Author name: Aanchal Bhatnagar | Founder | Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist

What is this title, you might ask.. I know, but don’t know either. (that’s basically what you can say about anything in Psychoanalysis to sound bougie). But let’s start somewhere- so, what is play for you? (sigh! the joy of asking awkward questions to put someone on the spot… ) However, isn’t that the charm of Psychoanalysis- to divulge us into gazing at the most ordinary page of our story with most fascination. Like a child watching a leaf fall from the tree, surrendered in a moment of both wonderment and excess! Aghhh.. what would I give to be lost in that kind of private play… wouldn’t you? WOULDN’T YOU… or are you too good for me? In case you didn’t notice, I’m pledged into understanding Psychoanalysis as a play with words- as an art of storytelling (Adam Phillips), an art of listening (Salman Akhtar), an art of interpretation (Freud). Did you notice the chronology is upside down? ** huffing **  catch up, Karen… we’re building a piece around play here! Anyhoo, the note of appreciation for Psychoanalysis’s own childlike wonderment aside (although I don’t think we’d be asking this question if it wasn’t for it…), when did you actually stop playing? #deep. #blackhole. #donotwanttogo. #activateresistance. Does someone know why we’re split when it comes to writing or thinking about our own (dis)embodied play? Why do we have to include a century-old discourse to talk about it? And is it even play if a thinker has to think it? This piece, despite my attempts at the opposite, is coming from a place of both curiosities, & deep sadness. A sadness reckoning an almost strategic, developmental loss. And then to write about curiosity & play, in a playful way, well, something’s amiss. So let me do the easier bit… let’s make-do with the concept of play psychoanalytically. Yeah well, I see you know a writing on play cannot be done without Winnicott, & Freud, & Bowlby and who not, and I know you’re watching how I would (fail to) compress this life-size work on play in a paragraph… Very clever, Karen. Very. Clever. Did I mention my toxic (loosely using) trait is handpicking unfathomable themes for the newsletter? But, a girl can, & must try. It might surprise you, but in psychoanalysis play is not seen as a leisure activity, it is not even an attribute of the child, it is not in the act of it- rather, play is a form of communication and expression that provides insights into the unconscious thoughts, feelings, and conflicts. Shocker, right? Let’s just prep our floaties as we jump into the shallow end of its Psychoanalytic iterations now. Something Old: So, to start from the beginning- let’s take a whimsical stroll into Winnicott’s microcosm, where the concept of play is never just a child’s pastime, but a working-through of the unabsorbed, overwhelming reality. Yes, literally, Winnicott believed that children play to master anxiety… (stay with this thought a second more, and you’ll agree). Now, imagine you’re the little you (disobedient, I’d prefer), brandishing your toy truck (gender neutral!). As you cater to yourself in that make-believe worlds, you’re not just passing the time—you’re crafting your reality. In Winnicott’s world, play isn’t just a distraction; it’s the theatre where the unconscious scripts unfold, where impulses are enacted, where sensual gratifications are allowed. But here’s where it gets juicy- for him, play isn’t just for kids. Winnicott saw play as the ultimate antidote to the drudgery of adulthood where inhibitions & vulnerabilities are unveiled. Something New: Now, have you heard of Jill Miller? No, I’m not just putting common syllables together, she’s a real person, in fact a student of Anna Freud.  It’s interesting we’ve learnt to be versed with the old more than the new, the alive. What does that say about play?! Anyhow, now picture that tiny (still disobedient, I hope) you, are handed a blank paper & a bunch of broken crayons. That’s classic Miller- compelling a canvas to invite the exploration of thoughts and emotions through various mediums, from art and music to movement and storytelling. Why I feel she belongs in the category of the ‘new’ is her attitude of inviting the patient to cultivate a sense of wonder and curiosity about the self. She ascribes certain features of play to the work of the therapeutic alliance- So somewhere between all of it, play becomes a therapeutic tool for the pre-analytic parts of the self. Something Blue: Let’s put a few men adjacent to each other on this. For Freud, play came to be pleasure seeking (a shift he made from seeing it as wish fulfilling); for Erikson (1963), play forms an ‘emotional laboratory’ in which the child learns to master his environment and come to terms with the world; for Piaget play is a movement from functional to symbolic order- that is, it carries within the capacity to symbolise objects for them to be manipulated as metaphors for the reality. And one can go in any direction from here, but what remains intact throughout is the lucid understanding of play in the psychic organisation. It is one of those rare concept explained simply & repeatedly in Psychoanalysis (pheww), and that is not to say it’s not exponentially complex, it is only to say that play holds in itself an undebatable element of narcissistic mastery over the (primal) preoccupation with the self & the object. Yeah, quite blue, right? Something Borrowed: Time we borrow play. What a strange thing to say, right? Neither can one borrow time, nor play, and yet the unconscious dares to string them together in a singular breath. I believe that’s what’s amiss.  What I mean is, “I hope all my readers are going to fall under the spell of some kind of curiosity. Reading a novel without curiosity is a deadly process- we all remember it from high-school” (Ian McEwan). That no matter how much this piece makes sense, logically, it can’t render itself a play-mate, when the internal deficit of curiosity is unaddressed.  P.S.

