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For: parents, teachers, child care workers, psychologists and psychotherapists.
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How can we understand children and what they feel? How to build a harmonious relationship and effective containment with them? How to "manage" their behavior? How can I make myself heard?
These are the questions that adults I meet most often ask themselves about their children or the children they follow in school and in the helping relationship.
Deepening and refining this type of ability is a fundamental objective for our generation of “post-modern” adults.
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Spontaneous and symbolic play in children
in a Transpersonal vision
by Emanuela Fonticoli
The numerous experiences of psychological sessions with children aged 6 to 10 have shown me over the years how important it is to help children express their discomfort and their feelings through a playful activity (drawing, movement, sound, play). a long chat or a liberating cry for an adult.
Although in this age group, language is now a complete skill, it is not easy to express fully and in the various nuances emotions and sensations experienced internally and in the body, and that is why it is essential to give them the opportunity to express themselves through playful activities. typical of this age group.
In the imaginative and symbolic game, the child represents and communicates his own internal experience, to process negative (anguish, anger, aggression, sadness, etc.) and positive emotions (joy, happiness and contentment) and to learn to know himself and himself. world, but not only, play is a creative act in itself.
Freud himself maintains "every child engaged in the game behaves like a poet: insofar as he builds his own world or rather, he gives a new order to the things of his world at will" (1)
Klein also writes that “in play, children symbolically reproduce fantasies, desires, experiences. In doing so, they use the same language, the same archaic and phylogenetically acquired form of expression that is well known to us in dreams. "(2)
For Winnicott too, play has a symbolic value and expresses unconscious fantasies and feelings that often result in hunger for knowledge, in war games, for soldiers, in games of strict teachers, obedient students, in team games.
Play experiences are actually "inner" experiences, in the sense that they "constitute a global projection of a constellation of the child's inner psychic reality". (3)
But play is not just a pleasant activity: it also serves the child to manifest hatred and aggressive impulses, without fear that the environment reacts with hatred and violence.
During the game, children make friends and enemies. Play allows them to organize emotional relationships, creating favorable conditions for the development of social contacts.
Play contributes to the process of unification and integration of the personality, as it allows the child to relate ideas to physical functions.
Rubin, Fein and Vandenberg propose to define play as a psychological predisposition, as a set of observable behaviors, as a context in which particular phenomena occur. The game is such if you play for the pleasure of it so the process is, in reality, more
important of the result: this preserves from frustration; a difficulty can even become a new playful opportunity.
The game, which follows in order of time, the exploration conducts, produces
excitement, stimulates the imagination is not bound by factual reality. This is why environmental conditioning is so important, able to offer welcome and support, in which the child can actively engage in discovering new possibilities by going outside the box, treating things as if they were others; there are no constraints, the rules emerge from the negotiation.
The symbolic game has been analyzed by the psychologist Jean Piaget and concerns an evolutionary phase of the child that begins from 2 to 7 years (phase of Preoperative Thinking). In this period, children begin to use symbolic thinking as they acquire the ability to represent, that is, they are able to mentally represent things, objects, situations, people regardless of their presence.
Children in this phase are able to perform deferred imitations, that is, to represent past actions of which they have witnessed (such as combing the doll in the same way as the mother combing her little sister).
The result of this phenomenon is the game "pretending to", precisely the symbolic game, which presupposes deferred imitation (running on a horse) and mental combinations (using the broomstick instead of the horse).
According to Piaget, the symbolism that the child constructs by playing with the toys at his disposal is just as revealing as that which emerges from dreams and sometimes much richer in nuances. Furthermore, he believes that the game fulfills two functions: it consolidates, through repetition, skills already acquired; it strengthens in the child the sense of being able to act effectively on reality without fear of failure and creating symbols to evoke events and situations that are not present. (4)
In the language of Biotransenergetics, or in the transpersonal vision, it can be said that play for the child is one of the experiences through which the ego expresses itself and decodes itself: some boundaries are drawn, functional to going into the world, it is brought to light and point a repertoire of evolutionary potential. With play, the child experiences a creative process through the vision of transcending and including the rule. (5)
Symbols, Archetypes and Orixà
In my experience, children's play is made up of both a relative part of the image and the symbol, both conceived in a Jungian sense.
