Problems We Address • 197Dorothy’s therapy was ending prematurely, not because she was ready, but because I was
pregnant, and in the early 1960s you couldn’t teach or work in a child psychiatric unit for
long after a pregnancy was visible. Although Dorothy was not able to express her anger
at me then for leaving her, when I visited the craft class on the ward a month later, she
showed me drawings of “Mrs. Rubin Having a Baby” (T) and “Mrs. Rubin being Attacked
by Soldiers for Being Bad” (U).
Twenty-five years later, despite having had considerable supervision and training in the
interim, including a PhD in counseling psychology and completing the program in both
adult and child psychoanalysis, I was confronted with a child in my private practice who
proved to be even more of a challenge to work with than Dorothy.
Such children can often be helped through art therapy when other methods fail (Evans
& Dubowsky, 2001; Rutten-Sarris, 2005). On the DVD (9.4), you can see Marijke Rutten-
Sarris, an art therapist from the Netherlands, working with two such children, using move-
ment and mirroring as well as drawing. She calls her approach “Emerging Body Language
(EBL) Therapy.” I got to know Marijke when serving on her doctoral dissertation commit-
tee. As so often happens, I learned much more than I taught.
The little girl who was referred to me, however, would not let me get as close as the boys
in the video of Rutten-Sarris’s work. I am still not certain what would be the best diagno-
sis for my patient, though I suspect it would be what is now known as autistic spectrum
disorders. Whatever her diagnostic label, and although Kitty functioned on a much higher
level than Dorothy, she forced me to use all of my resources just to connect with her. Here
is her story.
A Girl Who Spoke by Shutting Me Out: KITTY (4)
Kitty was a beautiful girl who had attended a progressive preschool for years but had no
interest in other children. Instead, she would play out stories by herself and would some-
times do odd things, like flapping her hands or jumping up and down and twirling. At the
Figure 9.3 “The Tortoise Shell Family” by Dorothy.