ABSTRACT
This chapter is an account of a brief dramatherapeutic intervention (ten hours) with a client with chronic catatonic schizophrenia. It shows how ritual, storytelling, music and different objects were used to create containers and a context within which the client could discover the transitional space of play, and thus transform ‘passive withdrawal’ into ‘creative distance’. This distance enabled him to take the risk of entering into an active communicative relationship with the therapist and subsequently with the staff and his parents. In that sense it shows in an exemplary way how the paradox of dramatic distance as well as metaphors can work in short-erm treatment to generate healing communicative responses.
