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THE ENCHANTED PLACE
The Memory of the Playspace
By Zsuzsa Barta
"Whoever remains unmoved, whoever cannot contemplate, or know the deep shudder of the soul in enchantment, might just as well be dead, for he has already closed his eyes on life."
(Albert Einstein)[1]
Introduction
The purpose of this study is to call attention to a powerful, and somewhat mystifying experience that I call ‘enchantment’. I will define, and explore the qualities of this experience, and will attempt to present the developmental process that is likely to be in the background of this emotional construct. I will argue that the enchantment-experience is connected to the ‘playspace’ (in Conversational Model)[2] and it is functionally important in affect regulation as it plays a self-soothing and vitalising role. Via reviewing a number of relevant analytical concepts and providing clinical examples, I aim to integrate the experience of enchantment into the body of psychotherapies and into the
mind-frame of psychotherapists.
Grasping the Concept of Enchantment
The experience of Enchantment, like many other deeply subjective phenomena, is challenging to describe in a scientific discourse.
Let me introduce a limited selection of definitions for enchantment. The Dictionary definition of enchantment is “delight; charm or put under a spell”. The word originates from the French enchanter[3], and from the Latin cantare[4]. The dictionary also lists the following synonyms: “power or quality of attracting: allure, allurement, appeal, attraction, attractiveness, call, charisma, charm, draw, enticement, fascination, glamour, lure, magnetism, witchery.” (Roget's II. 1995) In Wikipedia, enchantment is defined as “a magical spell, a charm or bewitchment, in traditional fairy tales or fantasy”.
Clearly, these definitions precise enough, do not take me any closer to the phenomena I am examining.
A really beautiful description by Andrews has some elements of my own idea of the experience of enchantment.
Humans recognised life in all things. Every blade of grass and flower had a tale to tell. In the blink of an eye one could explore worlds and seek out knowledge that enlightened life. Shadows were not just shadows and woods were not just trees and clouds were not just pretty. There was life and purpose in all things and there was loving interaction between the worlds. (Ted Andrews, 1993)[5]
This enchanted world, this experience is above all alive. Bennett strikes a more integrated chord in me when she talks about strategies to facilitate qualities of enchantment in life:
One of those strategies might be to give greater expression to the sense of play, another, to hone sensory receptivity to the marvellous specificity of things. Yet another way to enhance the enchantment effect is to resist the story of the disenchantment of modernity. (J.Bennett 2001)[6]
Indeed, this resistance motivates my study and my work.
I will use the term, ‘enchanted space’ to describe a complex, special experience, the expression of the innermost private, a wonderment filled joyous place. It is characterised by an unusual sensory intensity of colours, sharpened senses, intense positive emotions, warmth, intimacy and perhaps at times, it is topped with a touch of childlike feelings of magic. As P. Fisher describes it, it is a "moment of pure presence" (J. Bennett 2001). The perception of the outside world fills with positive affect, accompanied with a sense of cosiness, safety and the ‘all is well’ feeling. It is akin to a sensation of fullness, and a feeling of liveliness, as if “one's nerves or circulation or concentration powers are tuned up or recharged.” (J.Bennett 2001)
Sometimes it is indeed characterised by a changed sensation of time and space, just like in hypnosis. One of the most profound aspects of the enchanted space, in my opinion, is that we suddenly “recognise life in all things” (Andrews 1993)[7]. As Hobson notes when he writes about those special states of “self-forgetfulness”, “we seem to see into the life of things”. Seeing into things really opens up the meaning of those things far beyond the ordinary level of feeling laden images. We are now in the enchanted space. While the subjects of our perception are often the ordinary, the quality of the experience is not. Ordinary things are being seen in a very “personal way”, and in that space there is no fear and limitation.
Let me now start my journey into the mystery of enchantment by recounting some of my encounters with this experience.
The White of Christmas
My Own Experiences of Enchantment
During a sandtray demonstration a few months ago, (World Technique by Margaret Lowenfield) I was transported back to my childhood, to age 4. I was building the most beautiful castle with an elaborate water system running through it, ponds and creeks, underground secret tunnels, and stunning bridges with spiral staircases leading up and down to the hundreds of beautiful rooms and passages. I became alive and filled with wonderment.
The figures and objects that we were supposed to use to furnish our part of the tray were filled with life, emotion, beauty, mystery, colour and soul. They encapsulated the rich and magical substance of events that rushed back to me from my childhood.
For example the firewall at the end of my childhood street, was the most mysterious, and imposing piece of architecture. It both scared and fascinated me in the same time, it was alive. In fact all the places of my childhood have held the same magical quality that made them engaging and ever so fascinating to interact with. I recalled hundreds of scenes from my childhood which all had this overwhelming intensity and aliveness about them. The breathtaking beauty of a spinning kaleidoscope, the ambiance of a winter Christmas, when everything in me and around me felt beautiful, magical and was injected with a warmth of safety and a sense of the wondrous.
Objectively, the street where I lived was anything but poetic: it was an extremely busy road with trams, buses, cars and many trucks. Our apartment was on the third floor of a representative building of ‘Socialist Modernism’ with large bullet holes in it, left by the invading Russian tanks of 1956. No romanticism whatsoever. Still, the sense that everything was imbued with that ‘enchanted substance’ was the way I perceived the world.
The “Pleasure-place”[8]
“As if she never had seen the sky so blue,
The earth so green, the trees so freshly leafed:
For here, guarded by the high cliffs
That encircle this pleasure-place,
Autumn still spites the northern wind
And figs still ripen and oranges still bloom.”
