Play as Entertainment, Psychology of

Play and Human Development

A seminal paper in the journal Human Development was among the first to question the “normative” story of human development on which developmental psychology is based. This kind of questioning inaugurated an inexorable uncoupling of our understanding of a whole range of human activities, including play, from developmental psychology as a satisfactory explanatory framework. For Susan Buck-Morss, developmental psychology had constructed a questionably standardized story of individual human development based, not just on an inevitable progression through “stages” common to everybody, irrespective of culture, but on a journey toward reason as the defining feature of individual self-actualization at the top of that hierarchy of developmental stages. So human activities other than fully achieved adult abstract reasoning were typically consigned to a lower status, and often viewed as things to be “outgrown.” Play as well as entertainment got consigned to a lower status, as secondary or only contributory to the more important progression toward rationality.

Play might be recognized as a necessary feature of preadult stages of human development and entertainment recognized as a necessary way of satisfying incidental adult needs, e.g., for relief from the pressures of adult “reality,” but neither can be understood as more than this—as constitutive features of contemporary culture—without recourse to ideas from outside [Page 508]developmental psychology's normative story. So the psychology of play as entertainment is not a matter of finding play's place within normative development, where “normative” means relating to an ideal model or standard. Instead, play can be understood (and we might recall Abrahams' street-corner performances again) as non-normative, as transgressive of the normative expectations, as returning in often unruly ways through both the child's and the adult's repeated recourse to entertainment forms in order to insist that play is not something that can be “outgrown,” and, moreover, that it is not adequately explained by terms such as escapism, which are themselves only meaningful as evocations of temporary respite from that normative story of development.

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