ABSTRACT
This chapter presents survey the literature on the reactions of a child with a life-threatening illness, facing his own impending death. Not only did S. Freud have to be open enough to what he could observe in his consulting room, but society at large had to be able to receive his findings. A specific study shows that awareness of their illness seems to persist with fatally ill children, even when they are not in hospital. As with the fatally ill hospitalized children in studies, this 1975 study indicates that the fatally ill out-patient children conveyed significantly more preoccupation with the threat to their body integrity and functioning than did a control group of children with chronic illness. One of the means of testing that the researchers used was a projective test of a three-dimensional replica of a hospital room, as an analysis of interpersonal distancing.
