THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE
Introduction
In this paper Gordon Sturrock discusses what he sees as the need to find a new paradigm for the practices in play work. In the course of developing this theme, Sturrock introduces some new and little known concepts about play which I believe to be of great importance and which should be examined carefully by play workers and any others concerned with children, young people, play, peace, creativity and education. These ideas deal with the essence of play and may act as an indicator in our search for the source of peace in the human psyche which I refer to in my new paper on this site, The Link between Play and Peace.
The need for a greater understanding of the true meaning of play is at the core of the thoughts embodied in this web site in which we are searching for ways to transform the present popular culture of violence into a culture of peace. A first step will be to understand the phenomenon of play and its role in the person's inner life. From Sturrock's paper and my own experience and observations, it appears that the true nature of play is little understood, with the result that a great many children are deprived of its benefits, and society as a whole is seriously impoverished.
In the first part of the paper he examines the therapeutic use of play and the playworker's role from the point of view of a psychiatrist, reflecting his own dual professional background. One of the ideas he puts forward here is that this kind of 'original' play contains basic curative powers which he expresses here in saying " ... A curative potential , unlike most therapies ... allows that this healing is constituted not in the power and knowledge of the adult, but in the play of the child" , and is continued in his quotation from Sidoli and Davies which speaks of the quality of life depending on "...how far we are able to play out and live what is within us."
He sees this as a sensitive area of involvement on the part of the playworker, in which 'the playworker becomes a player in a web of psychodynamic activity'.
Play and numen - The new vision
Here Sturrock examines the abstract qualities of play, showing that play has a spiritual quality, that it is, indeed, part of the universal spiritual being. In order to express his new vision he uses some obscure terminology, (e.g. numen - relating to the divine), and invents some words, such as ludic, and ludido, derived from ludo, Latin for 'I play'. He believes that all people possess a play instinct, that this property of playfulness , or the ludic element, is a reality in adults as well as children, and that it is associated with creativity.
Sturrock cites many examples showing that the concept of the spiritual aspect of play and the search for the source of being, are demonstrated in the mythology of many Eastern cultures. He discovered in these, as well as in some Western thinkers and philosophers such as Schiller, Jung, Freud and others, a rich source of ideas and beliefs, in the context of the universal life of the spirit.
He associates it also with lila, the Sanskrit word appearing in Hindu mythology for the cosmic play of the gods which he sees as a living reality; and with Hermes, messenger of the gods in Greek mythology and god of science.
The constellation of Hermes
In this section Sturrock says "we can see, projected in the figure of the Greek god Hermes, the suspended lila function" which I find an interesting concept in that we see here a parallel between the magical playfulness found in the Hindu gods with a similar characteristic for which Hermes was known. He goes on to outline a number of associations between mythology and writings about depth psychology, and quotes Jung in particular who says that, " .... The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect, but by the play-instinct acting from necessity. The creative mind 'plays with the object it loves' ....", and goes on to say that "every good idea and all creative work are the offspring of the imagination, and have their source in what we are pleased to call infantile fantasy.... The dynamic principle is play, a characteristic of the child."
The last section, Play and therapeia , deals with a possible approach to changing the present therapeutic methods by trying to gain a deeper understanding of play and by simplifying the present complex thoughts and method. He reports a possible new definition of play by Huizinga, namely that play can be seen, "not as a behaviour, but as a drive, or instinct operative in this sacred hinterland." He concludes by stating that civilisation, in its earliest phases, arose from play.
Sturrock views the subject in terms of depth psychology, the underlying thoughts are, however, valid and highly relevant to both the playworker/therapist and the lay person concerned with children, and play in all its theoretical and practical manifestations.
Elizabeth Stutz
June 1998
Some background
This paper is an extract from a larger piece which proposed that playwork -
the discipline of those who work with children at play - faces a variety of
threats which require it to re-think and re-state its purposes and practice.
