Play is one of the oldest ways psyche grows.

Gaming can expand and enrich your life or unconsciously replace it.

World of Warcraft’s classes, factions, and deaths mirror archetypal patterns.

On November 4, Blizzard Entertainment releases World of Warcraft (WoW): Forever, a reimagining of the game’s original 2004 world. The announcement emotionally stirred something in me: a homesickness for a place that never existed, yet has always been real to the psyche.

So, I am going back to Azeroth, likely to the dismay of the Horde players I plan to turn into sheep through magical spells. Playing the beta, I’ve noticed how quickly my body remembers the slow walk through an enchanted forest at dusk, or how relaxing it is to hear the music shifting as I cross into a new zone.

In my practice, clients often mention gaming the way people confess a guilty pleasure. However, I love these conversations; what we choose to play, and how we play it, can tell us a great deal about what the human soul is reaching for.

Play is serious business for the psyche

Some of psychology’s greatest thinkers took play seriously, in theory and in practice. After his painful rupture with Freud, a disoriented Jung returned to a childhood game: building a small village of stones by the lake. That play, he later wrote, opened the door to the inner images that shaped his life’s work.

Other psychoanalysts from Freud to Winnicott have written about play as well; it may be one of the oldest formative experiences we share across cultures, and play itself can be a form of liberation.

Choosing a class is choosing an archetype

Jung described archetypes as forms without content: inherited patterns that shape how we perceive........

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