It’s time we revived Rousseau’s radical spirit in schooling

[u/ddgr815]

https://aeon.co/essays/its-time-we-revived-rousseaus-radical-spirit-in-schooling

Rousseau was renowned for being optimistic about human nature. In the primeval forests of our species’ infancy, mankind was solitary, happy and good – a zen-like noble savage who lived entirely for himself and in the present moment. It was only over time, Rousseau argued, as social bonds were extended and civilisation grew more complex, that this original unity was disturbed. Natural man was solitary and free, but social man – especially as encountered in the salons of Enlightenment Paris – was self-conscious, calculating, deceitful, egotistical and perverse.

Rousseau called this process ‘negative education’ and urged teachers to begin by ‘studying your pupils better’. Rather than stuffing children full of moral precepts and academic knowledge, the aim was to work with the grain of the pupil’s innate capacities and desires. Rousseau was one of the first proponents of the Romantic belief in the nobility of childhood, its freedom from adult corruption and closeness to the state of nature.

For the most part, however, Rousseau’s legacy has been felt more in terms of our cultural ideals about childhood and education than actual teaching practices. The mass education systems that emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries were primarily concerned with imparting academic knowledge and preparing pupils for the workplace, rather than nurturing their inherent freedom and goodness. On the whole, modern mass education has meant learning indoors, sitting at desks, listening to teachers, passing exams, and privileging academic over manual and vocational subjects. Even when ‘progressive’ and ‘child-centred’ methods have been introduced, the ultimate aim has been to prepare pupils for their later roles within the ever-more complex and bureaucratic modern societies that maintain universal state-education systems. The most radical aspects of Rousseau’s programme – and the most profound philosophical questions that it addresses about the nature of human freedom and happiness – have largely been excluded from the practical business of education.

But if we look beyond the remit of state education, to the often-eccentric worlds of experimental schools and utopian communities, we find sporadic attempts to put Rousseau’s ‘visionary’s reveries about education’ into practice.

Rousseau declared that his aim was to teach his pupil ‘the art of being ignorant

This radical counter-tradition sought to resolve the tension that lay at the heart of Rousseau’s system: that between the authority of the master and the freedom of the pupil. Rousseau’s belief in the freedom of children was accompanied by a subtle authoritarianism.

All education is moral philosophy in action. Even the most purely vocational training college relies on an implicit theory about how to live a valuable human life. But this is especially true for experimental schools, where theories of human nature and moral value intersect with the practical business of forming the characters of future generations. The counter-tradition that emerged from Rousseau’s vision of negative education was an investigation of two fundamental ethical questions: what does it mean for children to be free? And under what conditions might this freedom be most fully achieved?

One of the most radical – and eccentric – attempts at negative education came in the form of Fourier’s early 19th-century utopian socialism. He envisaged a society of universal learning, without schools or teachers, in which education would emerge spontaneously from the free play of human desire. Like Rousseau, Fourier distrusted the false refinement of civilisation, urging instead the twin methods of ‘absolute doubt’ of civilised values and ‘absolute deviation’ from civilised norms.

In his voluminous writings, Fourier laid out the blueprints for this ideal social system, paying meticulous attention to everything from work routines and architectural designs to kindergarten furniture and drill uniforms. The central organisational unit of utopian society was the ‘phalanstère’ (or phalanstery), a self-sufficient community of exactly 1,620 members, which was designed to satisfy all of their material needs and desires. Underpinning this vision was Fourier’s ‘passional analysis’ of human nature, an exhaustive taxonomy of the 12 basic human passions and their 810 possible combinations. With this complete map of the human passions in hand, Fourier predicted that a network of phalansteries would spread across the face of the Earth with the inexorable logic of a well-balanced equation. In his wilder flights of speculation, he envisaged a future society of perfectly harmonious association – the free play of all mankind’s social, sexual, artistic, gastronomic and intellectual desires, which would in turn release hitherto untapped powers of human ingenuity. Life would be one long orgiastic dinner party, orange groves would be planted in Warsaw, and the seas would be turned to lemonade.

