In museums around the world, we can see the toys from the very old age, from even few thousand years BC. Children’s play is common to all cultures.

Studies have shown that children spontaneously use play as a means of equally solving inner conflicts and problems they come across. Play helps them master the skills important for life in a community. Play is also an important means of communication before they master the language. Looking at the energy children play with and the importance they give to their characters is actually a privilege of looking at their inner world in the most spontaneous and the most open way. Therapists understood the importance the play has for children’s development long time ago. Because of that, they have worked on different methods where play is used as a means of therapy.

Early experts in psychoanalysis saw the children’s play as an analogy to free associations that adults have and which reveal important contents from our inner world. A good contact (connection) with a play is actually a good contact (connection) with our selves.

Today, there is a play therapy. Most often, it is used when working with children. It allows us to use the elements of a play in a structured way in order to establish psychological diagnosis and solve children’s problems.

Play techniques, guidance and interpretation help children overcome and eliminate their current difficulties.

Given that some children in their developing stages find hard to identify and express their feelings, in therapy sessions they learn how to do that, to recognize their feelings and which feelings are actually there and what these feelings mean. Using specific methods we make the process easier. Children express their feelings in a different way from the adults due to insufficient knowledge and experience.

 

Possible working methods through playing are:

• drawing and fantasy
• story and poetry telling
• making things
• playing in the sand

Generally, among children, if we are to be comforted, there are far more temporary problems that disappear over time than real pathology. This type of therapy is intended exactly for these children.

The point is that we do not work on eliminating symptoms, but the very change in the child makes the neurotic symptom disappear… and the child is guided to use their potentials in better ways, thus opening the possibility of solving all future difficulties they will come across during their development more easily.