Jung specifies that the image or imago is "fantastic" and that it only indirectly refers to the perception of the concrete object.
In other words, the image is an internal reality, therefore an expression of unconscious contents.
Symbols, on the other hand, are the language through which the mind expresses itself, therefore a very ancient language that must be understood as nourishment and expression of the mind itself and constitutes the essence of the Collective Unconscious, container of innate psychic settings, transmitted in
hereditary way, which are both in the personal Unconscious and in the collective.
So the symbol is the representation of an energy that humanity has always possessed and always will possess and which it expresses daily. This internal energy that is part of the Collective Unconscious takes shape through the Archetypes, that is, universal, impersonal basic schemes,
innate, hereditary.
In the image and in the symbol, Jung sees a complementarity between consciousness and unconscious that express the psychic totality.
But, while, in the case of the image this constellation is determined by an external object; in the case of the symbol, the constellation arises from a spontaneous activity of the subject, motivated by archetypes.
Mythical figures such as the Hero, the Warrior, the Great Mother, the Old Sage, the Child, the Demon, the Fairy, we find them in the cultures of the most ancient and disparate civilizations of the Planet.
These myths are archetypal figures patrimony of Humanity, that is to say "containers" of the profound experiences of the Human being understood as a species and therefore from its appearance on this world.
Biotransenergetics calls this level of archetypal forces Orixà, or mythological figures of the Afro-Brazilian tradition, which have connotations linked to Nature.
The archetypal aspect and the Orixà is often used in the child's play where puppets and symbolic objects can represent a character capable of moving a certain energy in the child.
For example, the child may take a puppet and say "this is the black man who eats all the children!" mimicking this scene and mobilizing, for example, his fear of something happening to him or of darkness or death.
It often happens, especially with younger children, that even elements of nature can become representative and thus identify with the Orixà, as in the case, for example, of a child who says "and when the sky was filled with black clouds, the sea got angry and the storm began to arrive! " (in this case the archetypal force of Iemanjà, lady of salt water, was contacted by the child).
Dis-identification and passage from the first to the second Attention
Both play (spontaneous or symbolic), and other playful activities in the child (such as drawing, the use of plasticine, etc.), can be valuable tools in a psychological session or in a child's observation activity.
The fact that there is a passage of something that is internal to something that is expressed and represented externally (in a play area or on a sheet) favors the process of disidentification in which the child is no longer completely immersed in what he feels , in the emotion he is feeling or in the discomfort he is experiencing, but causes a representative object to experience it, thus putting a distance between himself and what is inside himself.
It is as if there was a shift from one state of consciousness to another, from being identified with discomfort, to observing what happens through play.
In Biotransenergetics it is emphasized how play determines a useful tool for both the child and the adult that contains the child during play, for the transition from a first attention (what appears and we see immediately), to a second attention (what is behind what appears, the true meaning of what is there and which often does not appear at a first observation).
This step allows us to come into contact with more hidden and profound aspects that often the child cannot express verbally or of which he is not yet aware.
The Triad that heals
In a child's play, the presence of an adult can be of paramount importance. In the transpersonal vision there is a Triad that is formed, that is, the child, the adult and the field (what happens within this relationship between the two and which contains it).
If everything that happens in this triad has a harmonious evolution, the child's care process flows and the relationship between him and the adult strengthens and grows constructively for the child's well-being.
The adult or psychologist or therapist acts in Presence, that is, he will try to place himself in the relationship and in the field without judgment or manipulative acts, allowing a fluid connection with the field and with the archetypal forces that manifest here.
