درام و بازی درمانی با کودکان خردسال

Pergamon The Arts in Psychotherapy, Vol. 22, No. 3. pp. 223-228, 1995 Copyright 0 1995 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in the USA. All rights reserved 0197-4556195 $9.50 + .OO 0197-4556(95)00022-4 DRAMA AND PLAY THERAPY WITH YOUNG CHILDREN ANN CATTANACH, MSc, RDth, RDT* Tom tied a kettle to the tail of a cat; Jill put a stone in the blind man’s hat; Bob threw his grandmother down the stairs- And they all grew up ugly and nobody cares. Nobody loves me, Everybody hates me, Going in the garden To-eat-worms. Big fat juicy ones, Little squiggly niggly ones. Going in the garden To-eat-worms. ’ These rhymes are part of children’s armory to cope with their world and perhaps tell us, the adults, what they really think and feel. What Iona Opie (1992) called “a declaration of a child’s brave defiance in the face of daunting odds. ” Play for children is the place where they can ex- press their defiance and try to make sense of their own particular world and what it feels like to live there. They can play their world through making other worlds and in making sense of these created worlds come to terms with their own particular reality. This is the paradox of play; safe in the world of play we can declare: Nobody loves me Everybody hates me, Going in the garden To-eat-worms. and explore that loss of love in the safety of the play- ing space and the containment of the rhyme. Donald, age 7, knew that feeling. He told me he was really pleased that he was going home to his mother who had been in the psychiatric hospital, but in his play and drawing he was able to tell this story: This is a boy called Adam. He has got blood all over him because he was run down by a car. A man called Raymond ran him down. It was an accident. He is going to die from the accident. He goes into a coma in the hospital then he dies a day later. Everybody says ‘Hip-hip-hooray’ because no- body likes him and Raymond said ‘Hip-hip- hooray’ because he didn’t like him and was glad he had killed him, Everybody was putting knives into his dead body in the grave. Even in the grave, Adam had blood all over him. Adam was alone in the world. Donald could explore himself and his mother in his story. He described his own helplessness and his mother’s talk about killing herself but both were con- tained by the story. The pain of Donald’s life was held safe by the story of a boy called Adam.