Recent calls to appoint a Minister for Play in the UK have sparked mixed reactions, some recognising the urgency of the issue, others responding with mild irony. At the heart of this proposal lies a growing concern: children today are playing less, and the neighbourhoods they grow up in are increasingly shaped by a lack of access to green spaces, playgrounds, and the freedom to roam.
What struck me in listening to the discussions was how easily the importance of play is dismissed, as though it’s a luxury rather than something essential. In my work as a psychotherapist, I often encounter adults in the midst of life, with its routines, demands, and silent burdens, it’s easy to lose sight of something once so natural it needed no explanation: play. It may appear frivolous, even irrelevant, yet in my work as a psychotherapist, I often find that the absence of play points to something vital lost, something quietly mourned. And sometimes, rediscovering it becomes a turning point in therapy.
Psychoanalytic thinkers such as D. W. Winnicott, Marion Milner, and Françoise Dolto placed great importance on play, not only as something central to childhood, but as a way of being that continues to matter throughout life. For them, play wasn’t just a developmental stage to be outgrown. It was, and remains, a space in which something essential about the self is formed, expressed, and at times, restored.
The Child’s World: Play as a Foundation for the Self
For the child, play is not a luxury. It is how they come into being. Winnicott’s idea of the “transitional object”, the well-loved teddy or blanket, highlights this beautifully. These objects inhabit what he called the “potential space,” a place between inner and outer reality. It’s here, in this space of not-knowing-yet-exploring, that the child begins to relate, imagine, and symbolise. And it’s here that the earliest threads of the self are woven.
Marion Milner’s work takes this further. Through her intimate self-reflections, she traced how doodling, seemingly an idle, unstructured activity, can bring unconscious material to light. For Milner, even the simplest forms of play held the capacity to disrupt fixed ways of thinking and to reawaken creativity, spontaneity, and psychic movement.
Similarly, Françoise Dolto understood that children often communicate most clearly through play. In play, the unspoken becomes visible. The child works through unformulated feelings, symbolises conflicts, and constructs meaning well before language can fully carry it.
When play is allowed, the child not only grows. They also begin to remember—the kind of remembering that is lived, felt, and embodied rather than recited. These early experiences form the texture of what will later emerge as childhood memories in psychotherapy.
The Echo of Absence: When Play is Withheld
But what of those for whom play was interrupted by trauma, parental absence, unspoken family pressures, or environments too chaotic or rigid to allow for spontaneity? What becomes of the self when there is no room to play?
In my practice, offering psychotherapy in East London and West Hampstead, I often meet adults who carry this absence in subtle yet painful ways. The consequences can surface as:
- A difficulty in expressing emotions freely
- A feeling of being creatively ‘stuck’
- A sense of having lived a life shaped more by what was expected than by what was felt
- A struggle to form intimate, unguarded relationships
- An inner harshness that leaves little room for the unexpected or the unplanned
In these cases, the absence of play is not trivial. It speaks to a deeper psychic loss. The playful self, the part that is curious, unafraid to fail, alive to surprise, may have been quietly exiled.
A Return Through Psychotherapy: Reclaiming the Playful Self
Psychotherapy offers a space to encounter this loss without rushing to repair it. Much like Winnicott’s potential space, the analytic room becomes a setting in which something new, sometimes fragile and slow, can begin to emerge. This may not look like play in the conventional sense, but the spirit of play is there: exploration without certainty, expression without judgement, and the freedom to try out new ways of being.
Through in-depth therapy, it becomes possible to:
- Reconnect with early childhood memories not as fixed narratives, but as living scenes still shaping the present
- Begin to loosen the grip of long-held internal structures
- Experiment with feeling, thinking, and relating differently
- Reclaim a sense of aliveness, creativity, and agency
This process is often subtle. It may involve the willingness to daydream again, to engage in an activity for its own sake, or to tolerate the unknown without needing immediate answers. Sometimes it means encountering one’s history with more gentleness. At other times, it means risking play in the here and now.
A Final Reflection
If you find yourself feeling emotionally constrained, overly responsible, or somehow disconnected from your capacity for joy, it may be worth asking: Where did play go? Was it ever truly there?
Rediscovering play is not about becoming childish, it’s about reawakening something in ourselves that may have been long silenced. As a psychotherapist based in East Village, Stratford and West Hampstead, I work with adults who are seeking to make sense of this absence and, gradually, to recover what was lost.
Whether through in-depth psychoanalytic work or long-term psychotherapy, the aim is not simply to return to childhood, but to discover new ways of living more fully, with a greater sense of inner freedom. And often, that begins with allowing ourselves to play.