Abstract
Memory provides the narrative with adequate roots in events that have taken place, even if, as has been demonstrated, memory itself is also a construction of reality. But an account not only contains a reference to events that have taken place, but also to possible events, i.e., events that could have happened but have not happened. This reference to an imagined reality and to possible worlds is favored by the development of playful activity and by the role of play in the development of thought.
Taking as its starting point the Piagetian studies on play as an activity based on mastering unusual events and studies on the role played by the adult–child play relationship, the chapter highlights the biphasic structure between constancy and variability. The play brings to the thought and the narration both the imaginative aspect of the possibility and the element of the unexpected. This means that one of the aims of the story is to solve a problem.
Narrative, therefore, has an important origin in play, but memory is just as important in producing the stories of memories and bringing out the memories told. It is thanks to these two important origins that the stories are so committed to respecting, at least to a certain extent, both the criteria of correspondence (because this is what is asked of the memory, even if it does not guarantee it to us), and those of coherence and verisimilitude (because it is the task of the symbolic play to create a new world endowed with its own laws).
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Notes
- 1.
This state is well described by Winnicott in his essay “The capacity to be alone,” where the great English psychoanalyst describes a situation in which the child is alone in the presence of his mother. Still the child is not able to separate and be without her. However, if he has internalized a sufficiently good relationship with his mother, and if she is present, he manages to be alone (Winnicott 1958). Winnicott (1971) also expressed a similar concept in Play and Reality where he specified how play presupposes in the child a relaxation of physical excitement and being alone in the presence of someone he loves (Winnicott 1971, 102).
- 2.
The notion of a phase is quite controversial today. I use it to follow the Piagetian reconstruction with greater adherence, especially as regards the aesthetic dimension in the process of knowledge and the relationship that is created between the symbolic and narrative periods. For the purposes of this discussion, it is not essential to come to a decision on whether or not states exist, but only to clarify what is the evolutionary path taken by the child.
- 3.
J. Watson (1976, 332) highlights how these contingent relationships in which the child discovers that “doing A” “provokes B”, are the basis of what he calls a playful scheme that attracts towards the interaction with the caregivers will take the form of a real play.
- 4.
Generalizing assimilation is the function that allows the child to generalize patterns of action from the relationship with the single object to relationships with other objects that have some resemblance to the original one.
- 5.
Lorenz (1976) speaks, about some animals (such as the crow corvus corax or, among mammals, the rat epimys norvegicus), about the curiosity as “an irresistible longing for new objects” not aimed at satisfying a primary need. Unlike humans, in animals, however, this curiosity is limited to particular periods of development.
- 6.
In his pioneering text on the game (homo ludens) which appeared in Germany in 1939, Johan Huizinga (1939) highlighted for the first time the ramifications of this activity and its interconnections with other human cultural activities such as law, war, art, knowledge, religion, as well as of course sport and competition, whether these are riddles, philosophical cements, solving puzzles, or interrogations. The same legal agony in court can be seen as a game and in general all those human situations that take on a magical guise. As human activities often have a polemological character, sometimes aimed at controlling and exercising power, it is clear that the game can be transformed into an activity so intertwined with culture as to be very difficult to distinguish them from other so-called serious activities.
- 7.
The description that Bruner and Sherwood (1976) give of the game of “Peekaboo” is similar. It shows mastery of the game of constancy and variability by the mother and the child. This is evident where the authors write that what the child seems to learn is not the basic rules of the game, but the range of possible variations within the set of rules […] the child learns the regularity of the concept itself through learning the variables that express it” (Bruner and Sherwood 1976, 348).
- 8.
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Smorti, A. (2020). From Play to Narrative. In: Telling to Understand. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43161-7_6
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