One of the first things we need to appreciate is that many great minds have applied themselves to this question over the centuries, and in most of what has been written there is a notable reluctance to attempt to define play. Indeed, it is hard to find a consensus of opinion among early writers as to its true nature. Reilly (1974), in occupational therapy’s first engagement of any real significance with the matter, picks this up. She describes her own struggles with the enigma as ‘defining a cobweb’, and her review of the principal theoretical contributions to the subject concludes rather dismissively that:

Well, we ourselves therefore must subscribe to naïveté, for we believe that it is possible to draw out a common denominator, as it were, from the wide diversity of theories as to the nature and purpose of play. No attempt, however, will be made to define the cobweb. The end point of such an exercise is surely just a bald, utilitarian statement that a cobweb is a fly-trap, and consequently our understanding of its beauty, complexity and integrity as a work of nature is entirely lost to us. The full nature of a cobweb is best brought out by description not by definition, and it may indeed be described most precisely, the respective perceptions of the artist, the architect and the zoologist highlighting this quality and that property until a rich appreciation of the whole is understood. The description that follows is an attempt to shed some light on the essential nature of play.

In the light of the above, it is interesting to note that even the Oxford English Dictionary has extreme difficulty defining play, its substantial entry resorting to multiple descriptions and imagery. It does, however, offer a good starting point for an explanation of the subject, suggesting a thread or theme which runs throughout the following discussion. The root words offer two broad slants of understanding, both of which are concerned with motile output. The first is the notion of physical exercise, of free unimpeded movement, of brisk action, in living or non-living things. Ideas which are subsumed under this theme are:

The second shade of meaning also has to do with output and action, but stresses activity designed for amusement or diversion. Under this umbrella come games, sport, jest, musical and dramatic performance – all of which distil the notion of enjoyment, pleasure and delight. These elemental concepts will be commented upon more fully later, but it is perhaps worth noting at this point the common threads of spontaneity and freedom and zest, binding what are, in effect, fairly disparate images.

The poet Schiller (1875) is perhaps best known in this sphere for underwriting what has since become known as the surplus energy theory of play. He believed that:

Schiller saw play as a type of superabundance, as a means of release for an over-accumulation of energy. This theory has been discussed by many across the years but is no longer popular. More significant are Schiller’s ideas on the play impulse in man, which he sees as fundamental to the order of life. His view of human nature is that it is essentially bipartite: that persons have a sensuous nature (called the sensuous impulse) which exerts control over physical capacities, and a rational nature which exerts control over psychological capacities. This he called the formative impulse. The two aspects of this dual nature are complementary, but there is a third impulse which serves to unite them, and this is the play impulse. Where the sensuous impulse constrains a person by natural laws, and the formative impulse by laws of reason, the play impulse ‘will remove all constraint, and set man free’.

We might do well to consider Schiller’s speculations, insofar as they must surely challenge our thinking about the person whose ‘formative impulse’ is gradually disintegrating within the grip of dementia. Indeed, they beg the question as to whether that uniting force of the play impulse, working in harmony with the sensuous nature, can effect any kind of restraint or remission in the inexorable decline of reason in dementia.

The psychologist Berlyne has written extensively on the matter of play. His writing style is complex and rather turgid, but his key ideas are worthy of inclusion here. He is critical of the hold that the matter of ‘response selection’ has had upon psychology, particularly through the behaviourist era, and (writing in 1960) he indicated that future research needed to be led not by the question, ‘What response will this animal make to this stimulus?’ but by the question, ‘To which stimulus will this animal respond?’. Berlyne believes that play is all about arousal, and suggests that:

These qualities of novelty, uncertainty, conflict and complexity arouse the organism’s mechanisms for action via investigation, exploration and manipulation. Play is to be seen as stimulus-seeking behaviour. Berlyne (1969) observes that humour and its overt behavioural concomitants (laughter and smiling) are also created by these variables.