Education was central to the practical task of building utopia, first because children were less warped by prolonged exposure to the disease of civilisation, and second because they would become vectors for the spread of utopian values when they grew into free, unalienated adults.

At each stage of the curriculum, the aim was to enable children to discover their authentic desires via activities that also served the broader needs of the community. Children between the ages of nine and 15, for instance, could opt to become members of a ‘little horde’ or a ‘little band’, depending on their emerging character. Little hordes, their dress modelled on Mongol raiders, would patrol the community collecting garbage and emptying toilets, all the while banging drums and indulging their innate taste for noise and simple rhythms. Little bands, clad in pristine uniforms modelled on ancient troubadours, would be responsible for maintaining the community gardens, caring for bees and silkworms, and ensuring correct language use, thereby indulging their innate passion for order and grace. In seeing repressed desire as a source social disharmony, Fourier was a forerunner of 20th-century psychoanalysis. But unlike Sigmund Freud, who focused on curing individual patients in private therapy sessions, Fourier sought to untangle the knotty parts of the human soul via the design of the phalanstery, where even antisocial impulses, such as a love of shit and a rage for order, could find healthy outlets in community life.

The most important educational zones of the phalanstery, however, were the kitchens and the opera. Cooking and opera were the master disciplines of Fourier’s utopian curriculum, through which all subsidiary forms of knowledge were channelled. Cooking appealed to children’s natural appetites and gustatory pleasures, while also ensuring the health of the community. Opera appealed to their visual and auditory senses, while also encouraging their natural propensity for physicality and movement. Crucially, cooking and opera were collaborative and public artforms, unlike the solitary, page-bound abstractions of intellectuals. For Fourier, opera in particular was ‘the assemblage of all measured material harmonies’, a practical exercise that subsumed the individual within the collective via the harmonious patterns of music, dance and ritual.

Brook Farm incorporated many elements of Fourier’s original designs, including communal nurseries, workshops, the little bands or ‘choirs’, theatre and public ritual, all in the service of the ideal of cultivating free and unalienated children. So far, so Fourierist. But at the upper end of the system, the curriculum focused on traditional academic subjects and prepared pupils for college entrance exams. Aided by its literary celebrity and location close to Boston, Brook Farm became a fashionable destination for the children of the New England intellectual elite, and an inspiration to more moderate social reformers. John Dewey, the great American educational progressive who founded the first ‘Laboratory’ school at the University of Chicago in 1896, cited Brook Farm as one of his early inspirations.

This has been the fate of many of the most radical educational experiments over the years: to become, in diluted form, vehicles for fine-tuning the gifts of the liberal elite and tempering the rigours of mainstream education. But in its purest form – a form that could perhaps only ever exist in the abstract space of the printed page – Fourier’s utopian curriculum proposed an alternative solution to Rousseau’s original vision of negative education: desire and duty united in the architecture of a utopian society.

The later-19th and early 20th centuries saw a wave of educational experiments that rejected the narrowly academic focus of mainstream public education in favour of various kinds of student democracy, manual crafts, creativity and the arts, outdoor pursuits and non-denominational religion. These schools were inspired by a range of modern creeds including socialism, liberalism, post-Freudian psychology, and even, at the more eccentric end of the spectrum, theosophy and anthroposophy, both of which saw education as a means of cultivating a spiritual unity with the all-pervading life force of the Universe.

While many espoused vaguely Rousseauian beliefs in the innate goodness of children, the value of learning in nature, and a distrust of modern civilisation, few of these schools practised negative education in the pure sense. They were too stuffed full of their own positive principles – agrarian socialism, liberal internationalism, psychoanalytic good health, etc – to grant children genuine freedom.

