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[Authors are invited to submit for review articles published in learned journals on subjects relevant to this section. Articles from other publications will not be accepted, neither will chapters from books that might constitute the subject matter of a book review in this Journal.]
This brief paper offers what the subtitle describes as ‘an aid for a more comprehensive care of fatally ill children and their families’. Kiepenheuer presents and interprets a series of nine drawings in liaison with the medical course of a boy with acute leukemia between the ages of six and nine, when he died. The author seems to have become intensely interested in the drawings in order to understand the child's emotional condition and to deal with his own inevitable anxieties in the circumstances. As he says, the drawings ‘offered a strong supportive basis for communicating [with the boy]’. The drawings were understood both in terms of archetypal and personal unconscious elements, which were mainly for the doctor to know about, rather than to comment on as such, but he used the pictures as a way to initiate communication with the child, whom he described as very reserved. He was clearly a gifted child with a very rich imagination which he put into the drawings.
One thing which struck me particularly was the way Kiepenheuer also used drawings to help the other two children in the family following the death, as well as giving support to the parents, thus providing what he calls a more comprehensive ‘perithanatal’ care. In addition to this thought-provoking general point which the author makes, he presents a vivid and moving picture of this individual boy, and indeed of his own emotional responses to him.