PRETEND PLAY AND DEVELOPMENT IN EARLY CHILDHOOD (WITH IMPLICATIONS FOR THE

Pretend play reflects both the unique mental organization and the devel-opmental challenges of early to middle childhood, with a trajectory that parallels the monumental transformation of the toddler to the school-age child. Despite evidence for various forms of playing throughout the life cycle, the flowering of symbolic play in this phase is specific, essential, and typically transient in terms of its dominance in the life of the child. It reflects the simultaneous emergence, processing, and integration of the remark-able developmental advances occurring during this period, most especially the capacity to symbolize, in the service of the exponentially expanded psychosexual/social/emotional force field implied in the contemporary use of the term oedipus complex. Moreover, it constitutes a particular mental organization and ego state, with idiosyncratic mentation, affect regulation, and relationship to inner and outer experience, that accompanies the child’s gradual orientation to consensual reality. Subsequent access to some form of this state varies widely among individuals but is rarely fully comparable. P lay is a broad term for a variety of activities that can be observed in humans of all ages and in juvenile forms of many other species. In this paper, I am narrowing the term to apply to a very specific form of playing, known as symbolic, imaginary, or pretend play. Despite the trend away from linear chronology in the developmental literature in general and a specific recognition that different play types evolve as separate systems throughout childhood (Johnson 2006), there is a general consensus that pretending has a clear beginning, a period of dominance, and a demonstrabl