Learning play: a review of Beyond Love and Work and Deep Play

Citation

Bokeno, R.M. (2010), "Learning play: a review of Beyond Love and Work and Deep Play", Development and Learning in Organizations, Vol. 24 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/dlo.2010.08124dae.001

Learning play: a review of Beyond Love and Work and Deep Play

Article Type: Book review From: Development and Learning in Organizations, Volume 24, Issue 4

I have to confess that I started out writing a review of two books dealing with quantum thinking. I suspect that will appear in the next review. But in the process of reviewing and explaining quantum thinking as central in the future of learning and development, I was nagged by the simple thought that quantum thinking requires a wholly alternative mindset; one that is best unencumbered by conventional frames, concepts or practices. So I got to thinking about children, and then about, well, play as the outward manifestation of a child’s unencumbered curiosity, humility and wonder. And as any fruitful learning does involve a sort of “child’s mind,” I ventured into some play myself.

In two eerily complimentary books published the same year, Lenore Terr (1999) and Diane Ackerman (1999) articulate for us both the importance of play and the nature of play. And in particular, they illustrate play as a fundamental developmental feature in adult work and life.

In Beyond Love and Work, psychiatrist Lenore Terr begins by leveraging play into Freud’s abbreviated work-love polarity, as well as adding it as an even more distinct possibility into Erickson’s developmental schema. Indeed beginning with “the lowest rungs” on the developmental ladder, Terr expertly draws not only from the more famous developmental theories and theorists, but also those whose work compliments, extends or counters the traditional texts; in doing so she very amply illustrates for us the role of play from infancy to adulthood. Terr’s point, (I suspect with much damage to the nuances), is that we learn play in developmental phases that circumscribe its nature and content; we retain the nature and content as circumscribed, and find places to work at our play or play at our work; in either case, the integration makes for a “happier” and productive person.

While each chapter is generous with documented scientific studies and theoretical commentary, the academic stuff is deftly narrated via substantial and extensive stories – real cases, real individuals – that make it pliable, useful, academic stuff. All in all, a pleasurably informative read, cover to cover.

As Terr shows us what play typically is, Diane Ackerman explores the possibilities of play as a spiritual, transcendent experience. Deep Play is Ackerman’s testament to the far reaches of playful activity and the purposes it serves. In a way we might say that Terr has exposed for us the depth of the necessity of play, in that every living thing plays in some form or fashion. For Ackerman by contrast, “deep play” is distinguishable by its ability to “focus one’s life and offer ecstatic moments … [involving] an altered mental state where one most often finds clarity, revelation, acceptance of self … [feelings of] invincibility, immortality, an ideal version of oneself” (p. 24). Though many of Terr’s examples fit this definition, Ackerman’s point seems to be about the necessity of the depth of play. A prize-winning poet and essayist, Ackerman shares with – personally, almost intimately, her own exploration of deep play as an invaluable aspect of human experience and development. Deep Play is also a pleasurable read, though an entirely different pleasure.

What I take away from these two works on play, is the one sentiment they share the most: play is freedom. In the preface to Love and Work, Terr, in a Marcusian moment (see my own 2009) laments the replacement of the pleasure principle with the reality/performance principle, arguing:

When we play, we sense no limitations. In fact when we are playing we are usually unaware of ourselves. Self-observation goes out the window. We forget all those past lessons of life, forget our potential foolishness, forget ourselves. We immerse ourselves in the act of play. And we become free (p. 21).

Ackerman as well:

Above all, play requires freedom. One chooses to play. Play’s rules may be enforced, but play is not like luife’s other dramas. It happens outsider ordinary life, and requires freedom (p. 7).

And so I wonder whether a recovery of the child’s mind, or adult play as the activated memory of an unencumbered past, might just be prerequisite to the cultivation of any alternative mindset, a sort of prior foundation for a new, perhaps quantum, understanding of work, life, self and others. I take up those issues next.R. Michael BokenoProfessor of Organizational Communication and BB&T Fellow in the College of Business, Murray State University, Murray, Kentucky, USA.