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This paper draws on data gathered during the course of a project in psychological research and psychotherapy which I conducted from 1940 to 1943 with thirty-two schoolchildren between seven and twelve years of age. I studied these children in individual sessions. Their undirected free expressions were assessed in terms of projections—in the sense in which this term is used in the concept of "projective techniques" (Elkisch, 1943). Within that framework, I focused specifically on the significance of certain form elements, as they became discernible in the children's drawings and paintings (Elkisch, 1945), (1947), (1948), (1952), (1960). In addition, my study threw some light on other questions, such as those of verbal communication, or its absence or its distortion, and on the way in which the children's verbal communications were accompanied, supplemented, or replaced by other media.
The case of Kenneth demonstrates how communication may be established when the faculty of intelligible speech is impaired or absent in a child, or when he uses language in an autistic noncommunicative way.1
I treated Kenneth while he and I were at a boarding school. At the beginning of treatment he was seven and a half years old. Kenneth's parents were divorced. His mother, who had been diagnosed as schizophrenic, had been hospitalized several times. After Kenneth's birth, she had her first breakdown, a postpartum psychosis. The