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PERSPECTIVE ARTICLE
published: 02 March 2015
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00175
Enactive account of pretend play and its application to
therapy
Zuzanna Rucinska1* and Ellen Reijmers2
1Department of Philosophy, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK
2Interactie-Academie VZW, Antwerp, Belgium
Edited by:
Hanne De Jaegher, University of
the Basque Country, Spain
Reviewed by:
Frank Röhricht, University of Essex,
UK
Alemka Tomicic, Universidad Diego
Portales, Chile
Maria E. Molina, Universidad del
Desarrollo, Chile
*Correspondence:
Zuzanna Rucinska, Department of
Philosophy, University of
Hertfordshire, De Havilland
Campus, Hatfield, Hertfordshire
AL10 9EU, UK
e-mail: z.rucinska@hotmail.com
This paper informs therapeutic practices that use play, by providing a non-standard
philosophical account of pretense: the enactive account of pretend play (EAPP). The EAPP
holds that pretend play activity need not invoke mental representational mechanisms;
instead, it focuses on interaction and the role of affordances in shaping pretend play
activity. One advantage of this re-characterization of pretense is that it may help us better
understand the role of shared meanings and interacting in systemic therapies, which use
playing to enhance dialog in therapy rather than to uncover hidden meanings. We conclude
with bringing together findings from therapeutic practice and philosophical considerations.
Keywords: enactivism, pretend, play, systemic therapy, dialog
INTRODUCTION
This paper explores one relationship between philosophical
understanding of pretend play and therapies that include sym-
bolic play with objects in their repertoire.
In traditional therapies (and particularly psychodynamic ther-
apies), play has been used to “uncover” problems of clients to
allow therapists to “analyze” them. In those therapies, play in gen-
eral (pretend play at most, but also playing with objects) is often
seen as symbolizing. Similarly, in philosophical works, pretend
play, traditionally seen as symbolic play, is often characterized as a
representational capacity whereby an object or behavior “stands
in for” or represents another (see Mitchell, 2002). Mental rep-
resentational structures dominate both the characterization and
explanations of pretense activities. Such description of pretend
play goes hand in hand with how playing is seen in therapy, which
is as representing or denoting something true about the person
who is playing.
Systemic therapy, however, is an approach that tends to focus
on interaction and maintaining a dialog between a therapist and
a client (Watzlawick et al., 1967; Watzlawick and Jackson, 2009).
It asks for a different view of play, in which it is not a tool for
uncovering and interpreting meanings, but is seen as part of a
“here and now” dialog that allows discovering new meanings with
a client in order to facilitate his/her development of novel perspec-
tives. Likewise, the novel enactive account of pretend play (EAPP)
proposes such a view of play. Based on the functional–ecological
approach to pretense (Szokolsky, 2006), vast literature about
the importance of interacting with objects in development of
cognition and in establishing pretense relationships (e.g., Piaget,
1962; Vygotsky, 1978), and motivated by the emergence of novel
embodied, intersubjective and (radically) enactive approaches to
cognition (Gallagher, 2009; Hutto and Myin, 2013), the EAPP
highlights the role of interaction in pretense. It further focuses
on the key role that the notion of affordances may serve in shaping
pretense activities when playing with objects (and other people),
and suggests that even symbolic play need not invoke mental
representations (Rucinska, 2014a,b). The advantage of the EAPP
is that it looks better placed to provide an understanding of the
role shared meanings and interacting serves in therapy that uses
play. As such, it may fit better with the goals of systemic therapies,
which focus on interaction.
In this article we aim to show that we can broaden the scope
of what playing may be used for in therapy. We suggest a different
function for engaging in play in therapy: one of creating a dialog,
instead of being a mirror of reality. The EAPP gives further
reasons why the “staying within play” approach (Rucinska and
Reijmers, 2014) is beneficial in therapy, as it already pays special
attention to engagements (active exploration of objects in relevant
intersubjective contexts), finding mentality in the interactions and
not in encapsulated mental representations.1Understanding the
possibility of a different account of pretend play as proposed by
the EAPP makes an interesting case for therapists to reflect on
their therapeutic practice.
