Sapiens are fulfilled only in play

Sapiens are fulfilled only in play

Properly understood, Freud's doctrine of infantile Xuality is a scientific formulation and reaffirmation of the fact that childhood innocence, as displayed in their delight with their body, remains wo/man's indestructible unconscious goal.

Children on one hand pursue pleasure and on the other hand are active in that pursuit. A child's pleasure is in the active pursuit of the life of the human body. What then are we adults to learn from the pursuits of childhood? The answer is that children play.



As a religious ideal childhood innocence has resisted assimilation into rational-theological tradition. Although there is a biblical statement that says something to the effect that unless you become children you cannot go to heaven, this admonition has affected primarily only mystics. However, poets have grasped this meaning in its philosophic-rational terms.

In his "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man" Schiller says that "Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays." Sartre says "As soon as a man apprehends himself as free and wishes to use his freedom...then his activity is play."

H. H. Brinton, modern American archaeologist, considers the essence of man is purposeful activity generated by desire. The perfect goal generated activity is play. Play expresses life in its fullest. Play as an end, as a goal, means that life itself has intrinsic value. Adam and Eve succumbed when their play became serious business.

Jacob Boehme, a German Christian mystic, concluded that wo/man's perfection and bliss resided not in religion but in joyful play.

John Maynard Keynes noted modern economist, takes the premise that modern technology will solve wo/man's need to work and thereby lead to a general "nervous breakdown". He thinks we already experience a manifestation of this syndrome when we observe the unfortunate wives of wealthy men who have lost meaning in this driving and ambitious world of economic progress. He says "There is no country and no people who can look forward to the age of leisure and abundance without dread."

From the Keynesian point of view it will be a difficult task to transfer our ambitions from acquiring wealth to that of playing. But for Freud this change is not as difficult because beneath the habits of work acquired by all wo/men lay an immortal instinct for play.

Quotes from "Life against Death" by Norman Brown