Case XIX. ‘Lily’ aet 5 Years

The following brief statement about a girl is inserted to illustrate not so much the interview technique as the way in which the subject of stealing turns up quite naturally in association with transitional phenomena, so that the study of the one involves the study of the other.

Lily was brought to my clinic at the Paddington Green Children's Hospital in 1956.

The family was intact although disturbed by the parents' quarrelling, and the two older children were not doing well at school. The mother's mother was a powerful figure in the household, dominating her daughter (the mother of Lily) and now indulging the baby boy.

My first contact was with the brother, but it is the interview with the girl that I wish to describe. The interview was carried out in the presence of two Psychiatric Social Workers and two visitors.

Lily chose to draw and she drew the main figure of her nightmares, a monster. This was a human figure with a lot of hair. I asked her whether any of her actual possessions were like that and she drew her two teddy bears. After this she drew a third one, one which she said had no fur at all. She said her mother was always trying to get her to play with dolls, but she did not want dolls, she wanted her teddies. She liked to call her two teddies mother and father teddies, making it quite clear at the same time that they were not dolls. There was some story about the teddy with no fur having been burned by her mother, who tried to give her a doll instead.

I tried to get at the objective truth of this in conversation with the mother afterwards, and I found that the mother was surprised that the child had remembered an incident which she herself was ashamed of. The mother said that she had given the child a pram,