. In this case, the aggression only became sublimated in the context of creating a game.
In the last three paragraphs, I acted as if I was reporting verbatim what Solms said. I did not. I played with his ideas, just as he played with the clinical material and organized it in a new and fascinating way as he did so. I hope that I have stayed true to Solms’s ideas, as I think he did to the ideas of the presenter, while also articulating them in a way that organizes my ideas and thinking about the situations – the situation between the analyst and the children and the situation between Solms and the analyst.
This also allows me to think that it may be no accident that we, as mammals, have language. It is a representational process – as is playing. And play may be, at least in our evolutionary history, a necessary precursor to speech? In this case, the drive to play (and to speak) would be located in the part of the brain that is unique to mammals – and to birds – the cerebral cortex. As I said, I don’t know what I am talking about here – Freud’s language would be that play and language are ego drives. The other drives are located in the “lizard” brain, with projections into the cerebral hemisphere. Play, language, and then the checks on the drives would be in the cerebral hemisphere – and would be inhibitory rather than expressive drives. OK, I’m done playing amateur neuroscientist and, if you are a neuroscientist, you are free to scoff…
What was most useful about this talk was the idea of play as central to treatment; whether kids’ or adults’ treatment. The therapist’s job is to create a space for the patient to play – and this requires creating a space that is safe – where things that happen will be “as if” they are real, but never actually real. And the consequences of the play will be played with – will be discussed rather than acted on.
Earlier in the day I had attended a talk asking whether free association was still a cornerstone of psychoanalytic technique. It was hard, after seeing the Solms presentation, not to think that free association is a version of play. It is creating a space where the patient feels free to talk about whatever seems relevant – or irrelevant. The patient's job is to wander through their mind and report what they choose to, and the analyst’s job is to play with what is offered, to wonder with the patient about their mind works and how it is organized. One of the things that the analysts presenting in the morning agreed to in that session was that a patient should be able to keep some of their experience private. This is essential to psychological safety and to fair play. Free association is both a personal exploration and a joint endeavor, something that the presenting analysts were not so comfortable with thinking about. Perhaps introducing the idea of play would have helped them think about analysis as an interpersonal as well as an intrapsychic event.
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