e offers the child an opportunity "to experience growth under the most favorable conditions" (p. 16). The argument is that the context of play, which exercises the child's cognitive function without obliging him to articulate via language the cognitive experience, provides optimal conditions for childhood experience to evolve in ways conducive to manifest self-expression that can reveal latent emotional content and psychological status, as well as foster encounter with psychoemotional truth and resolution of problems associated with such truth. Axline continues:
Since play is his natural medium for self-expression, the child is given the opportunity to play out his accumulated feelings of tension, frustration, insecurity, aggression, fear, bewilderment, confusion.
By playing out these feelings he brings them to the surface, gets them out in the open, faces them, learns to control them, or abandons them (Axline, 1981, p. 16).
As a practical matter, directive and nondirective play therapy may overlap and converge. For example, Fischetti (2001) descri
...