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In psychoanalysis, the question of child's play owes its fame to child psychoanalysts. Before the emergence of child psychoanalysis, however, Sigmund Freud had evoked the question of child's play in his works many times. Surprisingly, his views on play remain generally underestimated - with the notable exception of the famous "fort-da" game that, by irresistibly attracting innumerable comments to itself, has come to overshadow, in the author's view, the whole Freudian conception of play. This paper therefore aims at archeologically re-examining this notion in the Freudian corpus. It intends to show that, far from being limited to an object of study as "interpreted," play is also called upon for what it offers heuristically as "interpreting," especially when Freud is faced with metapsychological obstacles. Two main strands of this theoretical conception of play are identified (a "deficit" and a "surplus" conception). The paper then highlights how the Freudian conception of play is intimately linked to his melancholy theory of the psyche and of culture. Finally, the paper changes tack in order to briefly suggest that this reconsideration of play might have psychoanalytic implications on two issues, namely the status of child's play in analysis and the more general question of interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysts may incorporate many of Melanie Klein's important contributions (e.g., on preoedipal dynamics, envy, and projective identification) without transforming their basic analytic approach. In this paper I argue that adopting the Kleinian notion of unconscious phantasy is transformative. While it is grounded in Freud's thinking and draws out something essential to his work, this notion of phantasy introduces a radical change that defines Kleinian thinking and practice and significantly impacts the analyst's basic clinical approach. This impact and its technical implications in the analytic situation are illustrated and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]