Ellenhorn kicked off our 2023 New Perspectives on Treatment Series Feb. 1 with a talk by founder and CEO Ross Ellenhorn, LICSW, Ph.D.
There is a pre-established link between play and mentalizing, not to mention a direct relationship between play and the ability to hold another’s mind and experience in our own consciousness. This presentation, however, touches upon something more than the imaginative ability to ponder the inner life of others. Play, after all, allows us access to the experience of “livingness” in people and in other living things—a sort of “sixth sense” that they are alive here on earth. In this, play is the very marrow of compassion and the antidote to dehumanization and alienation. It is authoritarianism’s opposite.