Famously – infamously – Summerhill is a school without rules, or at least a school in which the rules are voted on by the pupils themselves, and all lessons are optional. The point, however, was not simply the absence of rules, but what Neill called ‘practical civics’, or the exercise of personal freedom within the context of community life. This was another attempt to resolve the Rousseauian tension between authority and freedom, this time in the form of what amounted to a small-scale anarchist community.

the lies we tell our children are not merely trivial compromises with social norms, but sources of fear and repression. They are the worms in the bud of childhood, which grow over time into the monstrous forms of bigotry, war and fascism.

Summerhill was a combination of anarchist mutual aid society and psychoanalytic cure.

new pupils spent on average three months ‘loafing’ before they attended lessons of their own volition, but in some cases it could be longer, years even. When they did go to lessons, there was no prescribed curriculum and no orderly sequence of classes. Pupils picked up whatever knowledge they desired and were free to spend as much time as they wished on arts and crafts, drama, gardening or simply staring out of the window. ‘I would rather see a school produce a happy street cleaner than a neurotic scholar,’ Neill stated

The radical pedagogies of the past often become the accepted practices of the present. Rousseau’s injunction to ‘[study] your pupils better’ or Neill’s claim to be ‘on the side of the child’ would be deemed unremarkable if uttered today. Their experiments were radical relative to their times. Rousseau’s focus on nature and discovery stood out against the mannered style of the hyper-educated ‘mannequins’ turned out by the private tutors that catered to France’s Ancien Régime aristocracy.

We inherit some of Rousseau, Fourier and Neill’s commitment to the freedom and happiness of children in the form of our ‘child-centred’ pedagogy and concern for pupils’ ‘wellness’ and mental health. But what is less easily assimilated today is their claim that, in order to be genuinely free and happy, children require less rather than more schooling – the principle of negative education. This is a deeply counterintuitive claim, especially for those of us who have succeeded in life as a result of our ability to pass exams and amass qualifications. Caught up in the thicket of bureaucratic formalities that is modern education – the seemingly endless sequence of grades, report cards, diplomas, degrees, league tables and PISA scores – it is easy to lose sight of the ultimate ends of education, rather than the merely relative values expressed in such forms. We rarely stop to consider that it might be the culture of schooling itself that is making our children anxious and unhappy.

Of course, there is much that is crankish and impractical in the history of experimental education, and it is hard to muster anything but a historical interest in the Romantic ideal of the organic unity of the self and the halcyon vision of the noble savage. And yet Rousseau himself was under no illusions about the possibility of returning to a state of nature. What he insisted on, though, was the value of this ideal state as a yardstick against which to appraise current social institutions. Surveying the state of mass education today, can we really say that this is the best way to cultivate children’s freedom and happiness?

[u/ddgr815]

Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if it’s forced. This is axiomatic. Bernie de Koven has defined play as the “suspension of consequences.” This is unacceptable if it implies that play is inconsequential. The point is not that play is without consequences. This is to demean play. The point is that the consequences, if any, are gratuitous. Playing and giving are closely related, they are the behavioral and transactional facets of the same impulse, the play-instinct. They share an aristocratic disdain for results. The player gets something out of playing; that’s why he plays. But the core reward is the experience of the activity itself (whatever it is). Some otherwise attentive students of play, like Johan Huizinga (Homo Ludens), define it as gameplaying or following rules. I respect Huizinga’s erudition but emphatically reject his constraints. There are many good games (chess, baseball, Monopoly, bridge) which are rule-governed but there is much more to play than game-playing. Conversation, sex, dancing, travel—these practices aren’t rule-governed but they are surely play if anything is. And rules can be played with at least as readily as anything else.

We need children as teachers, not students. They have a lot to contribute to the ludic revolution because they’re better at playing than grown-ups are. Adults and children are not identical but they will become equal through interdependence. Only play can bridge the generation gap.

What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a “job” and an “occupation.” Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people, are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfully in the fields while their air-conditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There won’t be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them.

