Previews • 11her art (D). “Goodbye. I’m not gonna see you no more, but I’m gonna cry if I don’t see you
no more.” I told Lori that I would miss seeing her too, and she went on: “Well, see, if I don’t
see you no more, I might cry. I wanna hear myself talk.”
After listening to her speech on the tape recorder, a few faint smiles brightening her sad
face, Lori said that we should kiss goodbye, and we did. She was thus able in her last session
not only to express her anger, sadness, and sense of abandonment about the ending of her
therapy, but also her affection and her growing autonomy.
Art Therapy Unblocks Grieving for a Little Boy: JEFF (6)
Since I, as a highly verbal adolescent and adult, was unable to find words or relief for my
grief at the loss of Peter or my mother, it is no surprise that for a young child death is even
harder to comprehend. The following story is about Jeff, a child I saw first for an individual
art evaluation session, then in an art therapy group. The assessment revealed Jeff ’s profound
confusion and tangled feelings about the loss of his brother who had died from a sudden
cerebral hemorrhage. Both art and the presence of other youngsters allowed Jeff to begin to
face the reality of what had happened and to explore his mixed-up feelings about it.
Six-year-old Jeff was referred for art therapy by his psychiatrist. Jeff ’s brother had died a
year before, and although Jeff had been in treatment for many months, he had not yet been
able to deal with his feelings about the loss. In his first art interview, Jeff painted “A Monster
Head” (E). Telling about the monster, Jeff expressed not only his awareness of his brother’s
death, but also his confusion about it.
“That’s its hair. Know what happened to my brother? He died!” Then, about the mon-
ster: “He’s gonna crush somebody up, maybe a snake. He’ll go hiss ... He’d blow poison dye
right into the monster’s face. Then they’ll both die—then they’re gonna fight in heaven with
spears.” When I asked how old the monster was, Jeff said he was six, and that he was named
“Purvungi, the Happy Monster. But he cried and he’s sad.” When asked why, he said “’Cause
his mother died. The people laid right on his mother. A big lightning bolt came down right
into the cave and the mother monster got dead.” Jeff ’s unresolved guilt about the disappear-
ance of his rival, his identification with the dead brother who was one year older, and his fear
of losing his mother, all came through eloquently in the story about his very first product.
After this initial diagnostic art interview, Jeff joined an art therapy group of children
his age. One day, during snack time, the children were encouraged to make creatures out
of marshmallows and toothpicks and to use them dramatically, like puppets. Jeff, whose
brother’s death had been caused by a cerebral hemorrhage, was able to express more openly
some of his mixed feelings about the event, about which he had only giggled nervously in
past group sessions. Stating that both of his marshmallow figures were boys, he put one
down and said sadly, “His brother died ... Then his father cried, and he felt sad, and he
laughed.” I wondered how it had happened, and Jeff said, “An accident ... His mother was in
the accident too, but she didn’t die ... His father said ‘Don’t die.’”
I asked if the brother died anyway. “Yeah, he died.” Then I asked how the little boy felt, to
which Jeff earnestly replied, “Sad, sad, sad ... Yeah! I was sad when my brother died!” “I bet
you were,” I commented, after which Jeff went on with images he had until then been unable to
verbalize. “Yeah. My brother died, and the veins in his head broke, and all the blood came out
from his veins. But my brother didn’t have an accident when he died. His veins just broke.”
Art Therapy Releases a Worried Boy’s Energy: ALAN (4 and 11)
This is the story of Alan, a child who came for art therapy first when he was 4 years old for
three years of weekly sessions. Having found art therapy useful when he was younger, his