PLAY IN THERAPY
In traditional therapies (particularly psychodynamic therapies),
play has been used to “uncover” problems of clients to allow
therapists to “analyze” them. Drawing, playing with building
blocks or puppets as well as pretend playing and role-playing
is often used in various therapies, but as Russ and Fehr (2013)
1By “mentality,” we broadly refer to kinds of mental or cognitive aspects of life.
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Rucinska and Reijmers Enactive pretend play in therapy
point out, “play therapy continues to be most associated with
psychodynamic approaches.” In these approaches, play expres-
sions are seen as manifestations of hidden or repressed longings,
fears, or conflictive attachments, and are to be interpreted by the
psychoanalyst. Verbalization and active labeling of the feelings are
said to help the child understand and deal with the causes of their
feelings and behavior (Freud, 1966; Dolto, 1985; Axline, 1989).
The psychodynamic approaches to play therapy are the domi-
nant, but not the only available approaches. In systemic therapies,
for example, play is used as a vehicle for communication and
enhancing the dialog between the therapist and the client(s). The
focus on interaction and communication in systemic therapy (see
Watzlawick et al., 1967; Bateson, 1972; Watzlawick and Jackson,
2009) asks for a different view of play, seen as communication
in context, and not as an expression of individual behaviors,
thoughts or feelings that are projected onto the play or play
materials, as in more traditional play therapy theories. The focus
is not on what the play means or what the play expressions stand
for, but on how the therapist can engage with the client in play
in such a manner that it will enable the client’s change or shift of
perspectives. As such, playing gives the therapist a new role.
We will highlight two challenges for systemic therapists that
have to do with seeing therapy as such dialog. The first is to hold
on to a “not-knowing stance” (Anderson, 2005, 2012). The second
is not to attribute fixed meanings to play. Both challenges have
to do with the therapists’ pitfalls to want to analyze play from
outside of play, and to be in an expert position detached from
the interaction (Cecchin, 1987; Cecchin et al., 1992; Bertrando,
2007).
Maintaining a “not-knowing stance” may be challenging to the
therapist because trying not to interpret play, especially violent
play, is not easy. Extreme behavior of children during therapeutic
sessions, for example, can create situations where a systemic
therapist cannot see the play as an ongoing interaction and is
tempted to seek foothold in a “knowing stance.” When a therapist
is overwhelmed, he/she is likely to see a negative situation as a
mirror of reality, not as a creation of a reality in an on-going
dialog. On the basis of experience and intuition, but probably
also under pressure of dominant play theories that stress the
idea of play as individual expression of feelings and longings, a
therapist may determine a person’s problems ex ante, without
exploring them further. For instance, impressed by the destructive
way a boy behaved at a therapeutic session, a therapist at the
Interactie Academie made a direct and determinate link between
the aggressive moments in the game and the absence of a father
figure. The boy’s aggression was no longer seen as a meaningful
part of the game, but was perceived as an ever-present personal
trait. At that moment, the therapist lost her creativity and the
game with its playfulness stopped. However, when the therapist
decided to take a different approach and introduce role-playing
(where the players choose their characters and negotiated their
roles), there was a mutual engagement in the therapeutic session.
It seems plausible to suggest that this positive effect was, in part,
a result of not stigmatizing the boy’s behavior and attributing
blame. This example shows that the knowing position of the
therapist, linked with her interpretation of the boy’s aggres-
sion as a hidden longing, can block creativity in play, whereas
her focus on play without interpreting it created a different
dynamic.
A related challenge for therapists is not to attribute fixed
meanings to play, but to understand that there is a variety of
meanings that play can carry. Consider another case from our
practice of a young boy playing with a dollhouse during one
therapeutic session. A 9 years old boy tidied the house, correctly
arranged its furniture, swept the floors and played the piano in the
play. He did this without saying a word. Then, choosing carefully,
he placed every object in one room of the dollhouse. Finally he
locked that room, leaving only empty rooms. The play appeared to
be finished. In this example, the therapist is again under the risk of
searching for the meaning behind the boy’s play, using dominant
therapeutic theories and culturally embedded stories to analyze it.
The dollhouse can be taken to stand in for the boy’s home, or the
play to stand in for his feelings toward his family, but one way or
another, it is taken to represent an actual state of affairs.