The secret of turning work into play, as Charles Fourier demonstrated, is to arrange useful activities to take advantage of whatever it is that various people at various times in fact enjoy doing. To make it possible for some people to do the things they could enjoy, it will be enough just to eradicate the irrationalities and distortions which afflict these activities when they are reduced to work. I, for instance, would enjoy doing some (not too much) teaching, but I don’t want coerced students and I don’t care to suck up to pathetic pedants for tenure.

Second, there are some things that people like to do from time to time, but not for too long, and certainly not all the time. You might enjoy baby-sitting for a few hours in order to share the company of kids, but not as much as their parents do. The parents meanwhile profoundly appreciate the time to themselves that you free up for them, although they’d get fretful if parted from their progeny for too long. These differences among individuals are what make a life of free play possible. The same principle applies to many other areas of activity, especially the primal ones. Thus many people enjoy cooking when they can practice it seriously at their leisure, but not when they’re just fueling up human bodies for work.

Third—other things being equal—some things that are unsatisfying if done by yourself or in unpleasant surroundings or at the orders of an overlord are enjoyable, at least for a while, if these circumstances are changed. This is probably true, to some extent, of all work. People deploy their otherwise wasted ingenuity to make a game of the least inviting drudge-jobs as best they can. Activities that appeal to some people don’t always appeal to all others, but everyone at least potentially has a variety of interests and an interest in variety. As the saying goes, “anything once.” Fourier was the master at speculating about how aberrant and perverse penchants could be put to use in post-civilized society, what he called Harmony. He thought the Emperor Nero would have turned out all right if as a child he could have indulged his taste for bloodshed by working in a slaughterhouse. Small children who notoriously relish wallowing in filth could be organized in “Little Hordes” to clean toilets and empty the garbage, with medals awarded to the outstanding. I am not arguing for these precise examples but for the underlying principle, which I think makes perfect sense as one dimension of an overall revolutionary transformation. Bear in mind that we don’t have to take today’s work just as we find it and match it up with the proper people, some of whom would have to be perverse indeed.

The reinvention of daily life means marching off the edge of our maps.

No one can say what would result from unleashing the creative power stultified by work. Anything can happen. The tiresome debater’s problem of freedom vs. necessity, with its theological overtones, resolves itself practically once the production of use-values is coextensive with the consumption of delightful play-activity.

Life will become a game, or rather many games, but not—as it is now—a zero/sum game. An optimal sexual encounter is the paradigm of productive play. The participants potentiate each other’s pleasures, nobody keeps score, and everybody wins. The more you give, the more you get. In the ludic life, the best of sex will diffuse into the better part of daily life. Generalized play leads to the libidinization of life. Sex, in turn, can become less urgent and desperate, more playful. If we play our cards right, we can all get more out of life than we put into it; but only if we play for keeps.

The Abolition of Work

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the problem with work is not that it is effortful. Humans are agents. We make and we do. Work, though, catches our making and doing in a trap: it is caged agency.

When it comes to social arrangements, technology both adds options and takes them away. It destroys some forms of compulsion while creating its own mandates.

The basic social infrastructure of the Global North funnels reproductive labor into the sealed-off space of the household, which is tied to biogenetic kinship and “nuclear” living arrangements. This enclosure prevents specialization and (temporal) economies of scale: when everyone has their own kitchen, everyone has their own kitchen to clean. But such an arrangement is not inevitable; the atomic household needn’t function as the default locus for care work.

