Playing and ethics: moral development through intersubjective dreaming

Abstract

This paper rethinks the superego as an emergent ethical structure, a ‘contact barrier’ shaped within the analytic field. Drawing on two child psychoanalytic treatments, the author demonstrates how mutual play becomes a dreaming space where persecutory guilt and uncontained destructiveness are transformed into moral responsibility and ethical meaning. In the first case, a bereaved boy burdened by the guilt of his brother’s suicide enacts a courtroom drama, in which he moves between the roles of prosecutor, judge, and eventually defender. Through this shared fantasy, the analyst models a fair and compassionate stance that allows the child to symbolically metabolise guilt and begin to mourn. In the second case, a boy who survived clinical near-death and invasive neonatal interventions projects undifferentiated destructiveness through fantasies involving Death Eaters and Voldemort (from Harry Potter). As Voldemort is reimagined, moving from predator to reflective creator, the child begins to symbolise moral agency, transforming annihilating dread into relational play. These cases support a reconceptualisation of the superego as a co-constructed membrane of ethical meaning and a transformative psychical ‘group leader’. Rather than enforcing prohibition, through intersubjective dreaming the superego emerges as a dynamic function that organises aggression, love, and responsibility within the therapeutic process.