I contend that a new paradigm is needed which more effectively describes the
essential exchanges of playwork. This new approach, I argue, is a therapeutic
model. I see play not as a behaviour, though it could have behavioural outcomes,
but as a drive, a ludido. The containment for this ludic instinct within playgrounds,
sites and buildings, has some parallels with the analytic frame of psychoanalysis
and analytical psychology and with the methods of many therapies, the key difference
being that while a number of therapeutic endeavours could be seen to be the
archaeology of neurosis, playwork provides a beneficial engagement at the point
where such neurosis was being acted, or perhaps more appropriately, played out.
The playworker may use, as is stated of the eminent psychiatrist, Russell Meures:
| The field of play to cast a bright light on the
developmental ontogeny of the sense of self. He describes in depth the characteristics
of the child and caregiver relations by which enduring patterns are laid
down that subsequently provide the fateful core of self experience.
1 |
It is in this tender territory that the playworker is
operative, at the very heart of those experiences that the playworker becomes
a player, in a web of psychodynamic activity. What a writer says of Meures'
ideas is that he sees "play as the principle metaphor upon which an approach
to the evolution of the self is built". Might it be that our work in play
is akin to that of therapy, as Stanislav Grof suggests; in that:
| Whatever the nature and power of the technique used
to activate the unconscious, the basic therapeutic strategy is the same:
both the therapist and the client should trust the wisdom of the client's
organism more than their own intellectual judgement. If they support the
natural unfolding of the process and cooperate with it intelligently - without
restrictions dictated by conventional conceptual, emotional, aesthetic,
or ethical concerns - the resulting experience will automatically be healing
in nature.2 |
The irony of the many challenges which playwork faces
is that they offer a means through which we may be able to arrive at a more
transcendent description of our work and its values. If playwork is to thrive
it must learn to authenticate the most fundamental aspects of its practice and
draw into its methods elements from a variety of sources. These may help us
elucidate the contents of our own practice, its symbolic resonance, as a means
of describing a new form of play; one which contains its own healing. A curative
potentiality, unlike most therapies, which allows that this healing is constituted
not in the power and knowledge of the adult, but in the play of the child. I
hope that playwork can come to believe, like Sidoli and Davies, that:
| Playing and pretending are like a halfway house
between inner and outer reality. This leads on to play and to imagine a
playground in the mind and on to the adult capacity to give the inner playing
and imagery an outer form in terms of enriched work and living. It could
be said that the quality of life depends on how far we are able to play
out and live what is within us.3
|
Play and numen
As part of this new vision or re-vision we are obliged to accept that play
and the ludic have a numinous dimension. Even if playwork, or the simple engagement
with play more generally, is not within the strictest definition of that term
therapy, it is at least therapeia; the Greek origins of the word see it as being
in service of the gods. Is play a form of devotion to the gods of the playing
child and the ludic adult?
| We begin with the vision of original play creating
life and life creating original play. I use the word "original"
to denote play that is prehuman, precultural, before all conceptualisations
and learned responses. Play is a gift of Creation, not an artefact of culture.
It is the still point and energy from which all else is evolved. 4 |
It may be impossible to define play. It represents an
energy which operates outside of all that is known. It can be seen in the gaps
in our language - the Freudian notion of parapraxis is very precise -; as a
monad, after Leibniz, an irreducible energy like love, with which it has a close
affinity. Indeed, in the east, out with the traditions of Western classicism
and a Judeo/Christian perspective, play can be understood as lila; in essence,
play and the ludic, seen as having a religious purpose', or as Mircea Eiade
said of dance, an extra-human purpose.
In Sanskrit lila is seen as the cosmic play of the gods, as it is in Hindu mythology.
Similarly, in some teachings, connected with the worship of the Lord Krishna,
John Lash describes it as,
| a paradigm in religious and metaphysical teachings
of the East. In Hinduism, the world is produced from the dreaming of Vishnu,
a kind of hide-and-seek game in which the supreme Lord who is dreaming us
plays at being us, so that he can delight in the countless ways of discovering
himself.5 |
| David Spangler envisages play as a necessary phase
of creative experimentation in the inceptive unfolding of a new spirituality.
In Zen, as expounded by Suzuki, it informs and energises a satori, enlightenment,
which stands at the point where potentialities are about to actualise themselves.......It
is in fact the moment itself, which means that it is life as it lives itself.