Do you like Pages better or Word? What a random question, right.. well, it might surprise you but yours truly spends a minute deciding which one to open to write the newsletter! (As if the ‘right’ format will make the ‘(w)righting’ seamless.) While on some level this may seem an absolute BS, but I’m a creature of habit and I have learnt to see value in the conundrum of ‘space & time’ for any form of thinking, being & feeling. Like, I can only write with Jazz playing at the back (and so plays Sinatra at this point); I can only be my therapist self when I’m in my chair. (I wrote about what happened to that chair, and that self, when the screen took its place, here.) Basically, I’m a cat, living in my own world of routines. While for Freud there’s no concept of time in the unconscious, there ought to be an organising agent that situates psychic continuity in the reality. For me, that’s the reverie of space & time. What I’m trying to build towards, is something quite simple, and hence rejected by the hustle & grind culture, or practically anything that is designed to render us anxious- like deadlines!! I’m talking about the rhythm of being. What is your rhythm of being? We never talk about it. I’d love to know, really? Do you wanna build a snowman?   All we talk about are the notes of music- we keep a checklist, we keep a tab on our productivity, we have a to-do list but there’s no app to measure how it all comes together. There’s no one coming to weave our notes of the mind into psyche. How could they? This reminds me of a podcast where the analyst (forgetting the name) made a clever statement- that “psychiatry is mindless, and psychology is brainless”. From where I sit, I hear in that quoted statement an inherent incompletion, a deep & wide gap.  The world without music, even of nature, is pierced empty; it gives an imagery of an abandoned, no-one’s land. A town that is all concrete without any semblance of life. Now cut paste this idea to the inner world & imagine how barren the psyche could feel without a rhythm. I never see you any more Come out the door It’s like you’ve gone away! (Sometimes I think about the titles I pick to write on, almost trying to make my life difficult. Anyhoo…) So, what is your rhythm? I was reading, a while back, The Rhythm of Music by Ogden (yeah, you’ll soon realise I repeatedly read a few thinkers). He opens the paper saying “In the course of this discussion, I will ask the reader to listen to his listening” (* weeping *— leave it on to the psychoanalyst to make things poetically difficult). He goes on to explain it (pheww) as “to listen to the ways he (the therapist) listens and hears listening to an analytic session”. Somehow, I find myself readily inviting of this idea for it opens the window for fiction & anonymity in therapy, in ways that otherwise a non-rhythmic role would not. To be able to transition from the listener to the listener’s listener, from the knower to the unknown, from the conscious listening to the reverie- basically, any transition or movement needs a rhythm, and any analytic listening demands this swaying. Now, I can slowly see my writing becoming more about analytic listening, than the inner rhythm. ** Digression shalt be my middle name ** But that’s perhaps the liberating format one needs in order to listen, read, write, think & be in the world of Psychoanalysis. To be able to flow, float and fuse is the work of rhythm; to be able to survive ruptures is the possibility of rhythm; to be able to reckon & reconcile is the goal of rhythm. Let’s just put it this way- Winnicott writes in On the Capacity to Be Alone, “the goal for the child is to be alone in the presence of the mother”, what our piece is brewing is to replace (not literally, if ever you take anything in psychoanalysis in literality), replace the mother with rhythm. The goal for the therapist, or the inner world, is to integrate in the presence of a rhythm.  ** yeah, this image is the pictorial representation of my capacity for integration. ** (Pause)   Return to reality and ask, “why should I take your word for it, Aanchal?” Fair enough! I expect nothing less after living with cats.   So let me put our favourite men in the field to use! — Freud– Okay, I don’t know if to stick the idea of Biorhythms to Freud or his bestie William Fliess, but it’s certain that this idea was conceived between them. Basically, the concept of biorhythm proposes human lives are influenced by rhythmic cycles of physical, emotional, and intellectual states recurring over 23, 28, and 33 days respectively, & that our behavior and performance fluctuate based on these purported cycles. Now, I don’t know why mister didn’t follow through this idea when most women can vouch for it (maybe that’s why!), however, the ideation around rhythms & psychic functioning goes long back. — Winnicott– If one is to read closely, for Winnicott, the experience of childhood, if not a rhythmic, is a disaster. From the rocking of the infant by the mother, to the child forming a sentence by tying sounds & syntax in a rhythm to the possibility of play made accessible via rhythmic movements, Winnicott’s understanding of psychic & bodily movements is tied via “the rhythms of his need for sleep and for wakefulness, of his need for engagement with others and his need for isolation, the rhythms of hunger and satiation, the rhythms of breathing and heartbeat” (1956). He goes on to build on the idea of ‘attunement’, one of his most significant contributions, parallel to the importance of rhythmic experiences in early development — Thomas Ogden- More than others, Ogden is dedicatedly invested in the idea of rhythm. For him, rhythm symbolises an