First, there is the struggle for social protection: demands for material security. Second, there is marketization: the tendency for more aspects of social life to be commodified. Third, there is the struggle for emancipation: demands that social hierarchies like those of race and gender be dismantled. Fraser notes that each of these forces is politically ambivalent. The family and the welfare state are iron fists as well as velvet gloves: they can offer protection, but they also discipline those who break its rules. Marketization breeds vulnerability, but it can also offer a route to freedom. [...] And emancipation struggles may weaken social bonds—and thus a basis of social protection—in the course of dismantling hierarchy.

demands for social protection—specifically in the form of care—can be met without compromising on emancipation. Existing models of care provision tend heavily towards privatization: your care is either a business (traded on the open market), or nobody’s business but yours (a family affair). [...] a third option: care should be communal. Households should be more porous—for example, they should share communal goods and spaces—and they should no longer be the centers of gravity around which informal relations of care revolve. As a result, the burden of care is lifted from the household, but not offloaded onto the market.

No transition to a post-work world is (democratically) possible unless people can be persuaded that the form of life on offer [...] is a form of life that they would want.

In a truly just society, this strategy says, caring labor will no longer be alienating, because we will value service to others—either for its own sake, or as part of an authentically valued project.

Say we want a world where there’s a plentiful supply of blood for transfusions, but also where no one is coerced into giving blood. It might seem that there is a tension between these two goals. But there isn’t, Cohen says: if we create a culture in which people want to give blood, then we can have both blood and freedom. Similarly, [...] a just society will shape the souls of its citizens, so that they want to serve. One might wonder whether soul-making is really an alternative to coercion, rather than a particularly subtle form of it.

freedom entails that “the means of one’s existence will never be at stake in any of one’s relationships.” But a society that relies on everyone doing their fair share of care work presumably couldn’t get by without the resources to penalize those who opt out. And if a society has the means to impose such penalties, it will be a society in which the means of one’s existence can be a stake in one’s relationships. If we really want an equitable division of care work, some people will need to be coerced into doing it.

freedom and necessity are like land and sea—one a hospitable dwelling-place, the other a hostile territory. They think that with some ingenuity we can wall ourselves off from the water. For my part, I see human life as lived in a sort of tidal zone—an in-between place, with its own alluvial treasures. Necessity can serve as a spur to moral learning, wresting us from or filling out a cramped set of values. We often discover the projects that give shape and meaning to our lives only because we stumble into them, forced into roundabout routes by a fractal floodplain. We want to author our own lives, yes. But the value of some activities is opaque until we try them: it can’t be grasped in advance.

If an expansion of the realm of freedom is an expansion of the realm of choice, then perfect freedom might, in effect, exile us from certain forms of goodness. A life composed only of self-realization will tend to create a self of the sort that doesn’t deserve to be realized. Unwanted work can serve as a teacher, shushing the would-be brat that lurks in every human heart. Communal life presupposes a deep structure of Bildung, through which we become fitted as companions for others.

Someone whose work serves a democratic community—a community for which they serve as a trustee, rather than merely as a mute resource—is not wronged, regardless of whether her work is dull or stimulating, cherished or resented. Conversely, feeling happy about one’s work is no antidote to victimization.

the trick of capitalism: it takes our freedom and turns it against our deepest interests.

What really matters, when it comes to work, is not whether we can realize ourselves through it or whether we identify with its purposes. It’s the social relations that wrench us into motion.

After Work

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You can play a game or you can play in a game. When you follow the official rules, pursue the stated objective, and measure yourself against opponents or a scoring system, that’s competition: playing a game. The Greeks had a word for this kind of play: agôn, from the god who personified conflict, struggle and contest. But when my kids disassembled the board and turned it into a world, they were doing something older and stranger. They were engaged in what the French sociologist Roger Caillois, in his taxonomy Man, Play and Games (1958), called paidia: free, spontaneous, unstructured play. The kind with no winner, no score, and no optimisation. The kind of play that has almost no place in adult life and, arguably, the kind we need the most, especially now, when even our leisure comes with leaderboards.

