Play and the metaphors of the body

Symptoms and the sense of reality are built out of the reified metaphors of the body. In clinical psychology we deal less with the frozen events of "objective reality" and more with the fluid experiences of a subjectivity. Metaphor is the language of experience. In this paper I will cover briefly a wide range of material including children's play configurations, children's fantasy narratives, libido development, the symbolic function, the role of metaphor in the construction of a world view, and the recognition of metaphor as an organizing concept in psychoanalytic theory and technique. In doing so, I will illustrate the relationship between play and the metaphors of the body.