Play and Its Role in The Mental Development of The Child

International Research in Early Childhood Education 3
Vol. 7, No. 2, 2016
Play and its role in the mental development of the

child
L. S. Vygotsky
First publication: Vygotsky, L. (1966). Igra i ee rol v umstvennom razvitii rebenka, Voprosy psihologii
[Problems of psychology], 12(6), 62–76.
Translated in 2015 by Nikolai Veresov (Australia) and Myra Barrs (United Kingdom)
Introduction: Vygotsky’s “Play and its role in the mental development of the
child” – a history of its translation
Vygotsky’s seminal text on play was originally given as a lecture at the Herzen Pedagogical
Institute in Leningrad in 1933, and is consequently a relatively late work. It is thanks to a
stenographic record of the lecture that this text, a key influence on psychological research on
play, has survived. This was Vygotsky’s major work on play and despite its brevity it has
continued to resonate in all discussions of play ever since its publication. But in fact it was not
published, or translated into English, until more than 30 years after it was originally delivered.
This history of the publication of Vygotsky’s lecture is as follows:
1966: Vygotsky’s lecture, “Igra i ee rol v umstvennom razvitii rebenka”, was published in Voprosy
psihologii [Problems of psychology], 12(6), 62–76.
1967: In the following year, the first translation into English of the lecture, entitled “Play and its
role in the mental development of the child” appeared in Soviet Psychology, 5(3), 6–18. Jerome
Bruner wrote the preface to this issue of the Journal. The translation is not credited but is almost
identical to that later credited to Catherine Mulholland.
1976: The same translation was republished in J. S. Bruner, A. Jolly, & K. Sylva (Eds.), Play: Its
role in development and evolution (pp. 537–554). New York, NY: Basic Books. Obviously, Bruner had
met it in the 1967 issue of Soviet Psychology for which he supplied the preface. This translation is
almost identical to that published in Soviet Psychology, but there is one sentence where it differs,
which contains what must be intended as a correction. The sentence reads: “Is it possible to
suppose that a child’s behaviour is always guided by meaning that a preschooler’s behaviour is so
arid that he never behaves with candour as he wants to simply because he thinks he should
behave otherwise?”. In the Soviet Psychology (1967) version, this sentence read “and that he never
behaves with candy [sic] as he wants to”. This obviously must have seemed to the editors an
improbable translation, and so they substituted “candour”—a plausible substitution (the word
makes perfect sense in the context) but unfortunately inaccurate.
1977: The Play lecture next appears in Soviet Developmental Psychology: An anthology (pp. 76–99).
New York, NY: White Plains. This anthology of articles from Soviet Psychology was edited by
Michael Cole. The translation here is clearly credited to Catherine Mulholland and the text used
is very close to the translation already encountered. However there are minor changes
throughout. For instance, at the end of the first paragraph, the original Soviet Psychology translation
reads: “Is play the leading form of activity for a child of this age, or is it simply the predominant
ISSN 1838-0689 online

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Vol. 7, No. 2, 2016
form?”. The end of this sentence in the 1977 translation reads: “or is it simply the most
frequently encountered form?”. Most of the changes in this 1977 translation are minor (e.g.,
“which are highly important” is replaced by “that are very important”; “he will go away” is
replaced by “he will turn away”). It should be noted that, although previous translations are
generally attributed to Catherine Mulholland, this is the first time that she is named as the
translator.
1977: This translation also appeared in 1977 on the Marxists Internet Archive. (The
translation—probably unchanged, though this is now impossible to check—now appears on the
Marxists.org website dated 2002 (see below) with its source given as Voprosy psihologii [Problems
of psychology], 1966): www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1933/play.htm
1978: A version of the Play lecture—“The Role of Play in Development”—appeared in Mind in

Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (pp. 92–105). Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
It has frequently been noted that this text is hardly a translation at all. Van der Veer and Valsiner,
in their Introduction to The Vygotsky Reader (1994), refer to this book as “the cocktail-type mixing
of various of (Vygotsky’s) ideas to fit the American audience” (p. 4).
In the Editors’ Preface to Mind in Society (1978), Cole and his fellow editors, Vera John-Steiner,
Sylvia Scribner, and Ekkeb Souberman, give the source of the Play lecture as Voprosy psihologii
[Problems of psychology] 1966. In a famous apologia they also make clear the “significant
liberties” they have taken with Vygotsky’s texts in this issue:
The reader will encounter here not a literal translation of Vygotsky but rather our edited
translation of Vygotsky, from which we have omitted material that seemed redundant
and to which we have added material that seemed to make his points clearer . . . . We
realize that in tampering with the original we may have distorted history (p. x).
Michael Cole’s Prologue to Rieber and Robinson’s The Essential Vygotsky (2004) makes clearer
why these drastic editorial changes were considered necessary at the time:
I received the Vygotsky manuscripts from Luria in the early 1970s. But even with the
expert help of able colleagues and a good translation to work from, I could not convince
the publisher with whom Luria had entered into an agreement about the publication of
Vygotsky’s work that the manuscripts were worth publishing. All of the problems that I
had experienced earlier remained in place. The work seemed dated, the polemics either
opaque or outdated, and the overall product certain to produce fiscal disaster, not to say
personal embarrassment.
Faced with this seemingly unsurmountable barrier, and with help from Luria,
whom I visited every year or two and corresponded with regularly, we created a selection
of readings from the two manuscripts he had given me to which we added several essays
that seemed of an applied nature so that it would be possible for readers to see how the
abstract theoretical arguments played out in practice. The result, which was titled Mind in
Society, was published in 1978. I heaved a great sigh of relief. (p. xi)
The “selection of readings” which is Mind in Society has become the most widely read Vygotsky
text in the world. It unquestionably established Vygotsky in the West as a major psychologist,
and began the “Vygotsky boom” as Cole terms it later in the Prologue. But it also substituted a

Vol. 7, No. 2, 2016
streamlined version of Vygotsky for the real texts, and it continues to be the case even today that
it is Mind in Society that appears on university reading lists, rather than, say, The Vygotsky Reader
(now available on the Marxists Internet Archive).
The version of the Play lecture found in Mind in Society is considerably shorter than the full
Mulholland translation that we have so far been concerned with. It is approximately 3000 words
shorter than the Mulholland text (which is 8400 words long) and is different from the
Mulholland text (and the stenographic record that is based on). It is also to a considerable extent
rephrased; the editors allowed themselves considerable latitude in their rewording of what they
regarded as Vygotsky’s “opaque” or “outdated” original texts. However, a full comparison of
this version with the Mulholland translation is not possible here.
2002: A differently dated version of the original Mulholland translation appeared on the Marxists
Internet Archive (www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1933/play.htm)
This is essentially the same Mulholland translation that we have encountered in Soviet
Developmental Psychology (1977) and in other contexts.
2002: Play and its Role in The Mental Development of The Child [Kindle Edition] (Catherine
Mulholland, Trans.). This is the same translation as that published in the same year on the
Marxists Internet Archive. However the source of the text is given here as the website All-
About-Psychology.com
It is therefore clear that the Mulholland translation of the Play lecture has been—with the
notable exception of the text in Mind in Society—the only translation available in print and online
for nearly 50 years. This fact is testimony to the strengths of this translation which is, in general,
faithful both to the original stenographic record, and to the complexities of Vygotsky’s thought
in this dense and often demanding text.
In our translation we used both Mulholland translations (1967 and 1977) as a combination “base
text” and focused particularly on those places in that text which did not offer a perfectly
adequate rendering of the Russian original. Our aim has been to provide an authentic translation
that should, above all, be faithful to the original stenographic record—Vygotsky’s words—with
all its repetitions and sometimes hurried arguments (to be expected in what was after all a spoken
text). This has involved us in some long discussions about particular sticking points, where
particular Vygotskyan ideas seemed not to be fully conveyed by either Mulholland translation, or
where the Mulholland translation was hard to follow.
The work of this translation has been carried out as an email conversation, which has taken place
over more than 18 months, between Nikolai Veresov, initially in Finland and subsequently in
Monash University, Australia, and Myra Barrs in London.

