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CLASSICAL ESSAY |
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by William Stern
If we compare the play of children and adults a common principle is revealed; make-believe is produced in the midst of the world of reality. Like the playing of soldiers by youngsters, the billiard playing of grownups is a sham battle between people who in reality bear no enmity toward each other; an actor's role is as fictitious as the role of mother assumed by a girl playing with dolls. In both instances all the meaning of the play lies in the present; unlike work or artistic creation, play does not incline toward some systematic objective; it has no sequels, and it is not serious, however seriously the player may take it during its course. The differences between the play of young and old become clear when certain lines of development are disclosed. In early childhood, play is definitely central to the child's behavior (wherefore this period is also called the "playing age"). Here there is no sharp separation of the world of play and the world of real earnest; all environmental objects and all the child's actions, including the realistic ones like eating, dressing, etc., become entangled in play and charged with playfulness; even when things are frankly "taken seriously" there is no clear-cut distinction between make-believe and reality. In terms of inner experience there is scarcely any difference between a girl's helping her mother dress the baby by handing here the garments, and dressing her own doll. The school age brings about fundamental changes, inasmuch as the child experiences side by side the two spheres of work and play, which are now clearly separate; at this point serious activity begins to develop with increasing strength, along with restraint of playfulness. In adolescence the intermediate and mixed forms appear; intermediate forms are athletics, which, by the principle of constant increase of prowess, no longer yields gratification purely in the present but imposes future goals, collecting, and other hobbies directed upon the promotion of lasting concerns. A mixed form is "serious play" (Ernstspiel), a behavior which, while subjectively of serious import, retains objectively the freedom and lack of consequence of play. In adulthood play, sports, and hobbies become more and more definitely a mere adjunct to life, supplementing and completing it while affording a contrast to the severity of occupational routine and to the momentous responsibilities of domestic and public concerns. The changing place of imagination also correlates with development. In early childhood imagination is very free and spontaneous, wanton, unorganized and bubbling. In play everything is grist for the mill; both player and objects played with can assume any sort of "part" without rules or restrictions; the child is sole ruler of his world of play. When socialized play becomes more prominent, the individual's imagination must be curbed in certain respects; the game, its setting, and its rules impose limitations and directions which, without eliminating imagination, discipline and organize it. In athletics the principle of organization attains great strictness; each action is prescribed and established, and there is little room for free imagination, which receives new impulsion in the "serious play" of adolescence where instincts, desires, and anxieties are elaborated in an highly imaginative manner. The play of adults, however, is well-nigh devoid of imagination; forms of solitary amusement like collecting have their course laid out for them in greater or less strictness by the objective and the material. Social games (cards, table games, sporting games) are hedged by such a mass of fixed rules that very limited freedom of action remains to creative imagination.
Excerpted from Play, by William Stern |
General psychology from the personalistic standpoint, by William Stern The personalistic psychology of William Stern, by Gordon W Allport
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