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.
The authors of this book offer a clear and exhaustive account of the long and careful research carried out by a group of child psychotherapists. Although the group was operating over a large geographic area, from Novara to Lucca, the resulting work is nevertheless consistent and coherent in its scientific scope: the psychoanalytic model of personality. Each of the book's eight chapters deals with highly relevant theoretic and clinical issues, far exceeding what is relevant to clinical work and to the specific activity of drawing itself, although clinical data and drawing are the fundamental issues both of the research and of the book. The book itself is also valuable for its illustrations - 72 colour plates - for which the publisher, Raffaello Cortina, deserves credit.
A first section includes five accounts of therapies, each dealing with a single subject, which have been carefully put together and followed up through the drawings produced by each child. The subjects examined include autism, the feeling of emptiness, the engulfing relationship, and female sexuality. Each chapter is accompanied by a case history which has been carefully recorded by the author's assistants, who also deserve full praise. The second part deals with subjects such as symbolization of primary objects, space-time dimensions of the primal experience, emotions and colours.
This book is based on two fundamental premises. The first is the remark made by Melanie Klein, that “behind drawing and painting there lies a much deeper unconscious activity: it is the procreation and production in the unconscious of the object represented”. The second premise is that any study of the drawings produced in the playroom “can never fail to take into account both the quality of the relationship with the therapist and what happens during the session”. I wish to emphasize at this point that the quality of the relationship is taken into account in a very real and deep sense, not as a superficial association between