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.
Nowadays, when analysts must defend Freudian postulates and Freudian techniques from a bombardment of criticism, it is heartening to note how many innovative procedures have burgeoned from the theoretical concepts which can be formulated by a single person who listens to an individual supine on a couch.
Evolved by the late D. W. Winnicott, twice president of the British Psychoanalytical Society, here is such a procedure which copes with the difficulty of persuading a child patient to reveal himself. Using this technique, the inquiring therapist comes to the patient's level—matches him in making random marks, named “squiggles.” Confronted with a squiggle by the therapist, the child draws or indicates whatever it brings to his mind. Similarly, the therapist responds to the child patient's productions.
Compared to the squiggles, immediate, meaningless, and inoffensive, figures on Rorshach cards loom like threatening winged monsters. Both, however, are nonobjective, evoke images that represent the content of the patient's subconscious, and are related to memories that smolder there unacknowledged. The therapist assesses the significance of these images and their associations, clued by what he knows of the patient's history and the developmental stages through which the patient has passed. As intimacy increases, the therapist hears something of the patient's dreams, which he weaves into the pattern of the squiggle associations.
In the instances given in this book, the therapist discovered the traumata causing the patient's pathology from the themes that underlay the patient's pictures. Interpretations of these themes often relieved the patient's anxiety and guided his parents' treatment of him. Repeated checkups have shown the squiggle game to have effected gratifying and enduring results with a few consultations and interviews. This contrasts with the tedium and expense of extended child psychotherapy.
At the same time, these case histories show that such a sensitive probe