Through Psychology - The Importance of Playing (I)
Maria Rita Mendes Leal is a Psychotherapist, Psychoanalyst, Childhood Educator, Social Sciences Investigator and more. She was born in Rome in 1921, lived in London and in Sao Paulo, Brazil, then came to Portugal where she has been having a major influence on private and public psychology institutes.
Amongst her many accomplishments, Rita Leal was responsible for paying attention to HOW CHILDREN PLAY.
In her book Finding the Other, Finding the Self, Leal presents us with a series of investigations on Child Playing. Whenever she went for family interviews, she took her play-box with her and let the children freely explore it.
At some point, she notices that the child playing initiates an "in-out-in" repetitive sequence and feels a sense of urge in that never ending sequence - that cup that is filled and emptied with small pieces, for example.
Apparently, these in-out-in movements and gestures can be understood as primitive relationship mechanisms, projectively expressed in exchanges during playing.
A child uses gestures and sounds, and moves things to convey meanings to a hopefully attentive adult. That adult maintains a non-verbal communication and is attentive to the expressive response of the child.
The Compulsive Search for the Other
Within the first few days of life, attention converges easily to the mother, to the mouth and more generally to the human face.
The attentive infant spontaneously synchronizes the movement pattern of his body to the adult speech. At one month, infants imitate adults' expressive face movements, especially mouth movements.
Exchanges between the mother and the baby begin regularly near the two-month transition period and consist of a mutual repetition of some expressive gestures or actions. Mother's imitation of any unqualified spontaneous expression of the baby launches the pair in this type of mutual intercourse.
Mutuality emerges in the exchange of act sequences as a joyous game, not as a learning activity. When establishing a game-like mutuality, it is the adult who stands hopefully attentive to the alert baby's spontaneous emission of some act-sequence - which the adult, then, imitates.
When that happens, not only the baby's act becomes confirmed but it is as if the baby's very existence becomes acknowledged. In humans, communication involves an implication of mutuality in the sense of an expectation that the other should complete one's own actions.
When the other's response is captured, taken in, and a new message is emitted, an in-out-in-going contingency of messages may become structured and shared expressions are discovered and used as one's own.
The "other" is implicitly located as a co-actor, that is, an agent as well as a recipient of my autonomous experience. If a message is emitted by one organism to be received by a prospective partner to a relationship, a pause results for the expectation to be confirmed or not. This pause is an integral part of communication.
The search for the responding other with a progressive unravelling of in-out-in messages, given an expected feedback from an expectable environment, is seen as a basic mechanism of emotional integration and personality development.
Difficulties in establishing the rhythms in the communication with important others should account for disturbances in personality function.
Reference: Leal, M. R. M. (2005). Finding the Other Finding the Self. Ed: IPAF, Sao Paulo (Brazil).
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