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Through childhood experiences of outdoor freedom, firefly-catching, and later interests in camping and backpacking, she traces continuity from early play to adult pursuits. She explains rock-climbing as playful, embodied movement and proposes that fluid play states, not rigid theory, can inform therapist–patient interaction and clinical intuition. 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This edge play connects to polyvagal ideas about social safety and helps children and adults tolerate discomfort and high arousal.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":83,"og:type":124,"og:title":65,"og:site_name":95,"og:description":67},"article",{"robots":126,"canonical":83},"index,follow",{"doc_id":128,"site_id":62},591469,1792174834,{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":131},{"doc_id":128,"user_id":132,"nickname":92,"user_avatar":133,"doc_module":4,"category_id":34,"category_name":35,"doc_title":65,"doc_description":67,"doc_content":134,"file_id":135,"file_url":136,"file_type":137,"file_size":138,"view_count":14,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":8,"is_downloadable":8,"audit_status":8,"page_count":139,"language":140,"language_code":63,"site_id":62,"html_lang":63,"table_of_contents":141,"faqs":142,"seo_title":143,"seo_description":67,"update_tm":144,"read_time":145},962088121634,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/davatar_9964176cb1d06d4a9deccf72a44ae3dc","Play and the Art of Psychotherapy  \nAn Interview with Terry Marks-Tarlow  \nTerry Marks-Tarlow is a clinical and consulting psychologist and psychotherapist and a member of the teaching faculty at the Reiss Davis Child Study Center in Los Angeles. She is the author of Awakening Clinical Intuition: An Experiential Workbook for Psychotherapists; Psyche’s Veil: Psychotherapy, Fractals, and Complexity; Clinical Intuition in Psychotherapy: The Neurobiology of Embodied Response; and Creativity Inside Out: Learning through Multiple Intelligences. She is also a research associate of the Institute of Fractal Research in Germany, and her numerous publications include several works on fractals. Marks-Tarlow is also a rock-climber, dancer, painter, librettist, and yoga teacher. In this far-reaching interview, she explores the sources of play, creativity, and social connection and their relationship to the search for mental equilibrium. She discusses the game-like interplay of therapist and patient. And she suggests that fluid states of play rather than rigid theory should guide the course of therapy and inform clinical insight. Keywords: clinical intuition, creativity, fractals, playful therapy, psychotherapy  \nAmerican Journal of Play: Tell us how you played as a child.  \nTerry Marks-Tarlow: I grew up in a suburb in New Jersey, about thirty minutes from Manhattan. My home was surrounded by woods, including a steep gulch down to a creek that ran for miles. I spent much of my childhood playing outside. I loved to go into those woods and turn over rocks to find salamandars and other creatures. On summer nights, I was especially fond of catching fireflies and stuffing them into ajar. Playing outside represented freedom for me.  \nAJP: Does it still?  \nMarks-Tarlow: I have a strong interest in the continuity between early play and later activities in life and am quite sure that my blissful play outside helped me gravitate toward the outdoors later on. In high school, I began camping, which became an excuse to sneak to places with my boyfriend. Once  \n299  \nAmerican Journal of Play, volume 6, number 3 © The Strong [Contact Terry Marks-Tarlow at markstarlow@hotmail.com](Contact Terry Marks-Tarlow at markstarlow@hotmail.com)  \nI told my parents we were going to camp in upstate New York. This was true, but we headed for Watkins Glen, which was hosting a rock concert that had more than six hundred thousand people attending, a gathering so large that traffic closed down the New York State Thruway. Extensive news coverage helped my parents figure out where we had been by the time I got home. After I went to college on the West Coast, my love of the outdoors morphed into backpacking. At Stanford, I experienced culture shock and took to the land instead, finding solace in the beauty of the landscape. When I moved to Southern California to study clinical psychology at UCLA, my outdoor interests morphed again when I became a serious rock-climber.  \nAJP: What drew you to rock-climbing?  \nMarks-Tarlow: I loved the feeling of the rock against my body. I had been doing yoga for almost a decade and was flexible enough to put my foot up by myear to step up (I’ve been called a pretzel in a former lifetime). Climbing felt somewhere between a moving meditation and a dance on the rocks—a form of play whose serious consequences, including risk of death, helped to ground me inside my body.  \nAJP: What do you find playful at that dizzying height?  \nMarks-Tarlow: This very interesting question brings to mind Karen VanderVen’s notion of the protean self, which prepares for a chaotic world through play by becoming adaptive and resilient. Play is full of paradoxes and polarities that I love. Children throw themselves off balance in order to discover what balance is. They twirl until they fall in order to discover stability atthe center—that eye in the hurricane. All these embodied lessons help  \nchildren stretch their windows of tolerance. AJP: Can such lessons be taught through pl","cbCailq9SPvwZ8v5","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCailq9SPvwZ8v5","pdf",1812068,22,"English","# Interview with Terry Marks-Tarlow\n## Continuity between childhood play and later activities\n## Rock-climbing as embodied play\n## Playing at the edges: regulation, safety, and polyvagal theory","[{\"question\":\"How does early childhood play influence later life, according to Marks-Tarlow?\",\"answer\":\"Marks-Tarlow links her blissful outdoor play to a later gravitation toward the outdoors, including camping and backpacking. She emphasizes a continuity between early play and adult activities that helped shape her path.\"},{\"question\":\"Why does rock-climbing count as play in her view?\",\"answer\":\"She describes climbing as a moving meditation and a dance on the rocks. The risk and serious consequences of climbing ground her inside her body, giving the experience a playful-but-intense character.\"},{\"question\":\"How does play at the “edges” relate to emotional regulation and therapy?\",\"answer\":\"She argues that parents play with children near regulatory boundaries—the thin line between terror and pleasure. This edge play connects to polyvagal ideas about social safety and helps children and adults tolerate discomfort and high arousal.\"}]","Play and the Art of Psychotherapy - An Interview with Terry Marks-Tarlow | PDF",1792072515,55]