The Language of Drawings

This book is the result of a long gestation period.  Life had taught me that I was a good communicator, meaning that somehow people I met soon seemed to believe that I was interested in learning of their thoughts and experiences.  When I began to work with children in my clinical practice I discovered Winnicott’s use of squiggles in his therapeutic consultations and I was simply fascinated by the apparently magical bridge that this simple game made between the child’s unconscious and the analyst’s professional scrutiny.

It happens that I never thought I had any artistic gifts and this raised doubts about my ability to engage in the squiggles game.  The obvious decision followed in that, when I found that the child or adolescent patient was at a loss to express his thoughts and feelings in words, I asked them whether perhaps they might be willing to make a drawing.  It was only when they could not engage in making a picture by themselves that I suggested we might play a game together – squiggles. It gave me enormous pleasure to discover that, in spite of my lack of confidence, my patient seemed to accept my squiggles as valid and meaningful.  But, as time went on, I found more and more young patients who seemed happy to make drawings.  Most of them would move from one sheet to the next one, but some would turn the page over and draw on the other side. And, to my surprise, one day when I picked up the sheet of paper on which a youngster had drawn on both sides, I found an unexpected meaningful image resulting from seeing that piece of paper against the light.

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