Vol. 7, No. 2, 2016
Vygotsky’s “Play and its role in the mental development of the child”
In speaking of play and its role in the preschooler’s1 development, we are concerned with two
fundamental questions: first, how play itself arises in development – its origin and genesis;
second, the role that this activity, play, has in development, and its meaning as an aspect of
development in a child of preschool age. Is play the leading form of activity, or is it simply the
predominant activity, in a child of this age?
It seems to me that from the point of view of development, play is not the predominant form of
activity, but is, in a certain sense, the leading line of development in the preschool years.
Let us now consider the problem of play itself. We know that a definition of play based on the
pleasure it gives the child is not correct for two reasons – first, because there are a number of
activities that give the child much keener experiences of pleasure than play does.
For example, the pleasure principle applies equally well to the sucking process, in that the child
derives functional pleasure from sucking a pacifier even when he is not being satiated.
On the other hand, we know of games in which the activity itself does not afford pleasure –
games that predominate at the end of the preschool and the beginning of school age and that
give pleasure only if the child finds the result interesting. These include, for example, sporting
games (not just athletic sports but also games with an outcome, games with results). They are
very often accompanied by a keen sense of displeasure when the outcome is unfavourable to the
child.
Thus, defining play on the basis of pleasure can certainly not be regarded as correct.
Nonetheless, it seems to me that to refuse to approach the problem of play from the standpoint
of fulfilment of the child’s needs, his incentives to act, and his affective aspirations would result
in a terrible intellectualization of play. The trouble with a number of theories of play lies in their
intellectualization of the problem.
I am inclined to give an even more general meaning to the problem; and I think that the mistake
of many age-based theories is their disregard of the child’s needs – taken in the broadest sense,
from inclinations to interests, as needs of an intellectual nature – or, more briefly, their disregard
of everything that can come under the name of incentives and motives for activity. We often
describe a child’s development as the development of his intellectual functions, i.e., every child
stands before us as a theoretical being who, according to the higher or lower level of his
intellectual development moves from one stage to another.
Without a consideration of the child’s needs, inclinations, incentives, and motives to act – as
research has demonstrated – there will never be any advance from one stage to the next. I think
that an analysis of play should start with an examination of these particular aspects.
1 This paper of Vygotsky is devoted to the development of play in early childhood. In the original Russian text
Vygotsky uses the word doshkol’nik (дошкольник)/preschooler which according to Russian educational system
refers to the age from 3 to 6 years. The Russian terms “preschool” and “kindergarten” refer to the same age period
and therefore is different from the English/Australian usage which refers only to the last year before school. In the
text “preschool age” and “preschool child” means a child at the age from 3 to 6 years, “very young child” is from
birth to 3 years.

Vol. 7, No. 2, 2016
It seems to me that every advance from one age-related level to another is connected with an
abrupt change in motives and incentives to act.
What is of the greatest value to the infant has almost ceased to interest the toddler. This
maturing of new needs and new motives for activity should be moved to the first plane.
Especially as it is impossible to ignore the fact that a child satisfies certain needs and incentives
in play; and without understanding the special nature of these incentives, we cannot imagine the
unique type of activity that we call play.
At preschool age special needs and incentives arise which are very important for the whole of
the child’s development and which directly lead to play. In essence, there arise in a child of this
age a large number of unrealizable tendencies and immediately unrealizable desires. A very young
child tends to resolve and gratify his desires at once. Any delay in fulfilling them is difficult for
the early years child and is acceptable only within certain narrow limits; no one has met a child
under three who wanted to do something a few days hence. Ordinarily, the interval between the
motive and its realization is extremely short. I think that if there were no maturing in preschool
years of needs that cannot be realized immediately, there would be no play. Experiments show
that the development of play is arrested both in intellectually underdeveloped children and in
those who are emotionally immature.
From the viewpoint of the affective sphere, it seems to me that play is invented at the point in
development where unrealisable tendencies begin to appear. This is the way a very young child
behaves: he wants a thing and must have it at once. If he cannot have it, either he throws a
temper tantrum, lies on the floor and kicks his legs, or he is refused, pacified, and does not get it.
His unsatisfied desires have their own particular modes of substitution, rejection, etc. Toward
the beginning of the preschool age, unsatisfied desires and tendencies that cannot be realized
immediately make their appearance, while on the other hand the tendency to immediate
fulfilment of desires, characteristic of the preceding stage, is retained. For example, the child
wants to be in his mother’s place, or wants to be a rider on a horse. This desire cannot be
fulfilled right now. What does the very young child do if he sees a passing cab and wants to ride
in it, no matter what may happen? If he is a spoiled and capricious child, he will demand that his
mother put him in the cab at any cost, or he may throw himself on the ground right there in the
street, etc. If he is an obedient child, used to renouncing his desires, he will turn away, or his
mother will offer him some candy, or simply distract him with some stronger affect, and he will
renounce his immediate desire.
In contrast to this, a child over three clearly shows his own particular conflicting tendencies. On
the one hand, a large number of long-lasting needs and desires appear that cannot be met at once
but that nevertheless are not passed over like whims; on the other hand the urge towards the
immediate realization of desires is almost completely retained.
Henceforth play appears which – in answer to the question of why the child plays – must always
be understood as the imaginary, illusory realization of unrealizable desires.
Imagination is a new formation that is not present in the consciousness of the very young child,
is totally absent in animals, and represents a specifically human form of conscious activity. Like
all functions of consciousness, it originally arises from action. The old adage that children’s play
is imagination in action can be reversed: we can say that imagination in adolescents and
schoolchildren is play without action.

