Table of Contents

Preface. Introduction. Observing Play Activity. 1. Structural Analysis of Play Activity. 2. The Adaptive Player. 3. The Conflicted Player. 4. The Rigid/Polarized Player. 5. The Extremely Anxious/Isolated Player. 6. Play Activity, the Player, and Development of the Self. References. Index.

Promotional Information

A template for interpreting change and meaning in children's lives through their play activity

About the Author

Saralea Chazan is in private practice in New York City and assistant professor of psychology and psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical Center. She has published widely in the field of play therapy.

Reviews

Profiles of Play is a good source for tracking the progress of young patients. Some of Chazan's authoritative statements on the meaning of play in the treatment process might make useful handouts to give parents of new child-patients who are bewildered why anyone should be paid for just playing with their troubled children. The whole book impresses one with the richness of the enterprise.
*Psychologist*

Chazan uses a structured approach to observational data and contextual involvement in order to make sure that specific circumstances will not stop her asking important questions about what is going on at any stage of the therapeutic process - with questions she needs to ask in order to understand. At this level, the tension between interpretation and encounter - which is the therapist's version of the thought/feeling conflict - may be prevented from interfering with the reader's own imaginative participation in what is being described. The result is an extremely vivid piece of writing.
*The Journal of the British Association of Dramatherapists*