What’s more, play and playfulness can help us get back in touch with (or figure out for the first time) who we actually are. In the words of British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott in his classic 1971 book, Playing and Reality, “It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality.”19 Brown elaborates on this idea, writing that “the self that emerges through play is the core, authentic self.”20