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It is difficult to imagine that the incentive compelling a child to play is really just the same kind
of affective incentive as sucking a pacifier is for an infant.
It is also hard to accept that the pleasure derived from preschool play is conditioned by the same
affective mechanism as the simple sucking of a pacifier. This simply does not fit our notions of
preschool development.
All of this is not to say that play occurs as the result of each and every unsatisfied desire: a child
wants to ride in a cab, the wish is not immediately gratified, so the child goes into his room and
begins to play cabs. It never happens just this way. Here we are concerned with the fact that the
child not only has individual, affective reactions to separate phenomena but also generalized
unspecified affective tendencies. Let us take the example of a microencephalic child suffering
from an acute inferiority complex: he is unable to participate in children’s groups; he has been so
teased that he smashes every mirror and pane of glass showing his reflection. But when he was
very young, it had been very different; then, every time he was teased there was a separate
affective reaction for each separate occasion, which had not yet become generalized. At
preschool age the child generalizes his affective relation to the phenomenon regardless of the
actual concrete situation, because the affective relation is connected with the meaning2 of the
phenomenon, in that it continually reveals his inferiority complex.
Play is essentially wish fulfilment – not, however, isolated wishes, but generalized affects. A child
at this age is conscious of his relationships with adults, and reacts to them affectively; but in
contrast to early childhood,3 he now generalizes these affective reactions (he respects adult
authority in general, etc.).
The presence of such generalized affects in play does not mean that the child himself
understands the motives that give rise to a game or that he plays consciously. He plays without
realizing the motives of the play activity. In this, play differs substantially from work and other
types of activity. On the whole it can be said that the sphere of motives, actions and incentives is
less open to awareness at this stage, and becomes accessible to consciousness only at the
transitional age. Only an adolescent can clearly determine for himself why he does this or that.
We shall leave the problem of the affective aspect for the moment – considering it as given –
and shall now examine how the play activity unfolds.
I think that in finding criteria for distinguishing a child’s play activity from his other general
forms of activity it must be accepted that, in play, a child creates an imaginary situation. This
becomes possible on the basis of the separation that occurs, in the preschool period, of the
visual and meaning fields.4
This is not a new idea, in the sense that imaginary situations in play have always been recognized;
but they have always been regarded as one of the groups of play activities. Thus the imaginary
situation has always been classified as a secondary feature of play activity. In the view of earlier
writers the imaginary situation did not share those criterial attributes which are the defining
characteristics of play in general, but only the attributes of a particular group of play activities.
2 Vygotsky uses the term smysl (смысл) here.

3 Early childhood is the period from birth to 3 years.
4 Vidimoe i smyslovoe pole (visual and sense fields) in the Russian original

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I find three main flaws in this argument. First, there is the danger of an intellectualistic approach
to play. If play is to be understood as symbolic, there is the danger that it might turn into a kind
of activity akin to algebra in action; it would be transformed into a system of signs generalizing
actual reality. Here we find nothing specific in play, and look upon the child as an unsuccessful
algebraist who cannot yet write the symbols on paper, but depicts them in action. It is essential
to show the connection with incentives in play, since play itself, in my view, is never symbolic
action in the proper sense of the term.
Second, I think that this idea presents play as a cognitive process. It stresses the importance of
the cognitive process while neglecting not only the affective aspect but also the fact that play is
the child’s activity.
Third, it is vital to discover exactly what this activity does for development, i.e., what might
develop in the child with the help of the imaginary situation.
Let us begin with the second question, as I have already briefly touched on the problem of the
connection with affective incentives. We observed that in the affective incentives leading to play
there are the beginnings not of symbolism, but of the necessity for an imaginary situation. If play
is really developed from unsatisfied desires, if ultimately it is the realization in play form of
tendencies that cannot be realized at the moment, then elements of imaginary situations will
involuntarily be included in the affective nature of play itself.
Let us take the second instance first – the child’s activity in play. What does a child’s behaviour
in an imaginary situation mean? We know that there is a form of play, distinguished long ago and
relating to the late preschool period, but considered to develop mainly at school age, namely
games with rules. A number of investigators, although not at all belonging to the camp of
dialectical materialists, have approached this area along the lines recommended by Marx when he
said that “the anatomy of man is the key to the anatomy of the ape.” They have begun their
examination of play in the early years in the light of later rule-based play and have concluded
from this that play involving an imaginary situation is, in fact, rule-based play. It seems to me
that one can go even further and propose that there is no such thing as play without rules and
the child’s particular attitude toward them.
Let us expand on this idea. Take any kind of play that involves an imaginary situation. The
imaginary situation already contains rules of behaviour, although this is not a game with
formulated rules laid down in advance. The child imagines herself to be the mother and the doll
a child, so she must obey the rules of maternal behaviour. This was very well demonstrated by a
researcher in an ingenious experiment based on Sully’s famous observations. The latter described
as remarkable play in which the play situation coincides with reality. One day two sisters, aged
five and seven, said to each other: “Let’s play sisters.” Here Sully was describing a case in which
two sisters were playing at being sisters, i.e., playing at reality. The above-mentioned experiment
based its method on children’s play, suggested by the experimenter, that dealt with real
relationships. In certain cases I have found it very easy to evoke such play in children. It is very
easy, for example, to make a child play with its mother at being a child while the mother is the
mother, i.e., play at what is, in fact, true. The vital difference in play, as Sully describes it, is that
the child, in playing, is trying to be a sister. In life the child behaves without thinking that she is
her sister’s sister. She never behaves in relation to the other only as a sister would – except
perhaps in those cases when her mother says, “Give in to her”. In the game of sisters playing at
“sisters”, however, they are both concerned with displaying their sisterhood; the fact that two
sisters begin to play at “sisters” makes them both acquire rules of behaviour. (I must always be a

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sister in relation to the other sister in the whole play situation.) Only actions that fit these rules
are acceptable to the play situation.
In the game a situation is chosen that stresses the fact that these girls are sisters: they are dressed
alike, they walk about holding hands – in short, they enact whatever emphasizes their
relationship as sisters vis-a-vis adults and strangers. The elder, holding the younger by the hand,
keeps telling her about other people: “That is theirs, not ours.” This means: “My sister and I act
the same, we are treated the same, but others are treated differently.” Here the emphasis is on
the sameness of everything that is concentrated in the child’s concept of a sister, and this means
that my sister stands in a different relationship to me than other people. What passes unnoticed
by the child in real life becomes a rule of behaviour in play.
If play, then, were structured in such a way that there were no imaginary situation, what would
remain? The rules would remain. The child would begin to behave in this situation as the
situation dictates.
Let us leave this remarkable experiment for a moment and turn to play in general. I think that
wherever there is an imaginary situation in play, there are rules – not rules that are formulated in
advance and change during the course of the game, but rules stemming from the imaginary
situation. Therefore, to imagine that a child can behave in an imaginary situation without rules,
i.e., as he behaves in a real situation, is simply impossible. If the child is playing the role of a
mother, then she has rules of maternal behaviour. The role the child fulfils, and her relationship
to the object, if the object has changed its meaning, will always stem from the rules, i.e., the
imaginary situation will always contain rules. In play the child is free. But it is an illusory
freedom.
Although initially the investigator’s task was to disclose the hidden rules in all play with an
imaginary situation, we have received proof comparatively recently that the so-called pure games
with rules (played by school children and older preschoolers) are essentially games with
imaginary situations; for just as the imaginary situation has to contain rules of behaviour, so
every game with rules contains an imaginary situation. For example, what does it mean to play
chess? To create an imaginary situation. Why? Because the knight, the king, the queen, and so
forth, can move only in specified ways; because covering and taking pieces are purely chess
concepts; and so on. Although it does not directly substitute for real-life relationships,
nevertheless we do have a kind of imaginary situation here. Take the simplest children’s game
with rules. It immediately turns into an imaginary situation in the sense that as soon as the game
is regulated by certain rules, a number of possible actions are ruled out.
Just as we were able to show at the beginning that every imaginary situation contains rules in a
concealed form, we have also succeeded in demonstrating the reverse – that every game with
rules contains an imaginary situation in a concealed form. The development from an overt
imaginary situation with covert rules to games with overt rules and a covert imaginary situation
outlines the evolution of children’s play from one pole to the other.
All games with imaginary situations are simultaneously games with rules, and vice versa. I think
this thesis is clear.
However, there is one misunderstanding that may arise, and must be cleared up from the start. A
child learns to behave according to certain rules from the first few months of life. For a very
young child such rules – for example, that he has to sit quietly at the table, not touch other

