having experienced a lot of psychoanalysis, I feel most of these descriptions in TFA and here in the comment section are missing something. Declaring play to be

having experienced a lot of psychoanalysis, I feel most of these descriptions in TFA and here in the comment section are missing something. Declaring play to be aggressive vs non-aggressive is missing the element of conflict in our emotions. A particular mode of play is going to entail a mix of "sub-emotions": some aggression is always there, the question is how much, and how much it is being concurrently balanced by other conflicting emotions such as attraction or need, etc. The way you pretend to be an opponent is by being an opponent, just not too much or by also being a friend; the way you pretend to be selfish is to be selfish, just not too much. We are not one way or another, our emotions are in conflict all the time; we are a balance, or with some frequency, an imbalance.