You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
However one evaluates his mutual story-telling technique, Richard A. Gardner's Therapeutic Communication with Children is a fascinating collection of stories and establishes beyond any doubt that the tape recorder is an invaluable tool for the child analyst in getting to his patients' fantasies. Anyone who has worked with the prepubertal child can only be impressed by the richness of the material Gardner has elicited by means of his “Make-Up Story Television Program.” Here at last is a direct road to the latency child's unconscious. Whether or not we accept Gardner's approach, we owe him gratitude for demonstrating the effectiveness of bringing modern technology into the playroom.
His use of his patients' communications raises some question, however, about its therapeutic effectiveness as well as its relationship to psychoanalysis. He explains his technique as follows:
The child first tells a story; the therapist surmises its psychodynamic meaning and then tells one of his own. The therapist's story contains the same characters in a similar setting, but he introduces healthier adaptations and resolutions of the conflicts than have been exhibited in the child's story.
The child is directed to end his story with “the moral,” and the therapist does likewise. Since the format of his book consists mainly of the child's story, Gardner's questions concerning the story for his own clarification, and then his story response and his discussion of that, there is no way of ascertaining the actual structure of a session. There is at least one reference by the child to Gardner's writing during the session and an indication on his part that he may assign the child a task such as a commercial, while he busies himself working out his story response. There is also an inescapable impression that this is a storytelling competition in which Gardner almost inevitably emerges the victor. Although he stresses that his storytelling ‘is not a therapy per se, but rather one technique,” there is