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people’s things, obey his mother – are rules that make up his life. What is specific to the rules of
play? It seems to me that several new publications can be of great aid in solving this problem. In
particular, a new work by Piaget has been extremely helpful to me. This work is concerned with
the development of moral rules in the child. One part of this work is specially devoted to the
study of rules of a game, in which, I think, Piaget resolves these difficulties very convincingly.
Piaget distinguishes what he calls two moralities in the child – two distinct sources for the
development of rules of behaviour.
This emerges particularly sharply in games. As Piaget shows, some rules come to the child from
the one-sided influence upon him of an adult. Not to touch other people’s things is a rule taught
by the mother, or to sit quietly at the table is an external law for the child advanced by adults.
This is one of the child’s moralities. Other rules arise, according to Piaget, from mutual
collaboration between adult and child, or between children themselves. These are rules the child
himself participates in establishing.
The rules of games, of course, differ radically from rules of not touching and of sitting quietly. In
the first place, they are made by the child himself; they are his own rules, as Piaget says, rules of
self-restraint and self-determination. The child tells himself: I must behave in such and such a
way in this game. This is quite different from the child’s saying that one thing is allowed and
another thing is not. Piaget has pointed out a very interesting phenomenon in moral
development – something he calls moral realism. He indicates that the first line of development
of external rules (what is and is not allowed) produces moral realism, i.e., a confusion in the child
between moral rules and physical rules. The child confuses the fact that it is impossible to light a
match a second time and the rule that it is forbidden to light matches at all, or to touch a glass
because it might break: all “don’ts” are the same to a very young child, but he has an entirely
different attitude towards rules that he makes up himself.
Let us turn now to the role of play and its influence on a child’s development. I think it is
enormous.
I shall try to outline two basic ideas. I think that play with an imaginary situation is something
essentially new, impossible for a child under three; it is a novel form of behaviour in which the
child’s activity in an imaginary situation liberates him from situational constraints.
To a considerable extent the behaviour of a very young child – and, to an absolute extent, that of
an infant – is determined by the conditions in which the activity takes place, as the experiments
of Lewin and others have shown. Lewin’s experiment with the stone is a famous example.5 This
is a real illustration of the extent to which a very young child is bound in every action by
situational constraints. Here we find a highly characteristic feature of a very young child’s
behaviour in the sense of his attitude toward the circumstance at hand and the real conditions of
his activity. It is hard to imagine a greater contrast to Lewin’s experiments showing the
situational constraints on activity than what we observe in play. In the latter, the child learns to
act in a mental, not a visible, situation. I think this conveys accurately what occurs in play. It is
here that the child learns to act in a mental, rather than an externally visible, situation, relying on
internal tendencies and motives, not on motives and incentives supplied by external things. I
recall a study by Lewin on the motivating nature of things for a very young child; in it Lewin
5 The video link to famous Lewin’s experiment is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x4HWLMAwe8

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concludes that things dictate to the child what he must do: a door demands to be opened and
closed, a staircase to be run up, a bell to be rung. In short, things have an inherent motivating
force in respect to a very young child’s actions and determine the child’s behaviour to such an
extent that Lewin arrived at the notion of creating a psychological topology, i.e., of expressing
mathematically the trajectory of the child’s movement in a field according to the distribution of
things with varying attracting or repelling forces.
What is the root of situational constraints on a child? The answer lies in a central fact of
consciousness that is characteristic of early childhood: the union of affect and perception. At this
age perception is generally not an independent feature, but an initial feature of a motor-affective
reaction, i.e., every perception is in this way a stimulus to activity. Since a situation is always,
psychologically, accessed through perception, and perception is not separated from affective and
motor activity, it is understandable that with his consciousness so structured, the child cannot act
otherwise than as constrained by the situation – or the field – in which he finds himself.
In play, external things lose their motivating force. The child sees one thing but acts differently
in relation to what he sees. Thus, a situation is reached in which the child begins to act
independently of what he sees. Certain brain-damaged patients lose the ability to act
independently of what they see; in considering such patients one can begin to appreciate that the
freedom of action available to adults and more mature children is not acquired in a flash, but has
to go through a long process of development.
Action in a situation that is not seen, but only conceived mentally in an imaginary field (i.e., an
imaginary situation), teaches the child to guide his behaviour not only by immediate perception
of objects or by the situation immediately affecting him but also by the meaning6 of this
situation.
Experiments and day-to-day observation clearly show that it is impossible for very young
children to separate the field of meaning7 from the visual field. This is a very important fact.
Even a child of two years, when asked to repeat the sentence “Tanya is walking” when Tanya is
actually sitting in front of him, will change it to “Tanya is sitting down.” In certain diseases we
are faced with exactly the same situation. Goldstein and Gelb have described a number of
patients who were unable to state something that was not true. Gelb has data on one patient
who could write well with his left hand but was incapable of writing the sentence “I can write
well with my right hand.” When looking out of the window on a fine day he was unable to repeat
“The weather is nasty today,” but would say, “The weather is fine today.” Often we find that a
patient with a speech disturbance is incapable of repeating senseless phrases – for example,
“Snow is black” – whereas other phrases equally difficult in their grammatical and semantic
construction can be repeated.
In a very young child there is such an intimate fusion between word and object, and between
meaning8 and what is seen, that a divergence between the meaning field9 and the visual field is
impossible.
6 smysl
7 smyslovoye pole (смысловое поле; field of sense).
8 znachenie (значение; meaning).
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Vol. 7, No. 2, 2016
This can be seen in the process of children’s speech development. You say to the child, “clock.”
He starts looking and finds the clock, i.e., the first function of the word is to orient spatially, to
isolate particular areas in space; the word originally signifies a particular location in a situation.
It is at preschool age that we first find a divergence between the field of meaning10 and the visual
field. It seems to me that we would do well to restate the notion of one of the investigators who
said that in play thought is separated from objects, and action arises from thoughts rather than
from objects.
Thought is separated from objects because a piece of wood begins to play the role of a doll and a
stick becomes a horse. Action according to rules begins to be determined by thought, not by
objects themselves. This is such a reversal of the child’s relationship to the real, immediate,
concrete situation that it is hard to evaluate its full significance. The child does not do this all at
once. It is terribly difficult for a child to split off thought (the meaning of a word)11 from its
object. Play is a transitional stage in this direction. At that critical moment when a stick – i.e., an
object – becomes a pivot for severing the meaning12 of horse from a real horse, one of the basic
psychological structures determining the child’s relationship to reality is radically altered.
The child cannot yet split off thought from object, he must find another object to act as a pivot.
This expresses the child’s weakness; in order to think about a horse and to define his actions in
using the horse, he needs the stick as a pivot. But all the same the basic structure determining the
child’s relationship to reality is radically changed at this crucial point, for his perceptual structure
changes. The special feature of human perception – which arises at a very early age – is so-called
reality perception. This is something for which there is no analogy in animal perception.
Essentially it lies in the fact that I do not see the world simply in colour and shape, but also as a
world with sense and meaning. I do not see merely something round and black with two hands, I
see a clock; and I can distinguish one thing from another. There are patients who say, when they
see a clock, that they are seeing something round and white with two thin steel strips, but they
do not know that this is a clock; they have lost the ability to recognise objects. Thus, the
structure of human perception could be figuratively expressed as a fraction in which the object is
the numerator and the meaning13 is the denominator; this expresses the particular relationship of
object and meaning14 that arises on the basis of speech. This means that all human perception is
not isolated perception but generalised perception. Goldstein says that this objectively formed
perception and generalization are the same thing. Thus, for the child, in the fraction
object/meaning,15 the object dominates, and meaning16 is directly connected to it. At the crucial
moment for the child, when the stick becomes a horse, i.e., when the thing, the stick, becomes
the pivot for severing the meaning17 of horse from a real horse, this fraction is inverted and
meaning18 predominates, giving meaning/19object.
10 smyslovoye pole (field of sense).