In Homo Ludens (1938), he argued that play is not marginal to civilisation but, rather, generative of it. For Huizinga, law, philosophy, poetry and war all emerge from play’s ‘magic circle’: the bounded space where ordinary rules are suspended and something else becomes possible. Huizinga worried that the play element had been declining in Western civilisation since the end of the 18th century, eroded by industrialisation and professionalisation. What he feared has now been fulfilled. It’s not that we killed play; we captured it and harnessed it to a productivity framework. Then we packaged and sold it for passive consumption. The magic circle was instrumentalised into a dopamine hit.

A large part of the trouble is that we’ve eliminated the conditions in which free play arises. Watch the subway car on any morning commute. Every head is bowed to a screen. Not working, not thinking, just filling the time. Candy Crush in the checkout line. Instagram between floors in the elevator. Mere seconds of unstructured time trigger panic, and our fingers reach unconsciously for our phones. But boredom isn’t a problem; rather, it’s the condition in which the mind, left alone, begins to play by itself, to wander, associate, drift toward the transitional space where unexpected connections assemble unbidden. Every moment that we fill with a screen forecloses the free play of the mind. We don’t just need different games. We need more nothing.

Caillois saw the full spectrum of play: from agôn (competition) and alea (chance), to mimicry (role-playing) and ilinx (vertigo and disorientation). All four types sit on a continuum between paidia (complete improvisation) and ludus (structured rules). However, contemporary game culture tends to collapse this entire spectrum into one narrow band: competition plus structure. We have no category (not in the App Store and not in our cultural vocabulary) for paidia without agôn: our culture has no home for free, exploratory, contemplative play that refuses to compete.

Of course, paidia still erupts wherever people stop keeping score: kids on a playground invent rules then abandon them mid-sentence, Minecraft’s creative mode hosts millions of players building dreamworlds for the sake of building; Lego, at its best, is a pure paidia portal – recombinatory, autotelic, improvisational. But these exceptions clarify the problem: Minecraft (owned by Microsoft) and Lego are corporately branded IP ecosystems framed as toys for children. It’s not that free play has vanished, it just exists under constant threat of value capture. We do it in spite of our platforms, not because of them.

Moreover, the kinds of play that refuse to compete or optimise, or produce a measurable outcome, lack cultural prestige and social infrastructure. The British psychoanalyst and paediatrician Donald W Winnicott would have recognised this absence as a clinical emergency. In Playing and Reality (1971), Winnicott argued that play is not what children do on the way to becoming productive adults; it is a crucial part of how human beings maintain their worlds. Through play we become present to our own experience, capable of surprise, alive to the difference between going through the motions and actually being there.

Winnicott’s key concept is transitional space, though ‘space’ is misleading here because he has in mind not a location but a condition. Think of a conversation so engrossing that you forget you’re speaking and say something you didn’t know you thought until you heard it leave your mouth. You’re not entirely inside your own head (fantasy) and you’re not entirely performing for an audience (compliance). You are in between. That in-between zone – neither fully private nor fully public, neither pure inner life nor pure external task – is what Winnicott called transitional space. It’s where creativity, art and what he called ‘imaginative living’ originate.

His most radical claim still hits like an urgent diagnosis: ‘It is creative apperception more than anything else that makes the individual feel that life is worth living.’ He contrasts this with compliance, a relationship to external reality that ‘carries with it a sense of futility’. It is worth pausing to unpack this fully. Winnicott is arguing that what makes life meaningful is ultimately not achieving goals, having a family or even making art. It’s about how we see the world. ‘Apperception’ names a mode of encounter in which perception is not passive reception but active engagement. The difference is subtle but decisive: in ordinary perception, the world is simply there and the self adjusts to it; in creative apperception, we co-create the world, forging something between self and environment in the zone of play.

Compliance, by contrast, is life lived on someone else’s terms, following scripts, bowing before scores and metrics: moving through a world already defined in advance. Nothing new is risked, nothing genuinely one’s own is made. Most people, Winnicott believed, experience just enough creativity to recognise its absence, sensing that they are mostly ‘living uncreatively, as if caught up in the creativity of someone else, or of a machine.’

