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This paper reports on the final stages of the analysis of a psychotic preadolesent. The analysis in question was very lengthy (from the time the patient was three and a half until he was sixteen) and was marked by two particular characteristics: firstly there were the difficulties arising from the countertransferential reactions I had to face, which plunged me into anxieties of a psychotic nature: fragmentation, chaos, homicidal violence, lack of thought; secondly there was the particular use that both the patient and I made of drawing, which enabled us to communicate with each other again after having seemingly lost all ability to do so.
Irrespective of the content that the pencil would enable the patient to express in his drawings, it seemed to me that the sheet of paper itself might serve another purpose. Namely, being, as it were, sufficiently detached from both the patient and the analyst, it might represent a space in which even the most violent affects could be expressed, without the patient experiencing any real risk of putting his impulses into effect.
Paolo started analysis with me when he was just over three and a half years old. He was a very pretty child, with two lovely big black eyes. He