11 znachenie slova (значение слова)
12 znachenie
13 smysl
14 smysl
15 smysl
16 smysl
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Vol. 7, No. 2, 2016
Nevertheless, properties of things as such are still significant: any stick can be a horse, but, for
example, a postcard can never be a horse for a child. Goethe’s contention that in play any thing
can be anything for a child is incorrect. Of course, for adults who can make conscious use of
symbols, a postcard can be a horse. If I want to show the location of something, I can put down
a match and say, “This is a horse.” And that would be enough. For a child a match cannot stand
for a horse; there has to be a stick. Therefore, play is not symbolism. A symbol is a sign, but the
stick is not the sign of a horse. Properties of things are retained, but their meaning20 is inverted,
i.e., the thought becomes the central point. It can be said that in this structure objects are moved
from a dominating to a subordinate position.
Thus, in play the child creates the structure meaning/21object, where the semantic aspect22 – the
meaning of the word, the meaning of the thing – dominates and determines his behaviour.
To a certain extent meaning23 is freed from the object with which it was directly fused before. I
would say that in play a child operates with meaning severed from objects, but that meaning is
not severed in real action with real objects.
Therefore an extremely interesting contradiction arises in which, in play, the child operates with
meanings24 severed from their original objects and actions –and yet operates with these meanings
inseparably attached to other real objects and real actions. This is the transitional nature of play,
which makes it an intermediate between the purely situational constraints of early childhood and
thought that is totally free of real situations.
In play a child operates with things as having meanings,25 he operates with word meanings,26
which replace objects, and thus an emancipation of word from object occurs (a behaviourist
would describe play and its characteristic properties in the following terms: the child gives
ordinary objects unusual names and ordinary actions unusual designations, despite the fact that
he knows the real ones.)
Separating words from things requires a pivot in the form of another thing. The child cannot
sever meaning from an object, or a word from an object, except by finding a pivot in something
else, i.e., by the power of one object to steal another’s name. From the moment the stick – i.e.,
the “other thing” – becomes the pivot for severing the meaning of “horse” from a real horse, the
child makes one thing influence another in the semantic sphere. Transfer of meanings27 is
facilitated by the fact that the child accepts a word as the property of a thing; he does not see the
word, but the thing it designates. So for a child the word “horse” applied to the stick means,
“There is a horse there”, i.e., mentally he sees the object standing behind the word.
At school age play is converted to internal processes, becoming part of inner speech, logical
memory, and abstract thought. In play a child operates with meanings separated from their real
referents (e.g., the horse). But at the same time, these meanings can only be separated through
20 znachenie
21 smysl
22 smyslovaya storona
23 znachenie
24 znachenie
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Vol. 7, No. 2, 2016
real actions with real things (the stick) To separate the meaning of “horse” from a real horse, and
to transfer it to a stick (which is the necessary material pivot to keep the meaning from
evaporating), and then to act with the stick as if it really were a horse, is a vital transitional stage
to operating with meanings alone. A child first acts with meanings as with objects and later
realizes them consciously and begins to think, just as a child, before he has acquired grammatical
and written speech, knows how to do things but is not aware that he knows, i.e., he does not
realize or master them consciously. In play a child unconsciously and spontaneously makes use
of the fact that he can separate meaning from an object, without knowing he is doing it – just as
he talks without paying attention to the words and does not know that he is speaking in prose.
Hence we come to a functional definition of concepts, i.e., objects, and to a word as part of a
thing.
And so I should like to say that the creation of an imaginary situation is not a fortuitous fact in a
child’s life; its first consequence is the child’s emancipation from situational constraints. The first
paradox of play is that the child operates with an alienated meaning, but does so in a real
situation. The second paradox is that in play he adopts the line of least resistance, i.e., he does
what he feels like most, because play is connected with pleasure. Yet at the same time, he learns
to follow the line of greatest resistance; for by subordinating themselves to rules children
renounce what they want – since subjection to rule and renunciation of spontaneous impulsive
action constitute the path to maximum pleasure in play.
The same thing can be observed in children in athletic games. Racing is difficult because the
runners are ready to start off when one says, “Get ready, get set . . .” without waiting for the
“go.” It is evident that the point of internal rules is that the child should not act on immediate
impulse.
Play continually creates demands on the child to act against immediate impulse, i.e., to act
according to the line of greatest resistance. I want to run off at once – this is perfectly clear – but
the rules of the game order me to wait. Why does the child not do what he wants, spontaneously
and at once? Because to follow the rules of the whole structure of the play promises much
greater pleasure from the game than the gratification of an immediate impulse. In other words,
as one investigator puts it, recalling the words of Spinoza: “An affect can be overcome only by a
stronger affect.” Thus, in play a situation is created in which, as Nohl puts it, a dual affective
plane occurs. For example, the child weeps in play as a patient, but revels as a player. In play the
child renounces his immediate impulse, coordinating every act of his behaviour with the rules of
the game. Groos describes this brilliantly. He thinks that a child’s will originates in, and develops
from, play with rules. Indeed, in the simple game of “sorcerer” as described by Groos, the child
must run away from the sorcerer in order not to be caught, but at the same time he must help his
companion and get him disenchanted. When the sorcerer has touched him, he must stop. At
every step the child is faced with a conflict between the rule of the game and what he would do
if he could suddenly act spontaneously. In the game he acts counter to what he wants. Nohl
showed that a child’s greatest self-control occurs in play. He achieves the maximum display of
willpower, in the sense of renunciation of an immediate attraction, in the “game of candy”,
where the rules of the game are that the children are not allowed to eat candy because it
represents something inedible. Ordinarily a child experiences subordination to a rule in the
renunciation of something he wants, but here subordination to a rule, and renunciation of acting
on immediate impulse, are the way to maximum pleasure.
Thus, the essential attribute of play is a rule that has become an affect. “An idea that has become

