Through Psychology - The Importance of Playing (II)

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.

Maria Rita Mendes Leal

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Personality as a System of Relationships

Consistency or incongruence in the system of ongoing exchanges is the basic dimension for personality organization. The innate search for a responding other which is seen in humans from the beginning of life can be understood as an impulse to find species meaning through the co-active confirmation of own experience in a validating relationship.

Personality is viewed as an instance gaining structure in a relationship in as far as the same may be tested and controlled. Personality disorganization, parenthetically, results from an impediment or disturbance of the conditions for effecting the continuous analysis or testing of control over messages found to be either contingent or not.

Based on his early observations that very young babies take the initiative in establishing relationships with things and people and follow these up according to own rhythms and controls, J. S. Watson proposed that the human infant learns to produce rewards dependent on his behaviour: because of his expectation that spontaneous responses emitted by him have consequences.

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Rhythms Embodying the Search Pattern

In his experiments, babies were rewarded by a rotating mobile for spontaneous head-turning, so Watson thought they learned to do this because they would scan memory for response output and stimuli input: find and repeat that response which immediately precedes the reward stimulus (the revolving movement of the mobile before him).

He named this scanning behaviour "contingency analysis", referring to the fact that very young babies systematically select for repetition the spontaneous acts that furnish them with the experience of an immediately following interesting stimulus, which has been more consistent and at a certain time interval (on the average, 2-5 seconds and no more that 9 seconds), as if the stimulus were under his, the baby's, control.

In his "dialogue" with the responding mobile, the infant emits his response (head, legs or arms moving), then stops and looks; and moves again; and stops and moves; and ends up with an expansion of gurgling, smiling excitement.

Given the young baby's limited resources for higher brain function, it is understandable that Watson speaks of a functional awareness or of a form of immediate perception of contingencies. He is describing a process of resonance to immediate experience, leading as we know to a "GAME" of now-you-now-me-now-you.

Standing out is the phenomenon that the alerting expectation of the attentive baby is embodied in the two to five or up to nine seconds pauses.

It is notable that in the natural situation the only rewarding stimulus that is prompt enough to appear to the baby to be contingent on his spontaneous response occurs in the condition in which an attentive adult happens to be in face to face contact with the young infant - maybe when attending his physical needs.

Emotionally committed, the adult will spontaneously imitate whatever gesture or impelled movement he witnesses. He will also pause and observe what comes next before continuing. The posture is that of a waiting, accepting, confirming exchange of responses - to all appearances ready for that mutually constituting exchange of responses which the baby will carry on if given the chance to set the pace.

Trevarthen (1977) illustrated with a series of films the immensely pleasurable dialogue - the playing - which then emerges. In older babies this intercourse evolves into mutually imitative, almost ritualized sequences...

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Reference: Leal, M. R. M. (2005). Finding the Other Finding the Self. Ed: IPAF, Sao Paulo (Brazil).

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