ABSTRACT
Klaus was an eight-year-old boy when I first met him. He was suffering from a neuroblastoma, a malignant tumour of the nerve tissues. He was to be admitted to the children’s clinic for a bone marrow transplant. The family was socially isolated, the mother came from a different culture and did not speak German particularly well. The boy had had practically no social contact with his peer group as a result of his illness, as I discovered after the first interview. He had been to kindergarten only for a few months before becoming ill; he had not gone on to attend school. When we met for the first time about a week before his planned admission, he seemed withdrawn, lacking in vitality and anxiously reserved. The first squiggle pictures were characterised by the fact that parts of the lower body were missing: in some cases the animals had no legs. Interspersed were pictures in which body parts were twisted, and there were indications of a psychic dedifferentiation. Gradually I managed to get into conversation with the boy. He began to open up a little and talked about how sad he was to be so isolated socially, while his younger sister was able to go to school. He opened up to the point of being able to speak about his fear of what was to come. Towards the end of our conversation he seemed increasingly to have rebuilt his encircling wall, and drew as his final picture (fig. 10–1) a person with a lot of hair—just think of chemotherapy and the associated loss of hair—whose legs seemed, however, to be missing. <target id="page_129" target-type="page">129</target>Klaus, Person with a lot of hair https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780429478369/9ce339a1-b3c3-4bff-97f8-4ac016b5ea6c/content/fig10_101.tif"/> On my asking about this, he said they were wrapped in a blanket. We agreed that this was a person completely wrapped up in a blanket and therefore a baby. This interpretation made him laugh with relief. He was obviously able for a moment to identify completely with regressive wishes. When I asked my colleagues afterwards, I was told that the illness had indeed at times caused him pain in the legs. But above all, the boy was unconsciously using this image as a metaphor for his bleak situation, robbed as it was psychologically of all possible movement.
