Dibs in Search of Self: Personality Development in Play Therapy (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Ultimately, the successful treatment of Dibs is accomplished not with because of play therapy itself, but because Dr. Axline had was able to imagine that whatever condition Dibs suffered from was one that could be effective treated with play therapy. In this Introduction, Leonard Carmichael compares the story of Dibs to “a first-class detective story.” On the other hand, story of the book itself is comparable to one those movies about the cop who is the one capable of catching the bad guy he doesn’t play the rules. Which is simply a phrase to describe having the imagination to think in a way that other can’t or won’t. Update this section! He had started as before walking round, touching and naming objects. She had asked whether he would like to take his hat and coat off and he had agreed but had done nothing about it. Eventually he had asked for help to take things off but had dropped them on the floor, so she had put them on a hook. In Chapter 16 she recounts how Dibs had admitted to winding up his father, while threatening the father doll with a toy gun which he then hid in the basement of the doll’s house. He had then gone on to talk about the children at school before engaging in some water play, making a glass harmonica, and then mixing up all the paint jars. He had then gone to the office where he had pasted in some bookplates and asked for reassurance about his relationship with her. On his departure he had run to his mother and said, “Oh mother, I love you”. He had then asked to go to the office where he had looked up ‘yeast’ in the dictionary, written a Morse code message which he had also written on another card in the card file, had told her what other presents he had received and had thanked her for her birthday card.

Dibs’s mother had influenced the school board to accept him but had refused the offer of professional help; his father was a well-known scientist and his younger sister a ‘spoiled brat.’ With other parents complaining after Dibs had scratched another child, his mother had been told that the school was thinking of excluding him and there had been a case conference to which Miss A (as Dibs called her) had been invited. The staff were obviously captivated by Dibs and had agreed to her suggestion of play therapy. The focus of this story of Dibs has to do with Axline’s application of a very specific form of psychotherapy known as play therapy. This has proven over the decades since publication of the book to be an especially effective form of therapy for getting at the root of behavioral problems in children. But what is especially significant to keep in mind is that Axline has absolutely no way of knowing whether her choice of therapy will have impact on Dibs because, although she has theories, she does not know what his problem is. Others have voiced opinions on that topic, but nobody knows for sure. And no matter how effective any particular therapy maybe in treating a condition, it inevitably winds up being useless in treating the wrong condition. Just as one wouldn’t take prescription medication for a heart problem to treat depression, using play therapy to treat mental retardation is probably only going to produce a result purely by happy coincidence. It is difficult in a summary such as this to convey the depth and power of the descriptions of Dibs’s encounters with Miss A, one reason why it has been a regular on so many students’ book-lists for nearly half a century, but it is important not to be carried away by the work with Dibs. The key to her success, as she points out, was as much her uncritical, accepting and respectful relationship with his mother. But she was now anxious that he was “too unusual” and wondered if he was schizophrenic; they had sent his sister away to school so that they could concentrate on him. She had admitted that she had taken things out on Dibs because of the strained relationship with her husband, with both of them fighting to avoid admitting guilt for Dibs’s condition. But now both parents’ feelings had changed. There can be little argument that the story of Dibs: In Search of Self is about Dibs and his quest to establish a sense of self-identity. In this sense of the narrative, it is the tale of a little boy named Dibs and processes of a certain school of behavioral therapy. On the other hand, an argument can be made while the story is about Dibs, the book is about its author and the power of imagination to alter the course of a person’s narrative. Without the intervention of Dr. Axline, the story of Dibs would have played out quite differently, but that is probably true whether Axline’s approach was that as applied in the book or whether it had been any other approach she might have chosen.Dibs’s story parallels that of Lucy (Robertson and Robertson, 1971); both in their different ways had had a breakdown in their relationships with their mothers. The provision of an alternative caring environment in which they could establish a fresh secure relationship with an adult gave them the capacity to re-engage with their own mothers which then enabled them to make a fresh start with them. Excluding the initial session in the school play therapy room, she only had 17 hours with him, perhaps an illustration of Clarke and Clarke’s observation that the greater the adversity, the more rapid the initial recovery from it.

