Play: between Violence and Ecology of the Mind

Abstract

The article reflects on the relations between communication, violence and play in the tentative to find their convergences, affinities and contrasts. Our relations, in fact, initially are put in dilemmas and paradoxes of such a high complexity that it often makes the ‘logical’ and ‘analytical’ instruments inadequate: and from here may arise a sense of impotence, anger, paralysis, but even a potent desire to control and find solutions to the events. Both of these roads are followed under the false alternative of violence. The culture of play instead propose (through its practices, but also in the theoretical works of Freud, Winnicott, Bateson, here summarized and revisited) a more creative and non-violent modality, closer to an ecology of mind and an aesthetics of emotions.