Envisage: Embracing Play
New Envisage Article: “A Hockey Puck to the Chin is Play?!”
This week on CATA’s online magazine, Envisage, we are sharing an article written by BC art therapist Marilyn Hahn, B.Ed., RCAT, DCiiAT. In reflection about play and what different experiences and actions we consider to be play, Marilyn shares a six-part framework based on the guidance of Scott Eberle, researcher in Play Studies. In this article, Marilyn highlights these six elements of play: anticipation, surprise, pleasure, understanding, strength, and poise, and offers six corresponding directives that invite play and reflection with clients.
"Perhaps the answer is not to nail down a definition but to accommodate play more carefully. [...] Play is not the materials used or directives given but the quality of an engagement where we discourage working at art-making and encourage playing with it. This is our art therapy task: not to be curators of fun, enforcers of rules, or translators of meaning and theory, but facilitators of open conditions for play to emerge, recede, transform, or surprise entirely.”
You can read the rest of Marilyn’s article at https://www.canadianarttherapy.org/blog/2026/aug/hahn.
