Playing with fire

This chapter explores the nature and function of play in psychotherapy treatment with high-risk adolescents. It asks what play in adolescent psychotherapy might look like, and what role it has in the treatment of adolescents in crisis. The chapter will consider how self-harm and other risk behaviours might be thought about as the collapse of play, and how the play-space of the therapy might be used to resurrect a psychic structure that can create the conditions to play and to sublimate psychic pain. The chapter will address themes of uncertainty, imagination, and creativity and consider play as in itself a form of risk-taking, particularly on the part of the therapist, for whom risk can become a straitjacket, prohibiting their ordinary playfulness. The chapter asks how we can maintain playfulness in ourselves as therapists when working with situations involving high risk and the anxiety it evokes: how do we play in therapy when we are scared? And how do we nurture playfulness in others?