Erik H. Erikson - Toys and Reasons: Stages in the Ritualization of Experience

BY ERIK H. ERIKSON

Childhood and Society (1950, 1963)

Young Man Luther (1958)

Insight and Responsibility (1964)

Identity: Youth and Crisis (1968)

Gandhis Truth (1969)

Dimensions of a New Identity (1974)

Life History and the Historical Moment (1975)

Toys and Reasons (1976)

The Childs Toys and the Old Mans Reasons

Are the Fruits of the Two Seasons.

William Blake

for Joan

THIS BOOK is based on the Godkin Lectures which I gave at Harvard University in 1972 under the title Play, Vision, and Deception. The Godkin Lectures are under the auspices of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and are expected to apply themselves to some aspect of the essentials of free government. At that time, a rather improbable theme had struck me as elemental, namely, the relationship of childhood play to political imagination.1 But I would not have had the courage to enlarge on this subject had it not been for the fact that the Godkin lectureship that year included a seminar attended by a university-wide group of faculty members and students who were selected on the basis of ongoing work that seemed to meet my approach halfway. For the theme of my lectures is by its very nature most elusive in its varied manifestations, and can be made more comprehensible only by interdisciplinary work.

Among the readings used in the seminar was a talk on the Ontogeny of Ritualization in Man, which I had contributed to a symposium at the Royal Society of London in 1965.2 The concept of ritualization has proved so essential a link between the ontogeny and the phylogeny of human playfulness that I have expanded it for inclusion in this text.

I learned much from our seminar; but in the end it seemed best, in this slim volume, to try to restate primarily my main themes and to suggest their variable applicability. As far as I myself was able to come closer to political vision proper, I have carried the matter somewhat further in the Jefferson Lectures, which I gave in 1973 for the National Endowment for the Humanities.3 These lectures succeeded the Godkin Lectures in delivery and yet have preceded them in publication because of a special clause in the Jefferson lectureship. I hope that interested readers will be patient with a certain unavoidable overlapping in these publications.

My special acknowledgments must begin with the expression of my gratitude to Harvard University for the honor and pleasure of being invited back from retirement to give the Godkin Lectures. Dean Don K. Price of the Joseph F. Kennedy School of Government was a most attentive host. My former associate at Harvard, Pamela Daniels, organized the Godkin seminars with her special skill in inspiring collaboration in individuals from different fields.

My work on this book was much facilitated by a grant given by the Maurice Falk Foundation to the Department of Psychiatry at the Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco. My neighbor, Sherrill Brooks, typedand retypedthe manuscript with care and understanding. My friends Kai T. Erikson, Nathan Hale, Gerald Holton, Neil Smelser, and Robert Wallerstein have given the manuscript, or parts of it, critical readings. If I have not heeded all their warnings, the blame is mine.

Finally, as always, I thank Joan Erikson for her collaboration in my writings in many tangible and intangible ways. This book is dedicated to her because of her lifelong devotion to the grace that is play.

ERIK H. ERIKSON

Tiburon, California, 1975

OF ALL THE FORMULATIONS of play, the briefest and the best is to be found in Platos Laws. He sees the model of true playfulness in the need of all young creatures, animal and human, to leap. To truly leap, you must learn how to use the ground as a springboard, and how to land resiliently and safely. It means to test the leeway allowed by given limits; to outdo and yet not escape gravity. Thus, wherever playfulness prevails, there is always a surprising element, surpassing mere repetition or habituation, and at its best suggesting some virgin chance conquered, some divine leeway shared. Where this happens, it is easily perceived and acknowledged.

But even play, in its many spontaneous and ritualized forms, has been drawn into human conflict. Plato, too, speaks of young creatures; and what seems to become of play as we grow older depends very much on our changing conceptions of the relationship of childhood to adulthood and, of course, of play to work. Adults through the ages have been inclined to judge play to be neither serious nor useful, and thus unrelated to the center of human tasks and motives, from which the adult, in fact, seeks recreation when he plays. Such a division makes life simpler and permits adults to avoid the often awesome suggestion that playfulnessand, thus, indeterminate chancemay occur in the vital center of adult concerns, as it does in the center of those of children. But even the vast literature on childrens play reflects an intense ambivalence. Some of the play theories advanced seem to meet a passionate counter-Calvinist need to declare that all play at all ages must be altogether an end in itself, and a divine one, at that. On the other hand, developmental theories have marked the childs play as a prime necessity for growing and learning, while clinical theories have burdened it with the tasks of solving weighty inner problems indeed: we will come to that.

The designation play, however, is also used for deceptions and pretenses, which deny rather than transcend reality; and here I would single out two rather divergent trends in our civilization, namely, a new and widespread tendency to play at being playful, and to simulate, sometimes with the help of alcohol or drugs, a repertory of roles (say, in sexual and communal games), often making demands beyond the emotional means of most. On the other hand, there is the grim determination of adults to play rolesthat is, to impersonate to the point of no return their places in a cast forced upon them by what they consider inescapable reality.

Let me, in this introduction, concentrate on a trend in public consciousness that has seemed especially pronounced in recent national crises, namely, a general suspicion of playacting in high places indeed, and of the power of contrived scenarios not compatible with traditional national scripts. This imagery, so I noted as I was preparing for these lectures, was reflected with some regularity in the daily press. Having retired from Harvard, I could on occasion even manage to peruse the Sunday papers. And it did appear that themes somehow related to play in all its various meanings of grossly deceptive as well as imaginative make-believe characterized the mood of the commentators at that time, as if there were some pervasive sadness over the loss of playful leeway, some deep anger over the use of playacting for deception, and a universal, if vague, nostalgia for some kind of new vision. Now, it is obvious that any quotations from the daily press of a given year soon appear dated; yet they may also illustrate some tenacious long-range trend. And one may well wonder whether ever before in history commentators of stature have been preoccupied in equal measure with reality and irreality, with rationality and madness, with credibility, half-truth, and lying, and, above all, with scripts and scenarios. The American Dream, some insisted, was now a nightmare; credibility was said to be suffering not only from a gap but from an abyss; governmental deception, far from occasional, was felt to be spreading like quicksand under the feet of all.1