How Play Reveals Sexual Difference - Erik H.

Erikson

I set up a play table and a random selection of toys and invited the boys and girls of the
study, one at a time, to come in and to imagine that the table was a movie studio, and
the toys actors and sets. I then asked them to 'construct on the table an exciting scene
out of an imaginary moving picture. This instruction was given to spare these children,
the majority of whom were eleven years old, the indignity of having to play at 'kids' stuff';
at the same time it was thought to be a sufficiently impersonal 'stimulus' for an
unselfconscious use of the imagination. But here was the first surprise: although, for
over a year and a half, about 150 children constructed about 450 scenes, not more than
a half dozen of these were movie scenes, and only a few dolls were named after a
particular actor. Instead, after a moment of thoughtfulness, the children arranged their
scenes as if guided by an inner design, told me a brief story with more or less exciting
content, and left me with the task of finding out what (if anything) these constructions
meant'. [...]

In order to convey a measure of my surprise at finding organ modes among what (in
contrast to unique elements) I came to call the common elements in these children's
constructions, it is necessary to claim what is probably hard to believe, namely, that I
tried not to expect anything in particular, and was, in fact, determined to enjoy the
freshness of the experience of working with so many children, and healthy ones. To be
ready to be surprised belongs to the discipline of a clinician; for without it clinical
'findings' would soon lose the instructive quality of new (or truly confirming) finds.

As one child after another concentrated with a craftsman's conscientiousness on

configurations which had to be just right' before he would announce that his task was
done, I gradually became aware of the fact that I was learning to expect different
configurations from boys than from girls. To give an example which brings us
immediately to the mode of female inclusion, girls much more often than boys would
arrange a room in the form of a circle of furniture, without walls. Sometimes a circular
configuration of furniture was presented as being intruded upon by something
threatening, even if funny, such as a pig or father coming home riding on a lion'. One day,
a boy arranged such a feminine' scene, with wild animals as intruders, and I felt that
uneasiness which I assume often betrays to an experimenter what his innermost
expectations are. And, indeed, on departure and already at the door, the boy exclaimed,
"There is something wrong here', came back, and with an air of relief arranged the
animals along a tangent to the circle of furniture. Only one boy built and left such a
configuration, and this twice. He was of obese and effeminate build. As thyroid
treatment began to take effect, he built, in his third construction (a year and a half after
the first) the highest and most slender of all towers-as was to be expected of a boy.

That this boy's tower, now that he himself had at last become slimmer, was the
slenderest, was one of those 'unique' elements which suggested that some sense of
one's physical self influenced the spatial modalities of these constructions. From here it
was only one step to the assumption that the modalities common to either sex may
express something of the sense of being male or female. It was then that I felt grateful
for the kind of investigation which we had embarked on. For building blocks provide a
wordless medium quite easily counted, measured, and compared in regard to spatial
arrangement. At the same time, they seem so impersonally geometric as to be least
compromised by cultural connotations and individual meanings. A block is almost
nothing but a block. It seemed striking, then (unless one considered it a mere function
of the difference in themes), that boys and girls differed in the number of blocks used as
well as in the configurations constructed.

So I set out to define these configurations in the simplest terms, such as towers,
buildings, streets, lanes, elaborate enclosures, simple enclosures, interiors with walls
and interiors without walls. I then gave photographs of the play scenes to two objective
observers to see whether they could agree on the presence or the absence of such
configurations (and of combinations of them). They did agree significantly', whereupon
it could be determined how often. these configurations were said by these observers
(who did not know of my expectations) to have occurred in the constructions of boys
and of girls. I will abstract their conclusions here in general terms. The reader may
assume that each item mentioned occurs more (and often considerably more) than two
thirds of the time in the constructions of the sex specified and that in the remaining one
third special conditions prevail which often can be shown to 'prove the rule'.