Trasler (1960) had found that some of the most successful foster placements were those where the children’s parents were welcome visitors and, twenty years later, Berridge (1985) found that one reason why some children rejected foster care was because it implied rejection of their own parents and they preferred residential care because it did not. Yet some residential workers and many social workers lose interest in parents (Thorpe, 1973) and government policy in England has been for as many children in care as possible to be adopted rather than make their parents partners in bringing up their children as intended in the 1989 Children Act and required by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.Robertson, J. and Robertson, J (1971) Young children in brief separation: a fresh look Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 26, 264-315 See also Children Webmag October 2009 He had told her, to her surprise, that she had said, “This is all yours, Dibs. Have fun. Nobody is going to hurt you in here”, and he had gradually come to believe her. He had said that he had found his enemies and fought them; he had also learned how big God was and, in response to a question, she had revealed that she had heard his earlier conversation which had made him realise that they were now neighbours. She had met his parents a few days later when his mother had asked him why he called her Miss A. “A special name for a special friend”, he had replied.

In Chapter 24 she recounts how, two and half years later, she had heard Dibs talking to a friend outside her flat and learned that Dibs had moved into a house down the road. She had later met him in the street; he had told exactly how long it had been since their last session because he had framed the date of the last visit. In Chapter 9 she recounts how he had arrived fifteen minutes early at his mother’s request, had taken his outdoor clothes off, hung them up, started painting and then tapped the two-way mirror and said that he knew that people had been there before but that they weren’t that day. He had then played in the sandbox, breaking to look at her notes and telling her to spell out the names of the colours and not abbreviate them. He had later sung a song full of hateful words and tried to fix the doll’s house. He had pretended it wasn’t time to go and had hoped that the doctor would hurt his sister when he did the jabs, the reason for the earlier appointment. Virginia Axline (1911-1988) was the main architect of non-directed play therapy and her account of her work in the early 1950s with an emotionally disturbed five-six year old, which had a profound effect on her, has become a classic text. Key Points Clarke A. M and Clarke, A D B (1976) Studies in natural settings In A M Clarke and A D B Clarke (Eds) Early experience: myth and evidence Chapter 6, pp. 69-96. London: Open Books. She comments that his mother had previously been able to pay her way out of responsibility for Dibs and she was determined that she should not do so this time; his mother had also been more anxious in the first interview than Dibs.

In Chapter 3 she describes her visit to his mother the following day. She had been let into a drawing room where tea had been served but there had been no sign that it was ‘lived in’. His mother had said that she did not expect any change in Dibs and had offered him as raw data for study. She had also suggested using Dibs’s playroom but Miss A had insisted on using the child guidance centre even though his mother had offered her a higher fee if she had used Dibs’s playroom. She had given his mother a consent form to record the interviews and accepted his mother’s insistence that she would not be coming to the sessions. His mother had commented that his sister was a ‘perfect child’. In Chapter 2, she says that everyone has their own private world of meaning and it is important to try once more, because we don’t have all the answers. She had arranged to observe Dibs in school, to visit his mother and to see Dibs in the play therapy room at the child guidance centre.

Haley received a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and honed her sifting and winnowing skills at The Daily Cardinal. She previously covered politics for The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, investigated exotic pet ownership for Wisconsin Watch, and blogged for some of your favorite reality stars. Like Homer Lane (Bazeley, 1928) and George Lyward (Burn, 1956), she did not believe that, because a parent appeared to have ‘failed’ with their child, that was any reason to exclude them from what was happening to their child. Like Lyward she imposed the boundaries that she thought were necessary for her work and she took the same risk that Lyward did – that they would reject those boundaries and therefore the work with their child. In Chapter 10 she recounts how he had talked, among other things, about seeing similar toys in a shop and going to collect his father’s shoes from the mender’s while spending most of the time playing in the sandbox.In Chapter 4 she recalls that it was several weeks before the consent form arrived while Dibs had carried on as usual. When he had arrived for the first session, she had taken him to the playroom, which was more attractive than the one at school but with the same equipment.