Leonard Handler. Journal of Personality Assessment. Volume 72, Issue 2, 1999.
I would like to begin this article by sharing a “play” story with you, about my daughter Amy, who was, at the time, a college student. She and a friend from tap dance class had just completed a week or so of difficult final exams, and they had not done their grocery shopping. It had also been some time since they had had any fun. They decided to combine tap dancing and grocery shopping, so they tap danced down the supermarket aisles wheeling their shopping cart, stopping for a brief performance at the deli counter. The crowd that gathered applauded the girls, which only pushed them to new heights of playfulness. At one point Amy put a box of breakfast cereal on top of her head and tap danced in front of an elderly couple. The wife tugged angrily at her husband’s arm and said, “Walter, let’s get away from them!” “No”, he persisted, with a wide grin. He then put a cereal box on his head, danced a few steps, and said to his wife, “Margaret, if she can do it, so can I!”
Obviously, play is easy to observe; it is ubiquitous. Look in your neighborhood, the community swimming pool, or sometimes even in the supermarket. Also, if you read the literature in anthropology, comparative psychology, ethology, or developmental psychology, you will notice the importance that researchers put on play and playfulness in the maturation of various animal species, especially primates (Smith, 1984). For example, Fedigan (1972), who studied monkeys, indicated that, in play, the animal puts out as many tests or probes of the environment as possible to innovate. There are now a large number of animal and human studies that support the hypothesis that play behaviors foster problem-solving and creative skills (Smith & Simon, 1984). A number of theoreticians and researchers (e.g., Harlow, 1958, 1971; Piaget, 1937, 1962, 1963; Winnicott, 1971) have emphasized the importance of the ability to play, and playfulness in the development of psychological health. Yet, there is comparatively little written about play, especially adult play, in clinical psychology. There is almost nothing about play and playfulness in the assessment literature, except, of course, for the work of Russ (1987, 1993, 1995).
About 40 or 50 years ago, Harlow (1958), in his research with monkeys, taught us about the importance of play for psychologically healthy development. He raised baby monkeys on artificial wire and cloth “mothers.” Half of the monkeys in each group were raised without the opportunity to play with their peers, and half did have that opportunity. Baby monkeys deprived of the opportunity to play were emotionally, socially, and sexually impaired, whereas those allowed to play were well adjusted. Harlow was clear and unambiguous in highlighting the importance of play in healthy development. Even with partial social isolation (monkeys were placed in adjacent open cages so they could see and hear but not touch each other), the monkeys exhibited excessive clinging and sucking behavior. In addition, stereotyped behavior (e.g., rocking, pacing) and socially directed and self-directed aggressive responses were noted, and normal locomotion and exploratory behaviors failed to develop.
Thus, Harlow (1971) concluded, play is the primary activity for successful social development, as well as a prerequisite for the development of heterosexual bonds. As these partially isolated monkeys matured, they did little but sit at the front of their cages and stare vacantly outward. They were withdrawn and rarely initiated interactions with other monkeys. In Learning to Love, Harlow (1971) stated, “The primary positive variable pervading peer love is that of play” (p. 32).
In the words of Winnicott (1971), “Play … is universal, and that belongs to health; play facilitates growth and therefore health; play leads … to group relationships; psychoanalysis has been developed as a highly specialized form of playing” (p. 144). Winnicott used the word play to mean the exploration of potential psychological space—doing and being what one has not done or been before, spontaneous excursions into new roles, new actions, new thoughts, ideas, and emotions. He added, “This is the precariousness of magic itself, magic that arises in intimacy. When a patient cannot play the therapist must attend to this major symptom before interpreting … behaviors” (p. 47).
Winnicott (1971) was is even more direct about the importance of play:
Psychotherapy takes place in the overlap of two areas of playing, that of the patient and that of the therapist. Psychotherapy has to do with two people playing together. The corollary … is that where playing is not possible then the work done by the therapist is directed towards bringing the patient from a state of not being able to play into a state of being able to play. (p. 38)
If play is the focus of therapy, it seems important to include the evaluation of playfulness in our assessments. Given that I have impressed you with the importance of playfulness as a variable of health and adaptation, the typical next step in U.S. psychology is to construct a self-report measure of playfulness and to establish its reliability and validity. However, we already have a test of playfulness; it is called the Rorschach.