6 |
Hodgkin saw play as akin to the central method of Zen
'to keep alive a creative sense of play'. The yugen of Japanese Noh theatre
he sees as an 'emotionallv heightened readiness for feelings and ideas.' 7
The Zen master, in a curious correspondence
with the Barthes' notion of the photographic punctum is seen as a clown or idiot
in an effort to open a new perspective on existence; Enid Welsford's punctum
indifferens, or the fool as emancipator'.8
A casual reordering, which Conrad Myers
describes as that playfulness which cannot be 'netted' and outlines an ambiguity
which itself heralds that 'wondrous playfulness' that moves within all phenomena,
disturbing all the labelled drawers of the mind, emptying them and sporting
with all their contents, returning both form and content to the inexhaustible
source of their being.9.
Heraclitus' 'time is as a child playing draughts' has a particular ludic resonance.
The devotional path Sufism is sought through a process - the Arabic saf, pure-
which is unconditional and is arrived at through a kind of selfless ecstasy.
There is an aspect of the Sufi Theory of Creation called the Renewing of Creation
at each instant', or, at each breath',(Tajdid al-khalq bil'anfas), directly
connected with spiritual realisation achieved through a form of playfulness.
The dancing of the whirling dervish has overtones of playful behaviour. Henry
Corbin, the great commentator and writer on Islamic liturgy wrote, in a form
curiously redolent of the mission of psychoanalysis:
| Ta'wil, is, etymologically and inversely, to cause
to return, to lead back, to restore to one's origin and the place where
one comes home, consequently to return to the true and original meaning
of a text. It is ''to bring something to its origin .... Thus he who practices
ta'wil is the one who turns his speech f'rom the external (esoteric) form
[zahir} towards inner reality [haqiqat]." 10 |
The great Sufi poet, Rumi, captures the tawil - the
transfiguration of a literal event into an image of soul, as the Sufis would
have it - when he writes;
Last night the moon came dropping its clothes
in the street.
I took it as a sign to start singing.
Falling into the great bowl of the sky.
The bowl breaks. Everywhere is falling everywhere
Nothing else to do.
Here's the new rule: Break the wineglass,
and fall toward the glassblower's breath.11
Or in a more direct fashion:
| Out beyond the idea of right doing and wrong doing
there is a field. I'll meet you there.12 |
In Tantrism the serpent of kundalini is an energy that impels the devotee towards
liberation. A liberation, of which Mukerjee writes;
| is considered in Indian life to be the highest experience
- a fusion of the individual with the universal. The individual manifestation
is like a spark of the cosmos, as the human organism, the microcosm, parallels
everything in the macrocosm.13 |
Ramakrishna describes the kundalini consciousness as
follows;
| The very distinction between 'I' and 'thou' vanishes:
Whenever I try to describe what kinds of visions I experience when it goes
beyond this place ..... and think what kinds of visions I am witnessing,
the mind rushes immediately up, and speaking becomes impossible. In the
final centre, 'the distinction between the subject of consciousness and
the object of consciousness is destroyed. It is a state wherein self-identity
and the field of consciousness are blended in one indissoluble whole.'14 |
A view not far removed from modern ideas of quantum
physics, Fritjof Capra, in his ' Tao of physics' discusses a 'Hindu view of
nature' in which all forms are relative, fluid ; an ever-changing maya conjured
up by the great magician of the divine play. On Taoism he is moved to quote
Chuang Tzu, as an example of the polar opposites which dynamically operate in
a continuum of flux:
The 'this' is also that'. The 'that' is also this. That the 'that' and the 'this'
cease to be opposites is the very essence of Tao. Only this essence, an axis
as it were, is the centre of the circle responding to the endless change.16
Schiller, the German Romantic idealist, saw the 'play-impulse' as essential
for the human personality to balance and reconcile the opposing thrusts of material
and spiritual concerns. He suggested that
| 'the essence of all aesthetic experience lay for
this earnest mind in the activity of play (SpieI)' . He countered the essential
negativeness of Kant's definition of aesthetic experience as 'pleasure without
any practical interest' and turned it into a positive ludic dynamism: 'Human
beings only play when they are in the full sense of the word human; and
they are only fully human when they play.' 17
|
Within the mythic firmament a kind of playfulness can
readily be seen within the ludic perspectives projected by such figures as Pu
tai, Loki, Coyote, the holy fool of Zen and Hermes. It might be useful to spend
some time in examining this latter personification, Hermes, the psychopomp,
the guide of souls. Kerenyi sees this, as:
| The sum total of pathways as Hermes' playground;
the accidental "falling into your lap" as the material; its transformation