Vol. 7, No. 2, 2016
an affect, a concept that has turned into a passion” – this ideal of Spinoza’s finds its prototype in
play, which is the realm of spontaneity and freedom. To carry out the rule is a source of pleasure.
The rule wins because it is the strongest impulse. (Cf. Spinoza’s adage that an affect can be
overcome only by a stronger affect). Hence it follows that such a rule is an internal rule, i.e., a
rule of inner self-restraint and self-determination, as Piaget says, and not a rule the child obeys
like a physical law. In short, play gives the child a new form of desires, i.e., teaches him to desire
by relating his desires to a fictitious “I” – to his role in the game and its rules. Therefore, a child’s
greatest achievements are possible in play – achievements that tomorrow will become his average
level of real action and his morality. Now we can say the same thing about the child’s activity
that we said about things. Just as we have the fraction object/meaning,28 we also have the
fraction action/meaning.29
Whereas action dominated before, this structure is inverted, with meaning becoming the
numerator, and action taking the place of the denominator.
It is important to realise what kind of liberation from action the child obtains through play – as
when actions associated with real eating are translated into finger movements, for example. That
is, the action is performed not for its own sake, but for the sake of the meaning30 it carries.
At first, in a child of preschool age, action dominates over meaning31 and is incompletely
understood; a child is able to do more than he can understand. It is at preschool age that there
first arises an action structure in which meaning32 is the determinant; but the action itself is not a
sideline or subordinated feature: it is a structural feature. Nohl showed that children, in playing at
eating from a plate, performed actions with their hands reminiscent of real eating, but all actions
that did not designate eating were impossible to perform. Throwing one’s hands back instead of
stretching them toward the plate turned out to be impossible, that is, such action would have a
destructive effect on the game. A child does not symbolize in play, but he wishes and realizes his
wishes by letting the basic categories of reality pass through his experience,33 which is precisely
why in play a day can take half an hour, and a hundred miles be covered in five steps. The child,
in wishing, carries out his wishes; and in thinking, he acts. Internal and external action are
inseparable: imagination, interpretation, and will are internal processes in external action.
The meaning34 of action is basic, but even by itself action is not neutral. At an early age the
position was the reverse: action was the structural determinant, and meaning35 was a secondary,
collateral, subordinated feature. What we said about severing meaning36 from object applies
equally well to the child’s own actions. A child who stamps on the ground and imagines himself
riding a horse has thereby accomplished the inversion of the fraction action/meaning37 to
meaning/38action.
28 smysl
29 smysl
30 smysl
31 smysl
32 smysl
33 perezhivanie
34 smysl
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Once again, in order to sever the meaning39 of the action from the real action (riding a horse,
without having the opportunity to do so), the child requires a pivot in the form of an action to
replace the real one. But once again, while before action was the determinant, in the structure
“action-meaning”,40 now the structure is inverted and meaning41 becomes the determinant.
Action retreats to second place and becomes the pivot; meaning42 is again severed from action,
by means of another action. This is a repetition of the turning point leading to operations based
solely on the meanings43 of actions, i.e., to volitional choice, a decision, a conflict of motives, and
to other processes sharply separated from fulfilment: in short, to the development of the will.
Just as operating with the meanings44 of things leads to abstract thought, in volitional decision
the determining factor is not the fulfilment of the action, but its meaning.45 In play an action
replaces another action just as an object replaces another object. How does the child “melt” one
object into another or one action into another? This is accomplished by movement in the field
of meaning, which is not connected with the visible field or with real objects, and which
subordinates all real objects and actions to itself.
This movement in the field of meaning is46 the most important movement in play. On the one
hand, it is movement in an abstract field (a field that thus appears before voluntary operations
with meanings) but the method of movement is situational and concrete (i.e., it is not logical, but
affective movement). In other words, the field of meaning47 appears, but action within it occurs
just as in reality; herein lies the main genetic contradiction of play.
I have three questions left to answer: first, to show that play is not the predominant feature of
childhood, but is a leading aspect of development in the child; second, to show the development
of play itself, i.e., the significance of the movement from the predominance of the imaginary
situation to the predominance of rule; and third, to show the internal transformations brought
about by play in the child’s development.
I do not think that play is the predominant type of child activity. In fundamental, everyday
situations a child behaves in a manner diametrically opposed to his behaviour in play. In play,
action is subordinated to meaning;48 but in real life, of course, action dominates over meaning.49
Thus we find in play – if you will – the negative of a child’s general, everyday behaviour.
Therefore, to consider play as the prototype of his everyday activity and its predominant form is
completely without foundation. This is the main flaw in Koffka’s theory. He considers play as
the child’s other world. According to Koffka, everything that concerns a child is play reality,
while everything that concerns an adult is serious reality. A given object has one meaning50 in
play, and another outside it. In a child’s world the logic of wishes and of satisfying urges
dominates, not real logic. The illusory nature of play is transferred to life. This would be true if
39 smysl
40 smysl
41 smysl
42 smysl
43 smysl
44 smysl
45 smysl
46 smyslovoye pole
47 smyslovoye pole
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Vol. 7, No. 2, 2016
play were indeed the predominant form of a child’s activity. But the child would look like a
patient in a mental hospital if the form of activity we have been speaking of were to become the
predominant form of his everyday activity – or even if it were only partially transferred to real
life.
Koffka gives a number of examples to show how a child transfers a situation from play into life.
But the real transference of play behaviour to real life can be regarded only as an unhealthy
symptom. To behave in a real situation as in an illusory one is the first sign of delirium.
As research has shown, play behaviour in real life is normally seen only in the type of game in
which sisters play at “sisters”, i.e., when children sitting at dinner can play at having dinner, or
(as in Katz’s example) when children who do not want to go to bed say, “Let’s play that it’s night
time and we have to go to sleep.” They begin to play at what they are in fact doing, evidently
they are creating connections that facilitate the execution of an unpleasant action.
Thus, it seems to me that play is not the predominant type of activity at preschool age. Only
theories maintaining that a child does not have to satisfy the basic requirements of life, but can
live in search of pleasure, could possibly suggest that a child’s world is a play world.
Is it possible to suppose that a child’s behaviour is always guided by meaning,51 that a

preschooler’s behaviour is so arid that he never behaves with candy as he wants to, simply
because he thinks he should behave otherwise? This kind of subordination to rules is quite
impossible in life, but in play it does become possible; thus, play creates the zone of proximal
development of the child. In play a child is always above his average age, above his daily
behaviour; in play it is as though he were a head taller than himself. As in the focus of a
magnifying glass, play contains all developmental tendencies in a condensed form; in play it is as
though the child is trying to jump above the level of his normal behaviour.
The play-development relationship can be compared with the instruction-development

