Case III. ‘Eliza’ aet 7¹/₂ Years

It would perhaps be appropriate to continue in this first section with cases in which the child is not ill enough to merit a psychiatric diagnosis. As with most of the cases described by me here I am batting on a good wicket, and indeed it is a feature of this work that if the wicket is not in a good state I do not go in to bat. To continue with this analogy it seems logical that, batting on a good wicket, we may knock up a few good scores. I would like to point out, even at risk of repetition, that in the vast majority of these cases the general atmosphere is favourable, and if one is able to give a little help to the child or to the ill person in the family or social group, then clinical improvement ensues by the forces of life and of the developmental processes. It is a matter of changing a vicious into a benign circle. The vast majority of potential cases are of this kind.

Here in Case III the parents already had reason to have confidence in myself as a person before they brought their little girl to see me and they were quite happy to leave the child with me without first talking about her. Afterwards the mother did not want to talk to me about what had happened for, as she said, she was interested in the result and not in how it came about.

The mother brought Eliza and the two waited for me in the consulting-room where I had placed several copies of Animals magazine. This no doubt influenced the material of the consultation at the start.

Eliza was the middle child in a mixed family of boys and girls. In the few minutes that I had with the mother and Eliza together we talked about the Animals magazines. I got Eliza to go with me to the waiting-room which I had prepared for the mother complete with coffee, all of which interested her. She then came back into the consulting-room with me without any difficulty, and we settled down quickly to the squiggle game which I simply introduced and she acquiesced. She had not known about it as a game.

Eliza is a fair, slightly