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Because the girl I call Virginia is profoundly deaf, eyes and what they see are of paramount importance to her. I think that her material shows that her fantasy of what was in the eye of her beholder was a significant part of her therapy with me. It was this fantasy that changed in the course of our work together, and I hope to explain how this occurred in terms of theory put forward by Michael Fordham.
This work provoked my interest in, and thinking about, the role of the analyst's interest, and of the patient's perception of the nature of that interest. It also brought to my attention the kinds of responses that result from that perception.
By the time Virginia finished her therapy, she seemed to feel that there was a friendly community with which she could communicate and where she might find membership. The deaf community is poorly served by psychiatric services, and only a very few have had the benefit of psychotherapeutic help. It is my hope that this paper will serve to draw attention to this fact, and to stimulate interest in how this situation might be changed.
Virginia came to me for forty-two weekly sessions during her last four terms at primary school. I saw her in my role as social worker at a school for the deaf, and the work we did can best be described as a kind of “psychodynamic play therapy”.
We met in the school medical suite, composed of two small rooms joined by a door. The first room was where I had my desk, telephone, files, and two soft chairs. The second was the medical room, which contained a bed with a screen on wheels around it, a table with chairs, a desk lamp, a sink, a full-length mirror on the back of the door, and miscellaneous medical equipment, including a chart for eye examinations fixed to the wall.
To begin with, there was as much lack of understanding as there was presence of it. Virginia could not speak discernibly, save for a very few words, and although she was being taught signing, she had limited understan