through finding - thieving - the Hermetic event - into an Hermetic work
of art, which is always something of a tricky optical illusion, into wealth,
love, poetry, and every sort of evasion from the restrictions and confinement
imposed by laws, circmstances, destinies - how could these be merely psychic
realities? They are the world, and they are one world, namely that world
which Hermes opens to us. 18 |
We can see a continuation of this thought in Nietzsche's
ideas on the contrast and connection:
Between the Apollonian (the serene sense of proportion which Wickelmann had
so admired and which found its crowning expression in Greek sculpture) and the
Dionysian, (that flood which breaks through all restraints in the Dionysian
festivals and which finds artistic expression in music). In Nietzschsche's later
works the Dionysian no longer signifies the flood of passion, but passion controlled
as opposed to passion extirpated, the latter being associated with Christianity.
19
The constellation of Hermes
Within this cosmology we can see, projected in the figure of the Greek god
Hermes, the suspended Lila function. The 1udic potentiality has become constellated
within the depth psychology's appropriation of mythology to its own practices.
Hermes, and the hermetic function, is thus neuroticised. Jung wrote that 'what
were gods are now diseases'. Is the neuroticising of neurosis necessary to the
maintenance of the seriousness of therapies and analysis? From their playful
first contacts, Freud saw free association as the fundamental rule of analysis.
Can we trace a denial of the ludic in their extensive narratives?
The Hermes connection continues to appear, symbolically, as a kind of alterity,
a hologrammic potentiality. An implicit order which contains within it, when
looked at from a numinous standpoint, the idea that every divine form comprehends
itself within the essence of all things. This may serve to illustrate the logical
fertility of the stance that play and the ludic has some form of religio/magical
status and standing. In short, that mythically, it can empower and carry the
will to encounter between a microcosm and a macrocosm.
Einstein mapped an alternative route when he said that all science begins in
myth'. He went on to say that:
| The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements
in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be
"voluntarily" reproduced and combined.... This combinatory play
seems to be the essential feature in productive thought - before there is
any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs
which can be communicated to others. The above-mentioned elements are, in
my case, of visual and some muscular type. Conventional words or other signs
have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary state, when the mentioned
associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.21 |
Jung, as one might expect, appeared to show a certain
devotion to imagination and to playing: (the prefiguring action of all creativity)
| The creation of something new is not accomplished
by the intellect, but by the play-instinct acting from inner necessity.
The creative mind plays with "the object it loves" ... "we
know that every good idea and all creative work are the offspring of the
imagination, and have their source in what one is pleased to call infantile
fantasy. Not the artist alone, but every creative individual whatsoever
owes all that is greatest in life to fantasy. The dynamic principle of fantasy
is play , a characteristic of the child."23 |
Hitherto, this drive, out of the ideas of Freud and
Jung, has always been appreciated from solely within the depth/ psychoanalytic
perspective. Their mythic conflation means that it is laden with either Oedipal
or hero/senex metaphoric currency. But it can now be seen as being something
more simple; namely as playing.
Hillman advises that we may be required to rethink psychological work.
| If soul-making is not treatment, not therapy, not
even a process of self-realisation but is essentiallv an imaginative activity
of the imaginal realm as it plays through all of life everywhere, and which
does not need an analyst or an analysis, then the professional is confronted
with reflecting upon himself and his work |
Play and therapeia
We might, in play, be able to offer a contribution to this rethinking of
the therapeutic practice. A new paradigm might emerge from the basis of two
new approaches, or tenets, for our work in play. These are that the process
that this view outlines, the flow 'as it plays through', is really what I describe
as the ludido . Elaborations within the psychoanalytic context seemingly use
the a hidden and cryptic play motif to describe solely the sexual content of
this questing desire. Adam Phillips writes of the need to 'outplot' the Oedipal
, the ways we get round our oedipus complex is our oedipus complex.'24
Perhaps this desire to outplay, or to outplot, is a sign of a ludic juissance,
or as I have previously written, is it rather a 'jouer essence'?
