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The repeated recourse by children during the latency period to acting out often goes hand in hand with difficulties in playing, but also difficulties in assimilating schooling. With the children in question, in the context of sessions of analytic psychotherapy, “playing” is not there from the outset; playing is a therapeutic objective. The child may be completely disconcerted by being asked to initiate a game. This inhibition may continue for several sessions before resolving itself. The authors establish a close relationship between the “pleasure of playing”, which becomes an aim of psychotherapeutic work, and the “pleasure of thinking”. For play, surely, may be defined as a “pleasure of playing with one’s thoughts”, as the pleasure of enacting the existing links between sensory images, thing-presentations and word-presentations, that is, as a “pleasure of thinking”.