Toward a New Look at the Conditions of the Emergence of Play / Hacia una nueva perspectiva sobre las condiciones en las que aparece el juego

According to Vygotsky, play is marked by a fundamental inversion in the order of dependencies of meaning regarding the object and the action. In play, objects lose their impelling force and action is born out of thinking, bringing meaning to the fore. The child’s relationship to the world from the immediate in the concrete situation at early childhood becomes mediated in the imaginary situation at preschool age. However, a close study of the concept of meaning in Vygotsky’s 1933/1922 essay has revealed a number of aporias in the argument (Moro, 2022a). Based on work revisiting the concrete situation through the executive functions articulated to the study of the genesis of the will, we show that the inversion referred to above is first present in early childhood, resulting in reconsidering the conditions of emergence of pretend play and the status of the imagination at its beginnings. Our argument is based on writings from the final period of Vygotsky’s work (e.g., Vygotsky, 1935/1993), some of which have recently come to light in Vygotsky’s Notebooks (2018).