The most significant sex difference was the tendency of boys to erect structures,
buildings, towers, or streets; the girls tended to use the play table as the interior of a
house, with simple, little, or no use of blocks.

High structures, then, were prevalent in the configurations of the boys. But the opposite
of elevation, i.e. downfall, was equally typical for them: ruins or fallen-down structures
were exclusively found among boys. (1 quoted the one exception.) In connexion with the
very highest towers, something in the nature of a downward trend appears regularly, but
in such diverse forms that only 'unique' elements can illustrate it: one boy, after much
indecision, took his extraordinarily high and well-built tower down in order to build a final
configuration of a simple and low structure without any 'exciting content; another
balanced his tower very precariously and pointed out that the immediate danger of
collapse was the 'exciting element in his story: in fact, was his story. One boy who built
an especially high tower laid a boy doll at the foot of it and explained that this boy had
fallen from the top of the tower; another boy left the boy doll sitting high on one of
several elaborate towers but said that the boy had had a mental breakdown. The very
highest tower was built by the very smallest boy; and, as pointed out, a colored boy built
his under the table. All these variations make it apparent that the variable high-low is a
masculine variable. Having studied a number of the histories of these children I would
add the clinical judgement that extreme height (in its combination with element of break
down or fall) reflects a need to overcompensate a doubt in, or a fear for, one's
masculinity.

The boys' structures enclosed fewer people and animals inside a house. Rather, they
channelled the traffic of motor-cars, animals, and Indians. And they blocked traffic: the
single policeman was the doll used most often by boys!

Girls rarely built towers. When they did, they made them lean against, or stay
close to, the background. The highest tower built by any girl was not on the
table at all but on a shelf in a niche behind the table.

If 'high' and 'low' are masculine variables, 'open' and 'closed' are feminine modalities.
Interiors of houses without walls were built by a majority of girls. In many cases the
interiors were expressly peaceful. Where it was a home rather than a school, a little girl
often played the piano: a remarkably tame exciting movie scene' for girls of that age. In
a number of cases, however, a disturbance occurred. An intruding pig throws the family
in an uproar and forces the girl to hide behind the piano; a teacher has jumped on a desk
because a tiger has entered the room. While the persons thus frightened are mostly
women, the intruding element is always a man, a boy, or an animal. If it is a dog, it is
expressly a boy's dog. Strangely enough, however, this idea of an intruding creature
does not lead to the defensive erection of walls or to the closing of doors. Rather, the
majority of these intrusions have an element of humor and of pleasurable excitement.

Simple enclosures with low walls and without ornaments were the largest item among
the configurations built by girls. However, these enclosures often had an elaborate gate:
the only configuration which girls cared to construct and to ornament richly. A blocking
of the entrance or a thickening of the walls could on further study be shown to reflect
acute anxiety over the feminine role.
The most significant sex differences in the use of the play space, then, added up to the
following modalities: in the boys, the outstanding variables were height and downfall
and strong motion (Indians, animals, motor cars) and its channelization or arrest
(policemen); in girls, static interiors, which are open, simply enclosed, and peaceful or
intruded upon. Boys adorned high structures; girls, gates. It is clear by now that the
spatial tendencies governing these constructions are reminiscent of the genital modes
discussed in this chapter, and that they, in fact, closely parallel the morphology of the
sex organs: in the male, external organs, erectable and intrusive in character, conducting
highly mobile sperm cells; internal organs in the female, with a vestibular access leading
to statically expectant ova. Does this reflect an acute and temporary emphasis on the
modalities of the sexual organs owing to the experience of oncoming sexual
maturation? My clin ical judgement (and the brief study of the 'dramatic productions of
college students) incline me to think that the dominance of genital modes over the
modalities of spatial organization reflects a profound difference in the sense of space in
the two sexes, even as sexual differentiation obviously provides the most decisive
difference in the ground plan of the human body which, in turn, co determines biological
experience and social roles.

(Childhood and Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), 92, 93-100.]