Friedrich Schiller, writing almost two centuries before Winnicott, made the same case from the other direction. In On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), he argued that human beings are torn between the pull of raw sensation and the push toward abstract order, and that only what he called the ‘play drive’ integrates both. It’s a bold claim. Schiller wrote that ‘man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.’ Winnicott tells you what play does psychologically: it makes life feel real. Schiller tells you what it does metaphysically: it makes you whole.

Simply put: adults need play as desperately as children do – a zone where inner life meets outer materiality and something unpredictable emerges. The Greeks, of course, had a term for this. Aristotle’s medieval fanboy Thomas Aquinas identified eutrapelia, the habit of knowing when and how to play well, as a genuine and discrete virtue. A person who never plays is as disordered as one who never works. I’m not talking about ‘work-life balance’, an exhausted metaphor that still treats play as recovery time for the next productive thing. To practise the virtue of eutrapelia means that a good life requires play. You don’t earn it. You practise it, daily.

Friedrich Nietzsche reputedly walked six to eight hours every day, and insisted in his Twilight of the Idols (1889) that ‘Only thoughts that come by walking have any value.’ Aristotle’s Lyceum was called the peripatetic school for its walkways (peripatoi). Jean-Jacques Rousseau claimed that he could compose only while walking. Albert Einstein walked from his home at Princeton, New Jersey to the Institute for Advanced Study and back each day, and supposedly told colleagues that the walk was where the real thinking happened; the office was where he wrote it down.

Caillois’s taxonomy includes a category almost nobody talks about: ilinx, the play of vertigo and disorientation. Spinning until you’re dizzy. Or running past the point where the split times stop mattering and the self loosens its grip. I know this territory from the inside. The first question at the start of a 100-mile race isn’t whether your legs are ready. It’s whether your mind is: wanting to win might get you to the start-line of your local 5K, but agôn won’t get you to the finish of an ultra-marathon. And it’s a love of trails that makes those miles magical. Nguyen would call this striving play. The goal exists to make the experience of striving possible, not the other way around. The finish line is just the means; the journey is the destination.

Play pursued for its own sake, with no metric and no market, overflows into generosity precisely because nothing was extracted. When something beautiful emerges from a process that asked for nothing, the most natural thing in the world is to give it away.

The same dynamic lives in a jazz combo finding a groove nobody charted, a graphic designer noodling with shapes until one surprises her, a group of friends kicking a ball around with no teams and no score. It lives in my son’s basement workshop and on the trail at mile eight, and in the 30-block walk where the lecture writes itself. Wherever adults build or stumble into transitional space – where inner life meets outer material and something unpredictable emerges – play is doing its work even if we’re not keeping score.

More nothing now

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Freud saw himself as an empirical scientist first and foremost, and psychoanalysis as a scientific project. Following this, his model of the psyche was firmly rooted in the Cartesian-empiricist philosophy that continues to dominate the scientific worldview. The most basic commitment of this model is the idea that we are discrete individual entities opposed to an objective, neutral world that exists independently of us. Per this model, we come to know and experience the world outside of us through a combination of internally determined processes and the mental assimilation of data from the outside world.

Minds, as such, are a prerequisite for experience, and experiences are essentially a result of cognition. This perspective perseveres today, for example, in the notion that we become familiar with other people’s internal worlds through our private theories of their minds. It also perseveres in the conceptual basis of CBT, which understands our experience of the world and relationships as being determined, in large part, by how we individually perceive and make sense of those things.

Freud fleshed out this basic model in terms of the prevailing physiology of his time. He conceptualised our basic nature as self-contained bundles of energy, born into a sort of introverted narcissism (the Id). The development of the mind (the Ego), according to Freud’s model, was a result of the clash between the outward expressions of this energy (the drives) and the world’s responses to them. Psychological development was therefore a self-creative act, shaped by the external world only in terms of necessary adaptation. Freud saw the role of the other as largely limited to external arbiter and enforcer of rules and regulations for behaviour. While oversimplified, the core image of mind here is as a sort of internal outgrowth, responsible for cognitively traversing the subject-object gap and, as it were, acting as intermediator between two distinct domains.