relationship, but play provides changes in needs and in consciousness of a much wider nature.
Play is the source of development and creates the zone of proximal development. Action in the
imaginative field, in an imaginary situation, the creation of voluntary intentions and the
formation of real-life plans and volitional motives – all appear in play and make it the highest
level of preschool development.
The child moves forward essentially through play activity. It is in this way that play can be
termed a leading activity that determines the child’s development.
The second question is: How does play itself change? It is a remarkable fact that the child starts
with an imaginary situation where initially the imaginary situation is so very close to the real one.
A reproduction of the real situation takes place. For example, a child playing with a doll repeats
almost exactly what her mother does with her; the doctor looks at the child’s throat, hurts her,
and she cries; but as soon as the doctor has gone, the child immediately thrusts a spoon into the
doll’s mouth.
This means that in the initial situation rules operate in a condensed and compressed form. There
is very little of the imaginary in the situation. It is an imaginary situation, but it is comprehensible
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Vol. 7, No. 2, 2016
in the light of its relation to a real situation that has just occurred, i.e., it is a recollection of
something that has actually happened. Play is initially more nearly recollection than imagination –
that is, it is more memory in action than a novel imaginary situation. As play develops, we see a
movement toward the conscious realization of its purpose.
It is incorrect to conceive of play as activity without purpose; play is purposeful activity for a
child. In athletic games one can win or lose; in a race one can come first, second, or last. In
short, the purpose decides the game; it justifies all the rest. Purpose as the ultimate goal
determines the child’s affective attitude to play. When running a race, a child can be highly
agitated or distressed; and little may remain of pleasure, because he finds it physically painful to
run, and if he is overtaken, he will experience little functional pleasure. In sports the purpose of
the game is one of its dominant features without which there would be no point – it would be
like examining a piece of candy, putting it in one’s mouth, chewing it, and then spitting it out.
In play the goal, to come first in a race, is recognized in advance.
At the end of development, rules emerge; and the more rigid they are, the greater the demands
on the child’s adaptive ability, the greater the regulation of the child’s activity, the more tense and
acute play becomes. Simply running around without purpose or rules of play is a dull game that
does not appeal to children.
Nohl simplified the rules of croquet for children and showed how this demagnetized the game,
for the child lost the sense52 of the game in proportion to the simplification of the rules.
Consequently, toward the end of development in play, what had originally been embryonic now
has a distinct form; the purpose – the rule – finally emerges. This was true before, but in an
undeveloped form. One further feature has yet to come, essential to sporting games; this is some
sort of record, which is also closely connected with purpose.
Take chess, for example. For a real chess player it is pleasant to win and unpleasant to lose a
game. Nohl says that it is as pleasing to a child to come first in a race as it is for a handsome
person to look at himself in a mirror; there is a certain feeling of satisfaction.
Consequently, a complex of originally undeveloped features comes to the fore at the end of play
development – features that had been secondary or incidental in the beginning occupy a central
position at the end, and vice versa, features that had been central in the beginning become
incidental at the end.
Finally, the third question: What sort of changes in a child’s behaviour does play generate? In
play a child is free, i.e., he determines his own actions, starting from his own “I”. But this is an
illusory freedom. His actions are in fact subordinated to a definite meaning,53 and he acts
according to the meanings54 of things.
A child learns to consciously recognize his own actions and becomes aware that every object has
a meaning.55
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From the point of view of development, the fact of creating an imaginary situation can be
regarded as a path to developing abstract thought. I think that the rule-making connected to this
leads to the development of actions, on the basis of which the division between work and play
becomes established – a division which is encountered as a fundamental fact at school age.
I would like to mention just one other aspect: play is really a feature particular to the preschool
age.
As figuratively expressed by one investigator, play for a child under three is a serious game, just
as it is for an adolescent, although, of course, in a different sense of the word; serious play for a
very young child means that he plays without separating the imaginary situation from the real
one.
For the schoolchild, play begins to be a limited form of activity, predominantly of the athletic
type, which fills a specific role in the schoolchild’s development, but lacks the significance of
play for the preschooler.
Superficially, play bears little resemblance to what it leads to, and only a profound internal
analysis makes it possible to determine its course of movement and its role in the preschooler’s
development.
At school age play does not die away, but permeates the attitude toward reality. It has its own
inner continuation in school instruction and work (compulsory activity based on rules). All
examinations of the essence of play have shown that in play a new relationship is created
between the semantic56 field – that is, between situations in thought and real situations.
(1) I have already demonstrated in an earlier lecture the nature of a very young child’s perception
of external behavioural rules; all “don’ts” – social (interdiction), physical (the impossibility, for
example, of striking a match a second time), and biological (for example, don’t touch the
samovar because you might burn yourself) – combine to form a single “situational” don’t, which
can be understood as a “barrier” (in Lewin’s sense of the term).
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Afterword: Issues encountered in translating “Play and its role in the mental
development of the child”
Whilst it would not be possible to draw attention to every point where this new translation
differs from the familiar Mulholland translation of the Play lecture, this section, in order to
exemplify the approach taken, lists some of the main issues which were encountered, and
compares the new translation with the Mulholland version (1977). The work of the new
translation was both to render the meaning of the original Russian text into English as faithfully
as possible, and also to avoid obscurities or ambiguities in translation. Here we exemplify both
types of situation and select a number of examples that demonstrate these principles at work.
1. The first instance occurs on page 6 of the new translation in the sentence beginning: “I am
inclined to give an even more general meaning to the problem”. This sentence continues “and I
think that the mistake of many age-based theories is their disregard of the child’s needs.” The
Mulholland translation reads here: “and I think the mistake of many accepted theories”.
The change from “accepted theories” to “age-based theories” provides a more accurate
rendering of the Russian original. It also underlines a general point that Vygotsky is making in
this part of the lecture, which is not well reflected in the Mulholland translation.
Vygotsky is making clear his view that theories of play based on a view of development as
moving from one age-based level to the next are inadequate. In the section of the text that
follows, he argues strongly that, though play development is related to age, the key factors that
precipitate change are to be found in the maturing of new “needs, motives and incentives” for
action, and in and the development of unrealisable “tendencies and desires”. These new affective
developments create a kind of transitional conflict—it is important that the desires are
unrealizable—to which play is a solution (“Play is invented at the point of development where
unrealizable tendencies begin to appear”).
A couple of other changes in the new translation at around this point in the lecture relate to the
same idea. The new translation reads, in the paragraph that follows:
It seems to me that every advance from one age-related level to another is connected
with an abrupt change in motives and incentives to act.
The Mulholland translation reads:
It seems that every advance from one age period to another . . .
This rendering does not reflect the original Russian well, and Vygotsky’s point about the how
levels of development reflect but are not entirely determined by age is lost.
Similarly, in our translation of the next paragraph Vygotsky’s argument reads:
This maturing of new needs and new motives for activity should be moved to the first
plane.
This maturing of new needs and new motives for action is, of course, the dominant fact .
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Vol. 7, No. 2, 2016
Here the Mulholland translation fails to register the fact that Vygotsky is arguing for needs and
motives (and desires) to be viewed as leading play development and “moved to the first plane”.
2. After that rather complex instance of a group of related changes, the second example is more
straightforward. It occurs at the point in the lecture when Vygotsky finds “three main flaws” in
the argument that imaginative play is a subset of play in general, rather than being—as he
believes—part of all play.
In the paragraph about the second “flaw in the argument” (the fact that play is presented as a
cognitive process), the new translation reads:
It [the argument] stresses the importance of the cognitive process while neglecting not
only the affective aspect but also the fact that play is the child’s activity.
. . . while neglecting not only the affective situation but also the circumstances of the
child’s activity.
This is less faithful to the original Russian, which is more accurately rendered in the new
translation: we have however underlined Vygotsky’s argument by italicizing “is” in the text.
3. The third example of quite a major change to the Mulholland translation occurs in the
discussion of the role that an object—a stick—plays in enabling a child to imagine a horse. The
Mulholland translation reads:
The child cannot yet sever thought from object; he must have something to act as a
pivot. This expresses the child’s weakness; in order to imagine a horse, he needs to
define his actions by means of using the horse in the stick as the pivot
The second sentence here is rather convoluted. The new translation reads:
The child cannot yet split off thought from object, he must find another object to act as
a pivot. This expresses the child’s weakness; in order to think about a horse and to define
his actions in using the horse, he needs the stick as a pivot.
Here the translation is faithful to the original Russian, and also avoids the clumsiness of the
wording in the second sentence of the Mulholland. The psychological process described here is
complex and the new translation aims for as much clarity as possible in rendering the line of
Vygotsky’s argument.
4. Similarly, in the fourth example (actually two related examples), we have chosen a passage in
which the new translation aims to make the sequence of a complicated argument clearer. The
original paragraph, which occurs a couple of pages later than the last example, refers to the same
process of “severing meaning from an object” by using a pivot. The Mulholland translation
reads:
Separating words from things requires a pivot in the form of other things. But the
moment the stick – i.e., the thing – becomes the pivot for severing the meaning of
‘horse’ from a real horse, the child makes one thing influence another in the semantic
sphere. (He cannot sever meaning from an object or a word from an object except by

