198 • Introduction to Art Therapy
repeated urging of her teachers, her parents reluctantly brought her for treatment, choosing
an art therapist because Kitty loved to draw (DVD 9.5).
Her fluid and fluent drawings, which her mother gave me in abundance, reminded me
of those by Nadia, a British girl with autism who had become famous for her remarkably
detailed drawings (Selfe, 1977). Indeed, Kitty was a fine artist.
I felt concerned when I first saw Kitty’s bizarre behaviors, fearing that she had early infan-
tile autism, pervasive developmental disorder, or a neurological impairment. I soon referred
her to a child psychologist for diagnostic testing, but Kitty was so oppositional that the find-
ings were inconclusive.
At that point, I met with her parents again to try to get more of a developmental history,
which would be especially important in trying to understand the nature of her difficulties.
However, as had been true in our earlier meetings, their memories of Kitty’s early years
continued to be both inconsistent and vague. Since this was in the 1990s, I finally asked if
they had videotaped her when she was little. They had, and were more than willing for me
to look at their home videos.
The tapes were startling. While Kitty seemed like a pretty normal baby and toddler, her
mother, the main videographer, was so intrusive that it stood out as the most significant
feature. Mother’s narration, which was constant while she was filming, as well as her bound-
ary-less interaction with Kitty, introduced another possible motive for the child’s puzzling
symptoms and for her behavior with me, which had been evolving during the months I had
seen her before viewing the videos.
In the beginning, Kitty had enacted her solitary dramas at a distance—as far away as she
could get with her back to me in the large former living room of my office suite. After a few
sessions, she began to use the smaller adjacent playroom (the former kitchen).
She would usually grab drawing paper and markers and quickly produce pictorial story-
books. She would tell me what to write on each page, but Kitty would not respond to any of
my questions or comments. On the DVD (9.5), you can see the cover and inside pages from
one about “Wonder Woman” (A) and her adventures (B), and another about being “In the
Bubble” (C) and popping it to escape (D).
Finally, she began to involve me in her dramas. Her favorite thing was to shut me out of
the playroom space by literally shutting the door. Kitty would then gleefully control when
and how she would let me in. Sometimes she would shut me in, being equally bossy about
how and when she would let me out.
It was clear that she was trying to tell me something. But her message wasn’t so easy to
grasp. At first I thought she was telling me—by making me feel left out—that she was feeling
excluded from the closeness between her younger brother and her mother, which I had
observed and which was unusually intimate.
After viewing the videotapes of Kitty’s early years, however, I realized that her primary
need was to create a boundary between us. Her withdrawal from me and from other children
was not simply an avoidance of people. It was also a way of separating from her loving but
anxiously overinvolved mother, who was still having a very difficult time differentiating
Kitty’s needs from her own. She gave me permission to share my observations with her own
therapist, who had referred Kitty to me.
The information contained in the videos helped her mother’s therapist to help her to sep-
arate, thus giving Kitty the space she needed to grow more autonomously. As Kitty worked
through her problems in therapy using both art and drama, she became more sociable at
home and at preschool. Much to my surprise, when it was time to enroll in a kindergarten