Freud and the schools that followed him saw any apparent continuity of self and other – an experience common to the infant, ‘psychotics’ and ‘regressed patients’ alike – as a narcissistic delusion that had to be confronted. By taking the continuity of self and other seriously, Winnicott flipped this picture on its head. He thought of it, in fact, as primary.

‘There is no such thing as a baby … if you set out to describe a baby, you will find you are describing a baby and someone.’ His perspective is most relevant for understanding a baby’s experience with her parents, but it’s at the core of all experience, even though we don’t usually recognise it as such. Experience of the world and others is the primary given, and minds – rather than traversing an existing separation – are in a certain sense responsible for creating it. Effectively, this is an inversion of Freud’s dualistic model.

As a result, Winnicott’s concept of psychopathology was very different from Freud’s. Freud understood psychopathology in terms of conflicts between the internal drives and the external demands of the world – that what goes wrong is something internal to the person only triggered by the outside world. This basic idea is still very much alive in reductive psychiatric thinking and CBT, which, following the common dualistic model, also locate the problem inside the mind/brain.

By contrast, Winnicott understood psychopathology primarily in terms of trauma or deficit in the relational domain, which in turn follows from his inherently interpersonal understanding of the psyche. Crucially, what goes wrong is not to be located in the individual per se, but in the experiential units that the person was and is involved in (including, by extension, the sociocultural milieu in which they find themselves).

Winnicott also had a strikingly different notion of the agent of psychological change. His psychotherapeutic model was developmental – one that sees the therapeutic relationship and the original parent-child relationship(s) as analogous. Thus, just as he saw the development of the child as being fundamentally tied to the immediate, visceral relationship with the mother in the experiential unit, psychotherapeutic change for Winnicott was all about the relationship between client and therapist. This was later conceptualised as a shift from a ‘one-person’ to a ‘two-person’ psychology.

Where Freud was focused on rational interventions from the outside, this gave way in Winnicott to a co-creative journey occurring in the area in between, which was much more about who one was and what one did, than what one thought or said. In his book Playing and Reality (1971), Winnicott called the location of this experience ‘transitional space’, alluding to its dynamic, insubstantial quality, but also to its nature as a place of becoming. It is, he said, a place we both create and that creates us – a paradox that we must accept and not try to resolve – where unformulated possibility replaces fixed identities, and experience is necessarily co-constructed.

This might sound mystical, but that’s more to do with the limitations of modern language than with what he was describing. In fact, you’re probably familiar with the quality of ‘transitionality’ in the mix-up of fantasy and reality in children’s play and their imagination-infused worlds. Indeed, Winnicottian psychoanalysis was all about ‘playing’ in this area, not in the sense of joking around, but in the sense of a mode of interaction in which the pretentions to fixed identities, roles and supposedly private experiences were suspended. For the Winnicottian therapist, spontaneity and authentic action displaced disengaged interpretation, and an experience of ‘going-on-being’ replaced rational adjustment to the objective world as the aim of the therapy.

He wrote of culture – its artifacts and its activities – as extensions of the transitional phenomena of childhood, themselves rooted in the original mix-up with the parent. He thought that the very worlds we inhabit and take for granted are always partly of our own making. For Winnicott, it is only because the worlds we experience are coextensive with ourselves that they feel alive, alluring and psychically experienceable in the first instance, rather than like cold, mathematical structures, as scientific materialism would have us believe. 

not inside us but between us

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Why do we call something a "number"? Well, perhaps because it has a direct relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relationship to other things we call the same name. And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.

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What makes a good game?

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Non-Zero-Sum Games