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This is a vivid description of play therapy with a 10-year-old deaf girl. The author's arduous attempts to understand and communicate in sign language and ‘pretend’ play often brought her to the point of despair. The moving account of how the relationship unfolded shows a positive change in the girl's perception of what was in the eye of her beholder.
Virginia's stealing, unhappiness, and unpopularity at school caused concern. Language as a means of symbolic exchange was limited. She had a squint which seemed to be emotionally influenced. The author emphasizes, in the absence of hearing, the importance of eyes to contact the world, and of an interested audience to expand self-awareness. She links this with (1962) ‘maternal reverie’. Responding to an infant's signal is not enough; it ‘must come together with the baby's felt need for a particular maternal response and must answer the baby's initiative’. (1979) experiments demonstrating babies’ pleasure at causing happenings in their environment is paralleled by Virginia's dawning discovery of her own efficacy in the relationship.
The detailed play descriptions are illuminating. The author's response to having the door slammed in her face was to play at being rejected, ‘pleading’ to be allowed to enter, to gain Virginia's good graces. Virginia would feign disdainful contempt, excluding her analyst in pretend (as she felt about failing at hearing and sight tests or being teased by children). This play helped her gradually to accept the pleading, excluded child part of herself, and risk showing affection.
Sometimes the author's interpretations were too painful to bear seeing the words signed. Play with closed blinds and covering the analyst's face with blankets enacted a shutting out of the persecutory, critical, seeing eye. Closing her eyes to projected ‘bad’ parts of herself would risk losing all touch with the world. Her squint compromised, by maintaining open-eyed contact while defensively unfocusing