It’s been a while, hasn’t it?  The kind of while that stretches in memory, layered with all the things unsaid and the silence that wasn’t quite contemplative.  I could offer you the usual litany of explanations -life happened, chaos unfolded, the therapist needed therapy, people gifted me planners, etc, etc– but you and I both know that our resistances are always more interesting than our compliance! *wink wink* So let’s just say I was busy being human, with my spectacularly ordinary humanness. But you’re here. And I’m here.  And there’s something almost redemptive about that, right? So where do we start… perhaps, from the beginnings!  Three Humans Walk Into L&F… Lost and Found has grown!! Not in the Shark Tank way- scale! expand! multiply! * eww * But in the way a thought expands when we finally find the words for it- with intent, clarity and hope.  Three brilliant therapists have joined the L&F fold, and they’ve brought with them their own unique presence, clinical depth, and a capacity to listen to the unformed. If you’ve been with me through the onboarding process, you’d know that it isn’t their CV (which I did not open till very late in the process) or the credentials (though those matter, obviously), it is their ability to make the patient think that drew me in!  It’s Shruti’s ability to hear what one’s not saying, Mihika’s attunement with the patterns one’s drawn to like a moth to flame, and Akshita’s capacity hold the contradictions one brings to the clinic- I want to change but I’m terrified of changing, I need closeness but closeness feels unbearable, I know what I should do but I can’t seem to do it. It’s reassuring to witness their work. You know where to find them, right?! (→ here) And, here’s the thing about having a team, it splits you in ways you cannot fully get a grip of. Suddenly I’m not just the therapist in the room- I’m also the supervisor trying to hold someone else’s clinical uncertainty, the colleague debating theory over chai, the person who has to remember that payroll exists. This multiplication of roles is disorienting, and seldom confusing for everyone. But it’s also, and I’m surprised to admit this, deeply joyful. There’s something profoundly un-lonely about it.  also, I can finally use ‘we’ in my writings without it referring to just me and Anar! What else?!… LinkedIn! Ahh, we’ve been conducting experiments on our LinkedIn. I spent days scrolling through that damn platform of performance and envy, wondering if I’m doing life wrong. Like it’s 9am and I haven’t achieved anything today?!! Why can’t I just fall in love with LinkedIn, like a ‘normal professional’?, I have questioned myself periodically.  The closest I have come to an answer is, for me, it feels like showing up to a costume party in my athleisure- vaguely embarrassing, and set up for failure.  That blue thing is the superego’s canvas, where every post feels demanded by a particular gaze- thou must perform unambiguous professional virtues, and garnish it with the obligatory humility. *in robotic voice* So well, we’ve decided to move away from the “thrilled to announce, delightful to share, humbled to reflect”, to the “you know what?!”. About failures. About reckonings. About wonderments. About being a therapist at a strange organisation called “Lost and Found?”. Our LinkedIn is the pre-ChatGPT era inviting you to read and think, not read and applaud! * eww, never * Lastly, we’re soon to be three!!! Three years of this thing we’ve built… half by intention, half by accident that happened between me and you. Every time someone wrote to me “I thought I was the only one who felt that way” or ”You made me think of this paper I read…” or “I didn’t get you?!”, something became more than mine.  So the plan is to curate something to mark three years that actually acknowledges this inevitable collaboration. It wouldn’t be a celebration for its own sake, but a gesture toward the fact that ideas only live between people. That psychoanalysis, at its best, is a dialogue, not a monologue. That there’s a corner for everyone in this field. Details are coming soon! Meanwhile, is three too young or too old to be where we are?! *enters anxiety* PostscriptYou might be wondering where I’ve been. The truth is- here, but not here. Writing, but not writing. Caught in what I can only experientially describe as literary psychosis- repeating and binding stories in my head, that only I can see.You probably weren’t holding your breath waiting for this newsletter, which makes it easier to return with quality, over simple noise. There’s freedom in that- in returning without fanfare, in writing because you have something to say!Perhaps, it’s my way of saying, Thank you for reading… for being patient with the gaps. Thank you for staying long enough, with the good enough. P.S. If you’re looking for a therapist, our roster has expanded. New minds, new possibilities. Check the details. P.P.S. Anardana says ‘hello!’ as she basks in the sun and uninterrupted omnipotence… already working on the next newsletter!