Note what Schachtel (1966) had to say about playfulness and the Rorschach:
The freedom to play is an essential … condition for any creative act, including the creative assimilation of the unfamiliar in the expansion of one’s relations to the world. Play … contrasts not with seriousness, but with repressiveness, [with] too-narrow goal directedness and regimentation, and with conventional concepts of efficiency. In the encounter with the Rorschach inkblots …free play is a condition for a rich, varied, and personally meaningful experience and interpretation of the blots. (p. 57)
There is no place in any Rorschach scoring system to score a protocol for playfulness. At most, this variable might be discussed in the observations section of an assessment report, but often it is mentioned only anecdotally with little or no recognition of its importance in the assessment of emotional health or well-being. However, there are several ways in which playfulness can be scored during an assessment. The ability of the patient to make playful comments and to do playful activities during the assessment could easily be quantified, measured either as frequency of occurrence or as a two-level process, following Holt (1977), the first being more overt playing and the second level more symbolic playing.
Another method of quantifying playfulness is to evaluate the content of the percept and to rate each percept for degree of playfulness using a Likert-type scale. Still another way to quantify Rorschach playfulness is to build an interpersonal playfulness scale similar to the Urist scale (Urist, 1977; Urist & Shill, 1982), measuring the quality of interpersonal play. For example, Card II: “Two bears, smiling at each other,” compared with Card III: “Two people in a game of bowling, clowning with each other.” The latter percept would be rated as more playful.
We should not feel limited by the present variables in the Structural Summary. Exner himself has added variables in the past 15 to 20 years. However, even if we do not have a specific playfulness variable in the Structural Summary, we can construct one for clinical application and research purposes, just as the Holt and Urist scales can be used both clinically and experimentally. I score these scales implicitly as I analyze a Rorschach protocol.
We can also measure the type, intensity, or the developmental level of the playfulness. If we study the quality of playfulness as expressed in Rorschach responses, we would obviously give the lowest score to one in which seriously hostile destructiveness is expressed and a higher score to those responses in which playfulness is expressed in a mutually satisfying manner. For example, the following response would be seen as falling in the category of hostile destructiveness: Card II: “This is blood, spurting from this big knife wound.”
Higher playfulness scores would be given to those responses that go beyond more traditional blot description and to those responses that explore new or unusual responses, compared with typical responses. For example, “two bears performing in the circus” to Card II would get a lower rating than “two bears laughing,” which would in turn get a lower score than “two bears, telling each other jokes and laughing together.”
The developmental theory of play offers some additional assistance in the evolution and measurement of playful responses. Because the development of play begins with solitary play, followed by parallel play and, finally, interactive play, we could give lower scores to the former and higher scores to the latter. Following Urist (1977; Urist & Shill, 1982), interactive play that is mutually satisfying would be given a rating that is higher than interactive play in which only one individual is playful and satisfied.
Because Winnicott (1971) described play as involving risk-taking behavior (i.e., making forays into new, yet unexplored areas), playful responses can also be scored using the degree of risk taking involved in the percept. Therefore, a good playful response would meet the following criteria:
1. It reflects secure attachment.
2. It is unconventional.
3. It is original.
4. It contains some element of positive emotional tone.
5. It contains no hostility or aggression.
The reader should note that Criterion 5 was modified after reading Russ’s article in this issue. The modified Criterion 5 is described in the comments article by Strassle and Handler in this issue.
To generate more potentially playful responses, it is helpful to use a testing of the limits approach (Klopfer, Ainsworth, Klopfer, & Holt, 1954), where the patient is asked to go back through the blots, this time giving playful responses. I began doing that about 6 months ago, with some of the patients I had been seeing for some time, comparing these responses to playful responses obtained using the Comprehensive System (Exner, 1993), and that is how I started playing with playfulness. This procedure is done after the inquiry is completed. In general, the patients’ responses agreed with my impressions of their ability to play in their relationships with others. I selected several patients who I believed were not at all playful and several who I believed were quite playful.
One nonplayful participant was a paranoid psychotic man, who agreed to look at the first two cards. On Card I he saw “a stealth bomber,” “a house on stilts, with its own electric transformer,” and “a stage with dancers coming out to dance, spot lights, and jack hammers on the stage. It’s a play about sailors or pirates and these are harpoons and there are planks the sailors have to walk on.” His response to Card II, after a private laugh, was “two dead cats who died fighting amongst each other. This is their blood.” He became mildly offended when I suggested these responses were not quite playful, and he refused to continue.
The second patient was a 45-year-old married woman with severe attachment problems, who was quite thin skinned; although she laughed often, she seemed to really lack any playful ability. She was extremely sensitive to even the slightest criticism, yet she was quite sarcastic to everyone. On Card I she said “I see a mask. I guess it’s not playful. Looks like a bug. A mask to me is playful because to me it looks like a goofy Halloween mask. Maybe I’m not playful.” On Card II she said, with marked frustration and blame in her voice, “I see absolutely nothing in this one that’s playful. How come you keep giving me the black ones? Give me one of those colored ones.” She said the same for Cards III, IV, V, VI, and VII.
