Playing in a kindergarten: Bonding with very young children

This paper presents a clinical experience in a place called “Kindergarten” [Jardin d’enfant] inside a medico-psycho-pedagogical institution with therapeutic and observation groups using play for children between two and five years old. Based on the theorizations of Frobel, Freud, Lacan, and Winnicott, the act of playing is understood in this paper as one of the possible means of observing children to understand where they are in the construction of their relationship to themselves and to the world, and of their impasses and their questions, in order to form a bond that allows them to exist. For the therapist, as for the educator, the ability to play means being able to invent and to find the strength to resist the injunctions of hyper-normalization to which the field of education and care are more and more subjected, which can allow these professionals to make the most of searching, changing, and transforming.