Playing as a generational link: cultural and psychic transmission

Abstract

This article investigates play as a generational link, emphasizing its relevance for understanding both culture and subjectivity. From Johan Huizinga’s conception of play as an anthropological foundation of culture to psychoanalysis, where play becomes a constitutive experience, the text articulates Donald Winnicott’s clinical perspective, René Kaës’s formulations on generational transmission, and Freud’s work, which allows us to recognize analysis as a game of discovery. In conclusion, it is argued that play constitutes an indispensable cultural and psychic heritage, as significant as any material legacy, capable of transmitting values, shaping subjectivities, and opening, within the clinic, a space for reinscription and transformation.