On Card VIII she said “Oh, I like the colored ones better. I can see animals going up the side. I don’t know if that’s playful. To me, animals are playful. These colored ones make me feel good. These black ones don’t.” Despite her positive reaction to the color of this card, she could do no better in generating playful responses than she had done on the previous cards, especially Cards II and III, which contain some red. Nevertheless, the darkness of the card, the black and gray, were aversive to her. On Card IX she stated, “I see seahorses, playing in the ocean. Kinda reminds me of coral. I like the colors. Also kinda looks like gnomes, that are smiling.” This more playful response was perhaps due to the positive experience she had with Card VIII, as she recovered from the powerful depressive reaction she had with the “black” cards. These findings might indicate that the patient could be playful, unless she became enmeshed with depressive aspects of her life (especially her disastrous early home life), as she often did, with very mild external provocation. Nevertheless, she had the nascent ability to be playful, as small as it was, as she gave the preceding responses.
Another example was a 60-year-old woman, an artist, who had been married for many years to an engineer; he fit the stereotype of an engineer: little available affect, overly organized, highly directive, and obsessive. The patient developed agoraphobia many years ago, and she finally decided to get professional help. As I observed the couple’s interaction I noted a subtle condescending attitude on the part of the husband toward his wife. He was somewhat disdainful of her and treated her as if she were incompetent. She was actually a quite talented artist and had been a very responsible mother and wife. Nevertheless, her husband had a very annoying air of superiority and had degraded her accomplishments. In the past, she had allowed him to do this, but recently, in marital therapy she had experienced feelings of anger toward him. On Card II she saw the following, expressed in a joyous, enthusiastic tone: “These are two Oriental women doing patty-cake, patty-cake.” Suddenly, she became serious: “But they’re having conflict down there with their feet—bumping feet, and it’s very, very painful!” She spoiled other playful responses in this same way. She would also give a playful response, quickly followed by a negative response. For example, Card VII: “It’s two people, dancing with each other, hamming it up, with their chins thrust out. It’s two women. Kind of a boogie dance.” Then she turned the card upside down, made a wry face, indicating that her percept was distasteful to her and, in an unhappy voice, said, “I guess that could be a woman’s vagina.” It is interesting to note that her husband accused her of damaging their “good times” together, turning happy times with he and their children into conflictual, dissatisfying experiences. This is exactly what she did on the Rorschach when she was asked to give playful responses.
The following is an example from a playful woman who taught music at a local college. She was almost finished with her treatment. As soon as she took Card I she said, “Ring around a rosie,” because she saw figures moving in a circle. Then she took the card, turned it upside down, held it over her head, laughed, and said, “It’s a hat.”
Another patient, a particularly playful 35-year-old woman who also liked to pun, gave the following response to Card VII:
Well, that could be two little girls with pigtails, like on a see-saw type of thing—one of those round kinds, so when they go up in the air their pony tails also go up. But this has to be a magic one because both pony tails are going up at the same time.
In each case I performed the testing of the limits procedure collaboratively, in an approach beautifully described by Finn and colleagues (Finn, 1996; Finn & Martin, 1997; Finn & Tonsager, 1992) and Fischer (1985/1994). We collaboratively investigated the personal meaning of these responses with reference to the therapeutic relationship.
One such collaboration concerned a recent patient, a 22-year-old college junior who was tall, athletic, and quite handsome. He, unfortunately, was quite rigid, very shy, quite serious, and not at all popular with women. Although he often felt quite angry toward people he experienced as unkind to him, he never expressed these feelings to them; all his affect was bottled up. I attempted to be especially playful with him, because he was so serious, but also because I felt he could appreciate playfulness, despite the fact that he could not yet play himself. He laughed easily at my humor, but he initiated no playfulness of his own. One day he was discussing his lack of humor. He told me he used to be playful and could sometimes be playful with certain friends. I decided to ask if he wanted to take a closer look at this so-called “lost” playfulness. He readily agreed, and so I asked him to give me playful responses to the cards. As he took Card I and examined it, I noticed his discomfort. He examined it for a long time and then gave me a startling response: “Kinda looks like a flattened, decapitated squirrel. I run over them all the time.” This was hardly what he or I expected, and he began to look more uncomfortable. He took longer to examine Card II, becoming somewhat more uncomfortable, scowling. He gave the following response: ”I’m gonna bomb this. How long am I supposed to take?” “This isn’t really playful,” he said, introducing his next precept, “That’s all I can think of; this looks like one of those underwater caves you dive to. These are two little brine shrimp, going to the cave, for a little rendezvous.” He did not recognize the humor in that response. “It all looks like two rhinoceroses trying to make out, but their horns are in the way,” he continued, “that’s if you disregard the pink stuff,” referring to the red areas. On Card III he gave the following response: “This looks like a bloody frog. Road kill is kinda funny to me. Especially when you hit a bird. They got wings; they can get out of the way.” He was startled by this very angry, cruel, and sadistic response and began to squirm in his seat.