The second tenet is that we are required to function within a space of healing
potential; an encounter which insists that we reflect deeply on the task and
its symbolism. 'As T.S. Eliot shows:
| And he is not likely to know what is to be done
unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment
of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but what is alreadv
living.25 |
The signal failing of playwork, and indeed, of our understanding
of play more generally, may be that we refuse to recognise that it has a potential,
not simply in the material manifestations which so preoccupy us, but in a delicate,
precious and sacred psychic ecology. An ecology of affect which the child encounters
with an open heart and one which we see fit to deny as a measure of profane
adulthood.
Huizinga propounds a further statement with which to approach a definition of
play, one that sees it not as a behaviour, but as a drive, or instinct operative
in this sacred hinterland.
| The spirit of playful competition is like a social
impulse, older than culture itself, and pervades all life like a veritable
ferment. Ritual grew up in sacred play; poetry was born in play and nourished
on play; music and dancing were pure play. Wisdom and philosophy found expression
in words and form derived from religious contests. The rules of warfare,
the conventions of noble living, were built on play patterns. We have to
conclude, therefore, that civilisation is in its earliest phases played.
It does not come from play like a baby detaching itself from the womb; it
arises in and as play and never leaves it. |
References:
1. Russell Meures, (I 993), The Metaphor of Play, Aronson Inc. Northvale. N.J.,
U.S.A..
2. Stanislav Grof (1985), Beyond the Brain, Universitv of New York Press USA.
3. Mara Sidoli. and Miranda Davies. (1988), Jungian Child Psychotherapy. Karnac
Books, London.
4. Fred Donaldson, (1993), Playing By Heart, Health Communications Inc, Deerfield
Beach, Florida, USA.
5 John Lash, (1990), The Seekers Handbook , Harmony Books, New York, USA.
6 Dr. T. Suzuki, (1977), Living in Zen, Rider & Co., London.
7 R.A. Hodgkin, (1985), Playing and Exploring, Education Paperbacks, Methuen
& Co., London.
8 M. Conrad Hyers, (1974), Zen and the Comic Spirit, Rider & Co., London.
9 ibid.
10 Henry Corbin, (1988), Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, Bollingen Foundation,
Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., USA
11 Noel Cobb, (1992), Archetypal Imagination, Lindisfarne Press, Hudson, N.Y.,
USA,Inc
12. Fred Donaldson, (1993), Playing by Heart, Healthcommunications Inc. Deerfield
Beach, Florida, USA.
13 Ajit Mookerje, (1989), Kundalini, Thames and Hudson, London
14. ibid
I5. Fritjof Capra. (1921), The Tao of Physics, Flamingo, London.
16. ibid
17. T.J. Reed, Schiller, (1991), Oxford, Universitv Press, Oxford, England.
18. Karl Kerenyi, (1992), Hermes, Guide of Souls, Spring Publications, Dallas,
Texas.
19. Walter Kaufmann, Ed., (1976), Portable Nietzsche, Penguin Books, London.
20. Maurice Friedman, (1982), Martin Buber's Life and Works, Search Press, Tunbridge
Wells, Kent, UK.
21. Steven Pinker. (1994), The Language Instinct, Allen Lane, Penguin Books,
London.
22. Russell Meares, (1993), The Metaphor of Play, Aronson Inc. Northvale. N
J., USA.
23. Jung as quoted by James Hillman, (1992), The Myth of Analysis, Perennial
Books, Harper & Row, New York, U.S.A.
24. James Hillman, (1992), The Myth of Analysis, Perennial Books, Harper and
Row, New York, USA.
25. T.S. Eliot as quoted by Thomas Ogden (1994) The Subjects of Analysis, Karnac
Books, London.
Gordon Sturrock
November 1995
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