Vol. 7, No. 2, 2016
finding a pivot in something else, i.e., by the power of one object to steal another’s
name.)
This has always been a tortuous part of the Mulholland translation, especially because of the
clumsy parenthetical sentence. Without altering much of the language, our translation moved the
parenthetical sentence and thus made the sequence of the argument in the paragraph clearer:
Separating words from things requires a pivot in the form of another thing. The child
cannot sever meaning from an object, or a word from an object, except by finding a
pivot in something else, i.e., by the power of one object to steal another’s name. From
the moment the stick – i.e., the ‘other thing’ – becomes the pivot for severing the
meaning of ‘horse’ from a real horse, the child makes one thing influence another in the
semantic sphere.
Here the words hardly change at all, but the clumsiness of the parenthesis (the origin of which is
obviously in the stenographic record) is smoothed out, and the process that Vygotsky is
describing is made clearer.
Three paragraphs later, Vygotsky returns to the same example, and again in the Mulholland
translation, the meaning does not come out clearly and the sentence seems rushed:
To sever the meaning of horse from a real horse and transfer it to a stick (the necessary
material pivot to keep the meaning from evaporating) and really acting with the stick as if
it were a horse is a vital transitional stage to operating with meanings.
The new translation aims to make the development of this complex idea much clearer:
To separate the meaning of ‘horse’ from a real horse, and to transfer it to a stick (which
is the necessary material pivot to keep the meaning from evaporating), and then to act
with the stick as if it really were a horse, is a vital transitional stage to operating with
meanings alone.
5. The fifth example relates to a point in the Mulholland translation where the original Russian
was obviously difficult to render, and Mulholland indicated, through the use of inverted
commas, that Vygotsky was using a metaphor.
In play an action replaces another action just as an object replaces another object. How
does the child ‘float’ from one object to another, from one action to another?
However the original Russian did not read “float”; the precise term Vygotsky used was “re-
melts”. On the one hand, the metaphor of “melting” was more graphic than “floating”—it
conveyed the idea of how an object/action can become several things in the course of play, and
how seamless these transitions can be. On the other hand, “melts” seemed a preferable
translation to “re-melts” which would be an obscure wording.
Our translation therefore reads:

Vol. 7, No. 2, 2016
In play an action replaces another action just as an object replaces another object. How
does the child ‘melt’ one object into another or one action into another? This is
accomplished by movement in the field of meaning
6. The last example comes from the point in the lecture where Vygotsky is arguing, in opposition
to Koffka, that play is not the child’s predominant or normal activity but the reverse, and that in
normal everyday situations the child behaves “in a manner diametrically opposed to his
behaviour in play”. Towards the end of this paragraph there is an obscure passage in the
Mulholland translation:
But it is hard to envisage the insane picture that a child would bring to mind if the form
of activity we have been speaking of were to become the predominant form of his
everyday activity – even if only partially transferred to real life.
The opening of this sentence is rather unclear and is not a true translation of the original
Russian. Our translation is more literal:
But the child would look like a patient in a mental hospital if the form of activity we have
been speaking of were to become the predominant form of his everyday activity – or
even if it were only partially transferred to real life.
This final section of the commentary has tried to exemplify the changes that the present
translators have made to the Mulholland translation in order to clarify obscurities, correct any
mistranslations, and in general to render Vygotsky’s meaning as clearly as possible. There are
numerous other smaller differences from the Mulholland text throughout the new translation;
here we have chosen examples that indicate the principles behind our changes. The Mulholland
translation, originally published in 1967 and revised in 1977, is now nearly 50 years old. It has
been in general a very satisfactory translation, and we acknowledge its strengths. However, we
hope that our new version of the Play lecture, which is closer to Vygotsky’s original, is more
accessible and more expressive of the meanings of this seminal text.
Translators
Dr. Nikolai Veresov is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Education, Monash University,
Australia. He has got his first PhD degree in Moscow in 1990 and started his academic career in
Murmansk (Russia) as a senior lecturer (1991–1993) and the Head of Department of Early
Childhood (1993–1997). The second PhD was obtained in University of Oulu (Finland) in 1998.
From 1999 to 2011 he had been affiliated to Kajaani Teacher Training Department (Finland) as a
Senior Researcher and the Scientific Director of the international projects. He published five
books and over 60 articles available in 10 languages. His area of interests is development in early
years, cultural-historical theory, and research methodology.
Correspondence: nikolai.veresov@monash.edu
Dr. Myra Barrs is a freelance writer, consultant, and researcher. She was previously director of
the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education, (London, United Kingdom), and visiting Professor
at the University of East London. Her freelance research has included projects on “Assessing
Learning in Creative Contexts” (2006–2008, CfBT, United Kingdom), and on “Educational
Blogs and their Effects on Pupils’ Writing” (2012–2014, CfBT). She is currently a consultant to
the Open University, developing courses on early years practice in Italian nursery schools. She is
the author, coauthor, and editor of numerous publications including The Primary Language Record

Vol. 7, No. 2, 2016
(1988), Teaching world literature in the Primary School (QCA, 2006), The Reader in the Writer (CLPE,
2001), This Book is Not About Drama (Pembroke Publications, 2012) and Making Poetry Happen
(Bloomsbury, 2014). Her other publications include articles on assessment, writing development
and imaginative play.
Correspondence: myra.barrs@zen.co.uk


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International Research in Early Childhood Education 3

Vol. 7, No. 2, 2016

Play and its role in the mental development of the

This history of the publication of Vygotsky’s lecture is as follows:

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1978: A version of the Play lecture—“The Role of Play in Development”—appeared in Mind in

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2 Vygotsky uses the term smysl (смысл) here.

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5 The video link to famous Lewin’s experiment is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x4HWLMAwe8

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10 smyslovoye pole (field of sense).

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Is it possible to suppose that a child’s behaviour is always guided by meaning,51 that a

The play-development relationship can be compared with the instruction-development

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In play the goal, to come first in a race, is recognized in advance.

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The Mulholland translation reads:

It seems that every advance from one age period to another . . .

Similarly, in our translation of the next paragraph Vygotsky’s argument reads:

The Mulholland translation reads:

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The Mulholland translation reads:

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The Mulholland translation reads:

Our translation therefore reads:

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