As he looked at Card V he said, “Looks like an exploding volcano; the burning hot magma flowing down to burn the villages. No, not the villages—In my chem professor’s back yard—if I don’t get an A. If I do,” he added, with an air of ceremonious playfulness, “the lava will part and avoid the house.”
With each card presentation he was becoming more and more agitated, and finally, after Card VI, he asked me if we could stop. We then discussed his discomfort, which he said came from his recognition that his responses were not playful but instead were extremely hostile and cruel. “What do you make of that?” I asked. “Well, that I’m really pretty mad.” he said. “I wanna be playful, but I realize that I’m just so angry.” He thought about his responses for a while and, focusing on the volcano response, he said excitedly, “I know! I know! I figured it out; I need to have a third party who’s not there, to be angry at, in order to be funny. That way the anger is removed; its away from me and I can allow myself to be funny.” He continued on to tell me about he and a friend leaving an answering machine message for a person they both disliked intensely, saying, “This is UT Hospital. We have a patient here who needs a kidney. We would like your kidney. In fact, we need both your kidneys. Oh, by the way, we also need your heart.” We laughed together, and then he suddenly became uncharacteristically alive with pleasure, almost shouting:
I know what it is! I know what this is all about! I know just what this is about. It’s about when I was younger—a little kid, from the second to the sixth grade. I was very small for my age and I was a playful, happy-go-lucky kid, but I got picked on a lot and ridiculed. There were a bunch of bullies who used to torment me, and my parents didn’t help any. I suffered badly for a couple of years, and I got so bitter, I withdrew from people. My parents were into this “peaceful stuff.” All they ever did was to tell me to turn the other cheek, but every time I was the butt of a joke it killed me. But I was told to remain cool—I had to forgive, and all that shit. They didn’t want me to fight. I had to stuff my angry feelings. It’s safer for me to express it to a third person, who’s not around.
He smiled broadly and said he felt quite relieved and clear headed for once. I could see him being more relaxed and spontaneous. “You know,” I said to him
The “cave and brine shrimp” response was sort of playful, and so was the “volcano” response, even though it was hostile. It looks to me like you haven’t lost your playfulness; it’s just been hiding, covered over with lots of anger.
He laughed and appeared to me to relax even more. Negative allusions he had made previously to his contained businessman father now began to make more sense, as well as this young man’s striving for super strength as an athlete and for superiority as a scholar. To date he has had only momentary glimpses of his underlying creativity. With great struggle he chose a liberal arts career instead of law or medicine and showed creative playfulness in winning a writing contest.
I have noticed that some patients, despite the directions to give playful responses, not only cannot give playful responses, but they give more negative responses compared with their responses using the standard administration. Some patients were actually startled by their nonplayful responses; no interpretation was even necessary. Also, a colleague who tests emotionally disturbed adolescents has used the playful instructions after administering the Rorschach using the Comprehensive System. He reported that when he used the standard instructions, the patients gave him constricted records, with few responses, many populars, using mostly form. When he added the changed instructions, he obtained rich records: They were longer, more detailed, and more revealing. This observation is similar to the findings of Blanchard (1959, 1968), who devised the Consensus Rorschach, in which two or more people take the test together, agreeing on the percepts. Blanchard reported that in the individual testing session the juvenile offenders were resistant, refractory, and defensive (Blanchard, 1959, 1968; Handler, 1997). Their typical responses were, “It’s an ink blot and I don’t see nuthin” (Blanchard, 1968, p. 327). When Blanchard gave the Rorschach to two groups of boys who had participated in a gang rape, he found that the protocols were much richer. In many respects the pattern and flow of the responses as the boys interacted on the task were a reenactment of the gang rape experience, in a pattern reflecting struggles for dominance and patterns of resistance. The difference between the standard administration and the “playful responses” instructions could give the assessor or therapist valuable information concerning the patient’s future propensity to be playful.
Given that the ability to play is one important factor in the assessment of psychological health for both children and adults, I believe it should be evaluated as part of the assessment battery. In this article I described several possible methods to do so without adding any additional tests. Such an addition is needed to our conceptual model of psychological health rather than endorsing a model that emphasizes only pathology.
I would like to end this article with a quote from Martin Seligman, president of the American Psychological Association. In a column entitled “Work, Love and Play,” Seligman bemoaned the lack of research on healthy aspects of personality functioning. He wrote:
It bothered me that my department did not have anyone whose main interest was work, love or play. As I mentally ran through the rosters of several other fine academic departments, I couldn’t think of anyone whose primary research was work or love or play. (Seligman, 1998, p. 2)
We hope that the work of Russ (1980, 1987, 1993) and the articles included in this series will be the beginning of such positive avenues of research and application.