We suggest a different approach to understanding play in
therapy. In this case, the dollhouse need not stand in for the
boy’s specific feelings or family relationships; we have no way of
knowing whether the play refers to the boy’s home unless the boy
explicitly says that the dollhouse is like his home. We suggest that
therapists should not pay attention to what could be the hidden
meanings behind play, but to how a client is playing at the time,
and how the therapist can in turn play with a client to further
influence and negotiate the play. We base this suggestion on the
idea that the meaning of the play need not be seen as hidden
behind the action, but as being in and emerging out of the action.
Play—even pretend play—need not be seen as representing mean-
ings, fixed by mental representations. To support this idea, we
turn to the EAPP.
THE ENACTIVE ACCOUNT OF PRETEND PLAY
In standard philosophical approaches, pretend play, traditionally
seen as symbolic play, is often characterized as a representa-
tional capacity whereby an object or behavior “stands in for”
or represents another. That is because pretense itself is taken to
be a type of a mental state that enables one to act as if one
thing was another. The recurring aspect that underlies present
pretense theories [whether metarepresentationalist (Leslie, 1987),
behaviorist (Perner, 1991; Lillard, 1994; Harris, 2000; Nichols
and Stich, 2003), or intentionalist (Rakoczy et al., 2004, 2005)
is the positing of mental representations. There are many ways
to characterize mental representations, ranging from a stronger
cognitivist reading in which mental representations involve inter-
nal symbol-processing mechanisms with semantic information-
bearing structures that store mental contents (Leslie, 1987), to
weaker, action-oriented representations or some form of motor
representations (Wheeler, 2005). However, Leslie’s (1987, p. 414)
definition seems to best capture the mentioned theoretical models
of pretense: “The basic evolutionary and ecological point of inter-
nal representation must be to represent aspects of the world in an
accurate, faithful, and literal way, in so far as this is possible for a
given organism.” To explain the capacity to pretend, the theorists
then postulate various kinds of internal cognitive mechanisms,
which manipulate the veridical mental representations to create
new pretense representations (albeit through different means) that
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Rucinska and Reijmers Enactive pretend play in therapy
direct pretend play (Leslie, 1987; Harris, 2000; see Nichols and
Stich, 2000; for most elaborate mechanism).2
Such description of pretend play goes hand in hand with how
playing is seen in therapy, which is as representing or denoting
something true about the person who is playing. Presently we
propose an alternative account of pretense, where higher cognitive
capacities such as offline symbol swapping need not be invoked.
The EAPP proposes that basic cases of pretend play like treating
one object as another only requires active exploration of objects
in a playful context, as supported by the theory of (social) affor-
dances (Gibson, 1979; Noë, 2004; Chemero, 2009) and agents’
sensorimotor skills (O’Regan and Noë, 2001).
Affordances are to be understood as possibilities for action.
To quote Noë (2004, p. 105), “Things in the environment, and
properties of the environment, offer or afford the animal oppor-
tunities to do things (find shelter, climb up, hide under, etc.).
(. . .) When you see a tree, you not only directly perceive a tree,
but you directly perceive something up which you can climb.” As
such, the immediate environment can solicit certain actions and
resist others. Applied to understanding pretense, we can think of
objects as affording novel possibilities in and through the play.
These possibilities depend on the actor’s sensorimotor skills and
dispositions, as well as on the object’s properties, and the novelty
and creative use of objects emerge through their interaction.
Setting the interaction in a playful context also provides further
flexibility to the actions, affecting the use that the objects solicit.
There is still a great debate about what affordances actually are,
that is, whether they count as relational properties or dispositions,
or whether they are inherently social (elicited by interacting with
other people) or canonical (elicited by a wider social context
and narrative practices; see Costall, 2012).3Nevertheless, they
are useful alternative constructs, both in terms of philosophy
and therapy, as affordances can take over some of the purposes
mental representations were supposed to serve. It is likely that in
acting upon a prop (like in the banana–phone game), the player
2It can be argued that this notion of mental representation underlies even the
commitments of other theorists of pretence aside Leslie. Even the so-called
“behaviorists” and “intentionalists” to pretence, who say that pretending is
“merely acting as if,” commit to the view that one is “acting as if ” a proposition
is true. For example, Harris (2000) claims that to successfully play banana–
phone, a child must act according to a rule (or as he call it a “flag”) that “this
banana is not a phone” and edit these rules to generate new flags through a
propositional model, with “statements written on the various flags” (p. 66),
while Rakoczy et al. (2005, p. 81)claim that “in pretending to pour the actor
symbolizes ‘there is water coming out of this container,’ he acts as if it was
true.” There is a clear indication that, explicitly intended or not, these theorists
too commit to the notion of mental representation of the stronger, semantic
kind.
