Two Drawings Occurring in the Analysis of a Latency Child

The unusual feature of the material I am going to present concerns the underlying resemblance between two pictures which are nominally representations of quite different things. These drawings were produced by a nine-year-old boy twenty-one sessions apart. The first picture was drawn on February the 15th and is of a leashed lion straining towards a joint of meat. The second drawing is of a map and was drawn as such. This was done on March 24th. On page 45 they are reproduced together. It will be observed that the contours of the map reproduced closely the head and shoulders of the lion. The child was quite unaware of this, and so was I. When it was detected I found there was also correspondence between the phantasies expressed in the two sessions and the problems that were being worked over. For purposes of comparison, I will give the detailed material of each of the sessions in which the drawings occurred. But first, I must briefly review the relevant aspects of the treatment situation of the child.

This little boy was referred at six-and-a-half years of age because of a reluctance to go to school and fairly severe eating difficulties; in particular he refused to eat meat. The symptoms began during a six-months hospitalization of the mother when the patient was five years old. This was his first separation from her. He had been breast fed and had been a good feeder. At the time when the drawings occurred he had attended analysis four times per week for three-and-a-half years.

There is a good deal of evidence that he had come to analysis with unduly high expectations of its being a place where he could do as he liked and have what he pleased. This was in line with his father's description of his abnormally exaggerated expectations of birthdays and Christmas. He was a very docile patient with an unusual degree of perseverance.

During the first year it became clear that he had hopes that his ‘bad bit’, as he phrased it, would be eradicated by the analy