Mirroring is the best way to maintain this right distance of non-judgment (eg "I see your puppet is beating my ...", child: "Yes he's very angry!", Therapist: "Yes indeed, it really looks like very angry ", child:" Oh yes, because he doesn't want to be teased anymore ... ").
In this way, through the Presence, the adult is not leading the child's process but is only promoting it.
In summary, the adult orientation includes:
- The presence (non-judgment, "Here you can do anything you want to do")
- Containment ("This is our space, nobody will touch it, I won't talk to anyone about what will happen")
- The Mirroring (postpone what you see or hear or feel or say, without judgment)
- Indications to facilitate the process (magic words, hypotheses)
“As if…“, the game and the Transe.
In the transpersonal vision, therefore, it is noted how play allows the child both to acquire new cognitive, social, communicative and metacognitive skills, and to get in touch and explore the world of archetypes.
Through these dynamics the child can find the way to observe and master his Transe, that is the way in which energy flows through the various levels of the Self, maintaining a balanced state of consciousness. In fact, play is one of the peculiar ways in which the child tries to give an answer to his deficient needs.
In the state of conscience of the game the lack becomes less distressing, the solutions sought, tested and transformed fill gaps and enrich evolutionary possibilities, the frustration is not experienced in a dramatic way.
That of the game is a Middle-earth, an oscillation between the totally real and the totally fantastic; it is a space where the Self can call attention. It is as if the game contains all the archetypes in a condensed form, therefore it is a fundamental source of development in which the child discovers new things about himself, about others, about the environment, develops strategies, creates, keeps spirituality alive. (6 )
It is precisely through the "As if ..." that we try to maintain contact with this dimension of creative freedom in which the child is offered the opportunity to identify and disidentify himself from the various archetypes of his inner world, to change his point of view every time ( eg “Now it is as if I were the
dinosaur eating man ... and now it's as if I were the man eaten by the dinosaur ... ").
Through disidentification and integration, the primary (observation, acceptance, awareness) and secondary (contact, mobilization, direction and transformation) therapeutic cycles are realized.
Here is an example from one of my sessions with children:
1) Primary cycle
Riccardo playing with some animal puppets: “Here is the lion eating sheep (observation), yes, the sheep are much weaker (acceptance), he eats them because he is too angry for the fact that they have invaded his territory! !! " (awareness).
2) Secondary cycle
Therapist: "Riccardo, what would happen if the lion tried to talk to us?" (mobilization)
Riccardo: “Yeah… great idea! (contact - picks up the lion and a sheep). Perhaps they would agree (management) and could even become friends (transformation) ”.
Play and playful activities represent the fundamental instrument of listening, care and evolution of the child and is no longer just something to observe that makes us understand the child better, but a process in which the child is fully immersed, together with the adult, to handle,
mastering and knowing forces, new points of view, empathy and emotions from different points of view, so that what happens outside is functional and transformative for what is inside of oneself.
Notes.
1 Freud S., The poet and the imagination, tr. it., in S. Freud, Opere vol. 5, Boringhieri, Turin, 1972.
2 Klein M., Psychological Principles of Child Analysis, tr. it., in M. Klein, Scritti 1921-1958, Boringhieri, Turin, 1978
3 Winnicott DW, The child and the outside world, Giunti - Barbera, Florence.
4 Piaget J., The construction of the real in the child, La Nuova Italia, Florence, 1973.
5 Pinoli PR, Let's do that… Transpersonal education for children, Iti Edizioni, Milan, 2012.
6 Ditto.
info: info@iti-life.com
Dr. Emanuela Fonticoli
Emanuela Fonticoli, psychologist, I have been working with children and their families for about ten years, preferring an approach based on feeling in the body, making children confident by expressing the discomforts and problems they experience through drawing, reading stories, music and creative experiences.
I work a lot on trauma and grief.
In 2014 I published my first book, a children's story called "Jim the Fish".
I am the mother of two beautiful traveling souls
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