ABSTRACT
Not all children move with imaginative freedom and trust. Not all children come to the therapist at a point where buried pain or fear is ready to emerge spontaneously through metaphoric play, and some children cannot play at all. Let us turn our attention, for a moment, to them and to the patient, waiting game involved in reaching them. For each child must be approached within a context that is comprehensible to him or to her, and the path to communication with each child is unique. It is not opened up by any single, simple, ‘Open sesame’ formula. The therapist can often use the methods described in preceding chapters (and then the communication is rapid and powerful), but sometimes there is a need to keep exploring a variety of approaches-testing, discarding, inventing-until the way in has been found.