It is clear that the space of enchantment has an intense positive affect.
It is about coherence, a sense of wellness and value that is assigned to the world, to the self. It is a core-experience within the self and it lights up the innerness as it filters through all the senses.
It is a transitional space where the real and the memory of a past-real (that has become inner), co-creates a special tone of the present. It is a ‘no-desire’ state; similar to the Winnicotian infant’s world who knows no desire because he has all, and is all.
The enchantment space is of the “intimate space” (Meares 1993)[9], with permeability with the playspace (Meares 2005)[10], which adds a kind of playful affect to it. The enchanted space has all the qualities of a healthy developed self, and some of the qualities of the playspace, the seed of self. There is an intimate quality of relatedness hovering over the enchanted space. The non-linear –“ fantasy thinking” that “goes on in the half shadows, or perhaps beyond awareness” (Hobson 1985)[11], characterises the experience.
Development of the Enchanted Space
I argue, that the enchanted space develops when the magical quality of the playspace can transfer into the mature intimate space, so the original animistic magical quality becomes integrated into the affect-landscape of the mature self. That affect tone will colour the intimate space and at times can be triggered at full intensity by the pattern recognition of metaphoric organisation in the memory (episodic, perceptual representational, or procedural by Tulving 1972)[12]. This mechanism is in the core of the enlivening function, the experience of enchantment fulfils in affect regulation.
We can speculate about the space of enchantment as a special construct of complex emotions first developing in the playspace, where “reality mingles with magic” (Mares 2005)[13]. The child in the process of play freely creates anything he wants. He is the creator of his world, free from limitations of the outer (in health). The ambiance of positive affect accompanies this process, as the world becomes his.
By 18 months, once the mother is recognized as an ‘Object’, we enter the realm of the social, the realm of the other-then-me. The following few years we visit both domains and the enchanted space can be transported from one to the other with ease. That is the time of the internalization of the playspace. The animistic thinking of the child creates a natural background for the magical to flow into the adaptive language, and thinking. During a 4-7 year period with increasing social interest, participation and “exchange” (Meares 1993)[14] the Intimate Space develops and the ‘Inner’ becomes silent, but can be brought into a conversation. The mature self then will contain the experience of enchantment as a partial memory of the playspace, and as an active, ever-present potential to reactivate the integrated form of the original experience.
Developmental Conditions
What do we need in order to develop this experience and then maintain it as a part of the narrative of the self? Naturally, all the conditions that underpin healthy self-development are also necessary for enchantment to be experienced.
Here, I want to pinpoint the most potent requirement: uninterrupted, reliably safe and continuous flow of positive affect that supports the symbolic play. Underpinning that, is the resonating Other, whose presence enables the affects and accompanying imaginations of free play.
If the enchanted experience becomes a dominant feeling in the playspace, if it is recurrent enough, then the enchanted tone becomes a part of inner life, part of the stream of consciousness. The enchantment experience then can flow into the intimate space and mix with reality. It can stay there as a potential for an imaginative, creative engagement, and also as an often dormant affect state, that can be activated.
The Activation of the Enchanted Space
Optimal conditions for this activation process in adult life are: safety, freedom from the pressure of time and responsibility, a sense of relaxation, absence of anxiety, physical wellbeing, and in general, space for innerness.
The activation of the enchantment experience is likely to happen via metaphoric similarities (Modell 2004) and according to requirements of self-regulation. “Metaphor functions as a pattern detector” (Modell 2004)[15] so that the sensory material, affect, imagery (affect and visual together), preverbal affect (vitality affects), bodily sensations, meaning, ambience of the old situation/relationship, are unconsciously being transported into the here and now.
The Freedom of the Playspace
The Function of the Enchanted Space is its enlivening effect. The play activity in the fantasy driven, magical playspace is not yet infused with reality. It is completely unbounded, untamed, ‘affect-me’ driven and expressed through ‘me-filled’ action, non-linear language, through the ‘rhythm’ of being (vitality affects). It is vitality itself, and if the qualities of the playspace make the transition into the intimate space, into the self, we have the basis for Korner’s “liveliness” (A.Korner 2000)[16]. Korner’s integrative work on liveliness is congruent with a mechanism that underlines the experience of enchantment:
To accept that an emergent or pre-representational self is a continuing aspect of experience throughout life may be to accept that shifting temporal forms and patterns represent an ongoing mental experience that colours lived reality. (Korner 2000).
Therapeutic Implications
I believe that the enchanted space is therapeutic, and I connect its healing value to its enlivening effect, to its hedonic tone and to its intimate quality.
Actively accessing enchanting images, memories, fantasies in many modalities of psychological intervention have a well-defined and well-deserved place. In Psychoanalytic traditions, particularly in the Jungian tradition for instance active imagination as a technique, and fostering fantasy thinking is well known and documented. This essay cannot be written without a tribute to Karl Jung whose whole working life was a fruitful journey into the integrated world of “transcendent mystery” and the “hard facts”[17] of observation.
Here, however, I want to draw on the Conversational Model particularly, believing, that the creation of an intimate space and within that the positive qualities of the playspace are inherently fostered in this modality.
Without going into much detail about the right ambience of the environment and the role of the therapeutic relationship in the process, let us just confirm that all attributes considered important in the setting are conducive to the experience of enchantment. The whole environment is constructed for deep engagement[18], a shared exploration, and specifically, for ‘play’.
The therapist’s own capacity for enchantment, his ability to balance both his role as an observer and his role as a participant, provide a background for the experience of the client. Peter Lomas writes :