A Reverie in Play – Playing in Reverie: Discussion of Elena Molinari’s and Violet Pietrantonio’s “Working Through Transformations in Play”

ABSTRACT

Elena Molinari’s and Violet Pietrantonio’s “Working Through Transformations in Play” (2023) investigates the interrelations between emotional transformations in dreaming and reverie and emotional and embodied transformations in play by interweaving clinical observations, theoretical insights from Bion, Ferro, Ogden et al, and analogies from art. In this way, the authors show how the unthought can be transformed, dreamt, and thought within the analytic relationship. In this discussion, I take up the oneiric theme of Molinari and Pietrantonio by following a reverie which I experienced while reading the article. After a discussion of the nature and the significant merits of the authors’ project as well as addressing some conceptual questions and issues, I re-read these conceptual issues in the article as a necessary theoretical enactment of the topic of the article. When one is writing about the transformation of the unthought, this very act of writing is in itself a transformation of the unthought, and, hence, by necessity it shows the performative and conceptual hallmarks of such a transformation. This perspective on Molinari’s and Pietrantronio’s article is then enriched and amplified by connecting their psychoanalytic discussion of play and reverie/dream with philosophical, religious, cultural studies, artistic, and literary perspectives on dream and play. The discussion concludes with revisiting the interrelations of playing and dreaming regarding my reverie in relation to “Working Through Transformations in Play”.

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Hilmar Schmiedl-Neuburg

Hilmar Schmiedl-Neuburg is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and Privatdozent for Philosophy at the University of Kiel, Germany. He is Director of the Institute for Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Cultural Studies (IPPK), Berlin, Germany, and editor of the Y-Journal for Atopic Thought, Berlin. He is on the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis (MIP), Boston, the Sigmund-Freud-University, Berlin, and the John-Rittmeister-Institute for Psychoanalysis, Kiel. After his dissertation and his habilitation, he served as visiting faculty in the Departments of Philosophy at the Universities of Prague and Vienna, and as interim Professor in the Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy at the Medical School Hamburg. His publications focus on continental philosophy and intersections of philosophy, psychoanalysis and cultural studies. Within psychoanalysis, he specializes in Bionian thought. He trained in Gestalt therapy and in psychoanalysis.