Morris (1969), from the quite different perspective of the zoologist, has made rather similar observations to those of Berlyne. Morris notes that any species of animal life, human or otherwise, engages in what he describes as a ‘stimulus-struggle’ which has a clear health/survival function. The object of this struggle is consistently to obtain the optimum amount of stimulation from the environment. For our early ancestors, as indeed for wild animals throughout history, this stimulus-struggle has not been a problem – the very demands of survival imposed sufficient challenge in terms of novelty, uncertainty, conflict or complexity to absorb energies fully. However, modern urban man, as indeed urban (zoo or domesticated) animals, is required less and less to engage in survival activity. Adequate food, water, shelter, health, maternity and child care are all relatively easily obtained, and generally speaking are readily available things we purchase, rather than spend time procuring for ourselves.

Morris notes how the cushioning of this new security in modern man can actually impose conditions of gross under-stimulation, and where such is the case, humans or animals will actively seek out or procure for themselves those situations of novelty, uncertainty, conflict or complexity which will return the stimulus balance to optimum. This may result in the constructive and creative use of leisure time where, for example, the factory worker with a repetitive job turns to the sports field or the artist’s easel in his leisure hours, thus enhancing pleasure and developing capacities. But it may equally manifest itself in self- or socially destructive ways. Morris (1964) has clearly documented the latter with regard to the animal kingdom; it requires only minimal experience of the institutional care of humans to be aware that all those features observed by Morris in animals are mirrored to a greater or lesser degree in the men, women and young people who populate our institutions.

Morris ponders the question of what it is that drives some individuals towards a positive handling of the stimulus struggle, and some into a negative response. He compares and contrasts the stimulus struggle of the human adult with the play of children, noting particularly the strength of the child’s exploratory urge in the face of almost omnipresent novelty and uncertainty. He proposes that the answer to individual and societal growth and progress lies in the retention of the creative essence of the play of childhood into maturity. What we need, he argues, are ‘childlike adults’:

Morris is, in effect, expressing Berlyne’s stimulus-seeking exploration of novelty and uncertainty in terms of creativity, which he clearly sees as critical to the health and wellbeing of individuals and societies.

Also understanding play as creativity, yet from a radically different viewpoint of child development, is the paediatrician and child psychiatrist Donald Winnicott. He perceived the play of the child as critical to healthy emotional and social development (Winnicott 1971). He was concerned that play should not be understood purely in the context of the inner, personal, psychic world of subjective experience. He believed that play inhabits a third, intermediate area, and sought to ‘locate’ it in the hypothetical ‘space’ between child and mother – specifically, in that potential space occupied by the child’s repudiation of the object (mother) as ‘not me’. Play, in this sense, facilitates the developmental process in which child and object are first merged; over time, object is repudiated, reaccepted and perceived objectively. Essentially, he perceived play as an essential component for the satisfactory separation of child from mother, the ‘not me’ from the ‘me’.

Winnicott’s hypothetical space is the ‘playground’ where play starts and develops, but it can only function and mature in the context of a relationship of trust and confidence in the reliability of the mother. The child’s creative move towards autonomy is nurtured in such a climate, increasingly so as the mother relinquishes her own adaptability to, and identifying with the child’s needs. Where there is no constant mother-figure, or where the mother-figure is not a sufficiently reliable presence for the child to gain trust and confidence, emotional development is likely to be impaired.

Our view is that play sustains health. Play facilitates ‘safe’ separation in our maturational process; it brings about our awareness of ‘me’ and ‘not me’, and gives us all we need to be able to form relationships. Without play, our capacity for relationship and sociality are seriously impoverished.

It is interesting to note that the essence of some of these themes is echoed in the metaphysical writings of certain theologians – an unexpected vein of wisdom, but one worth tapping.

Like Morris, the priest and academic Romano Guardini (1930) links the play of the child and the creativity of the adult. Like Winnicott, he understands play as the heart of relationship. In his exposition of the Christian liturgy as play, he discourses on the purposelessness of play, implying that its very purposelessness imbues it with meaningfulness: