Play, Games, Sports

Play, games, sports, ritual, and dance have much in common and sometimes blend into a single activity.

The Natural Self

All activities of this kind require sincerity from the participants, a willingness to relinquish personal motivations beyond the activity itself. If you don’t play fair, you’re not really playing, and anyone who enters play with personal ambitions like pride or competitiveness isn’t truly playing. To participate in these activities, one must sacrifice one's ego, which closely resembles a religious attitude – in play and games, one loses oneself and, in a sense, one’s conscious ego.

Creative Play

A child’s play is a creative act of creation; a spontaneous story where the participants exist fully in the “now.” Those who play are at one with themselves, allowing creativity and unconscious energy to flow freely. When playing, one is truly oneself.

However, if someone is rigid, trapped in a complex, or otherwise preoccupied, it becomes impossible to let go of personal goals, the psychology of the ego, and fully participate – they cannot let the energy flow through them. Play, in this sense, has obvious similarities with dance. Creative and artistic individuals often possess a playful quality. A true artist is generally genuine and spontaneous, as without these qualities, she lose her connection to creativity. The childish and the playful are, or at least can be, two separate things.

When children play, they imbue external objects with their psychic energy, thereby bringing the objects to life. Thus, play is a deeply creative activity, a kind of creation process – things spring to life, and stories unfold spontaneously.

The Game of Life

The game is an expression of life itself (compare Ball and Theater). One must play with certain conditions that were not personally chosen, but rather with the hand of cards dealt. Both within us and in the external world, we encounter teammates and opponents.

The intense interest in sports and identification with teams can express the “archetype of the game,” which illustrates a kind of eternal conflict. In certain cultures, such as the Aztecs’, games and sports involved literal life-and-death stakes.

Ball Sports

If a ball sport appears in a dream, it is worth reflecting on the nature of the sport itself: for instance, if it’s volleyball, the ball must stay off the ground; if it’s croquet, the balls must always stay on the ground; is it a team sport like soccer or an individual one like tennis, and so on.

Games

In earlier human history, games and play were always linked to ritual – that is, the two were inseparable as activities: throwing rings over poles, getting a ball in a specific direction, rolling dice, and so on. von Franz suggests that the overwhelming majority of these game-rituals revolve around the symbolism of the Self (1997, p. 91).

Pastime

A certain stage in the alchemical process is referred to as the “children’s game,” and in that context, play primarily refers to passing the time – at that moment, there is nothing else to do but wait and occupy oneself like a child. One cannot rush or force results; time itself is part of the transformation. “All haste is of the devil,” as the alchemists said.

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