3For example, adults initiate and guide children’s play by showing how to
play, which the child imitates, and encourage pretence play through various
forms of verbal and nonverbal feedback. Immediate dialogical interactions
afford others as potential co-operators. Intersubjective contexts can allow new
ways of understanding to be established in the interaction [in what De Jaegher
and Di Paolo (2007) call “participatory sense-making” activity]. Social context
determines whether there is a breakdown in the play (such as when “flying
movements” are used in “elephant” play) or whether it is accommodated (as
“Dumbo the flying elephant” play). Such co-creation of meanings suggests
that sensitivity to others’ understandings, stemming from engagements in
joint activity, allow for new, shared understandings to develop.
does not act independently of what is seen, but is guided by
the prop (banana) and perceives in action what the prop affords
(calling by holding to ear). Thus, affordances are strongly related
to our sensorimotor capacity to interact with objects; they are best
understood as the possibilities of action that come about in the
interaction, as suggested by the action–perception–action loop:
acting in the world brings about new affordances that further
shape how you perceive and act on the world.4
This view reflects earlier, ecological approaches to pretense,
where the nature of cognition is seen as dynamic and fluid, flexible
and adaptable, and “pretend play is an especially good example
of the fluid and dynamically intertwined presence of perception,
action and cognition” (Szokolsky, 2006, p. 82). While more work
is required to secure the EAPP, we provide here a first attempt at
showing its benefits and relevance to therapy.
APPLYING THE NEW PLAY METHOD
The EAPP can help to understand how to counter the two prob-
lems of systemic therapy: refraining from attributing prescribed
meanings to behaviors, and taking the not-knowing stance. The
notion of affordance can be useful for understanding that objects
may not “denote” meanings but instead can “create” meanings
through affording flexible actions to the actor. Regarding the
“not knowing stance,” following Costall, Szokolsky (2006, p. 68)
explains: “Any object has an immense number of action possibil-
ities, but these cannot be known in advance, in separation from
the actor and the action.” As we cannot know in advance what
the objects can solicit in play (as their meanings are relatively
flexible when negotiated in interaction), we should not fix our
interpretations on them.
Taking an affordance-based view could allow therapists to have
a different way of making use of play in therapy sessions. Consider
an example of the “staying within play” approach, which uses play
as a dialog that enables creating new meanings (Rucinska and
Reijmers, 2014). This approach relies on using objects to create
a playful dialog and an embodied experience. For example, one
client (John) was asked to pick an object that would stand for
the problematic relationship he wanted to deal with (the object
happened to be a flexible snakelike ornament) as well as to pick
objects to stand for different feelings he had regarding this rela-
tionship (he picked a book, an eraser and a colorful flower for his
feelings and a sharpener, a feather and a postcard for the feelings
of his son). John was then asked to put every object somewhere
in the room, giving it a place in relation to the snakelike figure.
Afterward, the therapist started a dialog with John about the form,
4That action and perception are tightly bound has been proposed and
defended extensively in the literature (Noë, 2004), and can be seen in empirical
findings. For example, Held and Hein’s (1963) famous “Kitten Carousel”
experiment showed that there was a significant difference in how the active
kitten, controlling its locomotion, responded to its environment (avoiding
visual cliffs, bracing themselves from being placed on the visual cliff, or
avoiding looming objects) as opposed to the passive kitten, which did not
engage in such behaviors. This finding suggests that there is an action–
perception–action loop, whereby the engagement in moving around afforded
its avoidance of visual cliffs. Thus, quoting Chemero (2009, p. 145), it is “more
appropriate to understand affordances as being inherent not in animals, but
in animal-environment systems.”
www.frontiersin.org March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 175 |3
Rucinska and Reijmers Enactive pretend play in therapy
shape and colors of the snakelike ornament and the way other
objects were placed around it. Further, the therapist asked John to
reposition the objects, as well swap seats with the therapist, who
inquired further about how the relationship between the objects
made John feel, what arrangements made him feel comfortable,
and what bodily and emotional changes did he experience when
he moved the objects around.
