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I now wish to include an illustration of an interview with a parent. There is no essential difference between an interview with a parent and an interview with a child except that with adults, as with older adolescents, it is unlikely that an interchange of drawings would be appropriate.
This is a case chosen from my hospital clinic. The daughter had been in our care, transferred by a colleague who is a paediatrician. In the initial interview with the child we discovered that there were features showing us that the mother's attendance with her child at the hospital indicated a need in the mother herself. The mother was unable, however, to think of what she was doing in this way, and she was constantly bringing her daughter for one doctor or another to examine her and to treat her for ailments the severity of which was not as great as the mother's anxiety would seem to indicate. It was necessary in this case for the child psychiatry team to keep in contact with the mother and daughter and to hold the case while waiting for developments. Gradually, after months, the mother lost her suspicion and revealed herself as a person very much in need of personal help.
I was told from the social-work side of the team that the moment had come for me to interview the mother, and I give a description of this interview. The result of this interview was favourable from the point of view of the clinic's efforts to give suitable help to the child since the mother, having communicated about herself, was now able to do a new thing, which was to hand over the management of her daughter to the casework organisation. As a result therefore of the interview we were able to place this girl in a suitable school which in fact carried her through the next few years. Contact between the child and the mother could be maintained because of the school's own special attitude to this matter.
A description of this interview is given not so much as evidence of the cure of the mother, which indeed would requ