John and the therapist stayed, so to speak, in the play situation
and in the play language. While this did not mark the end of the
therapy sessions, there was a clear positive gain stemming from
this form of interactive communication and hands-on engage-
ment with objects; as John mentioned afterward, “he enjoyed
the session, felt less depressive, and had a more hopeful feeling
about the relationship that troubled him.” We believe this method
allowed John to “position” himself differently to the problem. It
suggests a great impact of offloading the problem to the objects
that one can literally manipulate (have a hands-on embodied
experience with) that allows one to get new perspectives and shift
own attitudes (for more details on John’s case, see Rucinska and
Reijmers, 2014).
CONCLUSION
In this article we have suggested a different function for playing in
therapy: one of creating a dialog, instead of being a mirror of real-
ity. It shows that a therapeutic conversation is more than words.
Playing, as an embodied activity, adds and reinforces the narra-
tives, allowing new meanings to be created through object use
and interaction with the therapist. Thus, while the use of creative
methods and play is not new to systemic therapy, we believe that
in the case above play served a special role: not only did it enrich
the repertoire of the therapist, but it also allowed an embodied
dialog to emerge. In this dialog, objects did not serve as “stand-
ins” to be further analyzed but, rather, meanings attributed to the
objects were “offloaded” onto them to be further manipulated.
We also aimed to show that the EAPP, involving a concept
of affordances, can help us further understand the effects of the
“staying within play” approach. It can be useful for therapists
to understand that the traditional way play is characterized (as
representational) may be consequential and skew the focus of the
therapy, as therapists tend to look for inherent meanings in play
behaviors of clients and concentrate on what they symbolize. This
takes away from focusing on the interaction itself, where new
meanings and understanding between therapists and clients can
emerge.
As mentioned earlier, dominant cultural and therapeutic nar-
ratives make it difficult to see interaction and use of objects
in a play situation as a way of creating meaning; meaning is
supposedly already established or assumed. Thus, if we were to
operationalize what is going on in these therapies, we would intro-
duce mental representations of the semantic kind. The practice
of using play to “uncover meanings” of “suppressed feelings”
would be best characterized as involving represented “meanings,”
“inherent” in the subject, whereby theorizing about them would
be the right kind of practice to get to the mental life of the client.
Acknowledging the possibility of non-representational pre-
tense motivates careful consideration of how play in therapy is
to be understood, and broadens the spectrum of possibilities for
therapists to use play in their therapy sessions. While taking a rep-
resentational stance is tempting, it is not a necessary move, as an
alternative is present. What is safe to say is that there seems to be a
good fit between the EAPP and systemic therapy, in the sense that
both focus on the interaction, where they find mentality. As the
EAPP clarifies, interaction is a basis for mentality and is already
in some sense meaningful, and so no extra level of mentality
may need to be “uncovered.” The EAPP also gives an alternative
account to how, without focusing on interpretations and thinking
counterfactual thoughts but through engagement with objects,
the relevant changes in attitudes (shift of perspective) can come
about.5
Ultimately, with this paper we have aimed at promoting more
research of interdisciplinary kind to shed further light on the
implications that theories (and theoretical jargon) may have onto
practice, within and between various disciplines. We hope to
invite further research to be done in psychotherapy and cognitive
psychology from developmental as well as cultural perspectives,
using the notion of affordances and the EAPP.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was funded by the Marie-Curie Initial Training Net-
work TESIS: “Towards an Embodied Science of Intersubjectivity”
(FP7-PEOPLE-2010-ITN, 264828). With special thanks to Dan
Hutto, Alan Costall, Vasu Reddy, colleagues from the University
of Hertfordshire and the Interactie Academie for support received
in relation to the work presented in the paper.
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Conflict of Interest Statement: The authors declare that the research was con-
ducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be
construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Received: 14 May 2014; accepted: 03 February 2015; published online: 02 March
2015.
Citation: Rucinska Z and Reijmers E (2015) Enactive account of pretend play and its
application to therapy. Front. Psychol. 6:175. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00175
This article was submitted to Cognitive Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in
Psychology.
Copyright ©2015 Rucinska and Reijmers. This is an open-access article distributed
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