Like Homer Lane (Bazeley, 1928) and George Lyward (Burn, 1956), she did not believe that, because a parent appeared to have ‘failed’ with their child, that was any reason to exclude them from what was happening to their child. Like Lyward she imposed the boundaries that she thought were necessary for her work and she took the same risk that Lyward did – that they would reject those boundaries and therefore the work with their child. Virginia Mae Axline (1964) Dibs in search of self: personality development in play therapy Boston: Houghton Mifflin

At playtime, he had initially declined to go out but had done so when Miss A did; he had rested along with the other children after playtime and, when the children had joined in group activities, Miss A had invited him to the playroom. He had gone with her, holding her hand tightly. This also raises the possibility that the effectiveness of ‘group therapy’ has nothing to do with the theoretical framework chosen to underpin it but simply with whether or not the group within which a person was allowed to explore their own feelings had appropriate boundaries and levels of tolerance of strong feelings to enable a person to do express them freely on their way to resolving them. ReferencesHe had started as before walking round, touching and naming objects. She had asked whether he would like to take his hat and coat off and he had agreed but had done nothing about it. Eventually he had asked for help to take things off but had dropped them on the floor, so she had put them on a hook. In Chapter 3 she describes her visit to his mother the following day. She had been let into a drawing room where tea had been served but there had been no sign that it was ‘lived in’. His mother had said that she did not expect any change in Dibs and had offered him as raw data for study. She had also suggested using Dibs’s playroom but Miss A had insisted on using the child guidance centre even though his mother had offered her a higher fee if she had used Dibs’s playroom. She had given his mother a consent form to record the interviews and accepted his mother’s insistence that she would not be coming to the sessions. His mother had commented that his sister was a ‘perfect child’. He had told her, to her surprise, that she had said, “This is all yours, Dibs. Have fun. Nobody is going to hurt you in here”, and he had gradually come to believe her. He had said that he had found his enemies and fought them; he had also learned how big God was and, in response to a question, she had revealed that she had heard his earlier conversation which had made him realise that they were now neighbours. She had met his parents a few days later when his mother had asked him why he called her Miss A. “A special name for a special friend”, he had replied. Clarke A. M and Clarke, A D B (1976) Studies in natural settings In A M Clarke and A D B Clarke (Eds) Early experience: myth and evidence Chapter 6, pp. 69-96. London: Open Books.

In Chapter 18 she recounts how she had received a call from one of the teachers who had described a gradual change in Dibs’s behaviour at school and so she had arranged to meet two of the teachers for lunch. But, when they had showed her the very elementary pictures and writing he was producing, she had initially been baffled but hadn’t told them that he could do much better because it might have discouraged them. In Chapter 1, Virginia Axline describes her first sight of Dibs in a corner, crouched, head down, arms across his chest, ignoring the fact that it was home time and resisting his teacher’s attempts to get him to go home. If Dibs had not stopped resisting by the time his mother arrived, the chauffeur would be sent in to collect him. The focus of this story of Dibs has to do with Axline’s application of a very specific form of psychotherapy known as play therapy. This has proven over the decades since publication of the book to be an especially effective form of therapy for getting at the root of behavioral problems in children. But what is especially significant to keep in mind is that Axline has absolutely no way of knowing whether her choice of therapy will have impact on Dibs because, although she has theories, she does not know what his problem is. Others have voiced opinions on that topic, but nobody knows for sure. And no matter how effective any particular therapy maybe in treating a condition, it inevitably winds up being useless in treating the wrong condition. Just as one wouldn’t take prescription medication for a heart problem to treat depression, using play therapy to treat mental retardation is probably only going to produce a result purely by happy coincidence.

In the church he had said his grandmother had said church was God’s house and Jake had said that it was a sacred place; he had been startled when the organist had started to play, saying he had never heard such music before. The story of Dibs also reinforces the evidence that children have the capacity to self-heal if they are provided with an environment in which that self-healing can take place (Clarke and Clarke, 1976). As Neill (1962) and Lyward found, children don’t need individual therapy; at no time does Virginia Axline try to discuss or explain or interpret his behaviour to Dibs. She simply gives him an environment in which he can explore his own feelings and come to his own conclusions about them, whatever they are. Dibs’s mother had influenced the school board to accept him but had refused the offer of professional help; his father was a well-known scientist and his younger sister a ‘spoiled brat.’ With other parents complaining after Dibs had scratched another child, his mother had been told that the school was thinking of excluding him and there had been a case conference to which Miss A (as Dibs called her) had been invited. The staff were obviously captivated by Dibs and had agreed to her suggestion of play therapy.

Robertson, J. and Robertson, J (1971) Young children in brief separation: a fresh look Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 26, 264-315 See also Children Webmag October 2009 In Chapter 16 she recounts how Dibs had admitted to winding up his father, while threatening the father doll with a toy gun which he then hid in the basement of the doll’s house. He had then gone on to talk about the children at school before engaging in some water play, making a glass harmonica, and then mixing up all the paint jars. He had then gone to the office where he had pasted in some bookplates and asked for reassurance about his relationship with her. On his departure he had run to his mother and said, “Oh mother, I love you”. In Chapter 2, she says that everyone has their own private world of meaning and it is important to try once more, because we don’t have all the answers. She had arranged to observe Dibs in school, to visit his mother and to see Dibs in the play therapy room at the child guidance centre.Ultimately, the successful treatment of Dibs is accomplished not with because of play therapy itself, but because Dr. Axline had was able to imagine that whatever condition Dibs suffered from was one that could be effective treated with play therapy. In this Introduction, Leonard Carmichael compares the story of Dibs to “a first-class detective story.” On the other hand, story of the book itself is comparable to one those movies about the cop who is the one capable of catching the bad guy he doesn’t play the rules. Which is simply a phrase to describe having the imagination to think in a way that other can’t or won’t. Update this section! The real story of the book—the book itself and not story it tells—is that it would not exist without Axline having the imagination to look beyond the simplistic diagnoses of the teachers and Dibs’ parents. Furthermore, it is also the story a doctor having a mind open enough to see beyond the most likely outcome after her initial meeting with Dibs’ mother: three weeks of treatment and she’s going to pull the plug. The book is the story of the how having the imagination to look challenge everybody else’s limited imagination and the courage to challenge one’s own expectations of disappointment on the part of others to put their faith in technique to the test. Trasler (1960) had found that some of the most successful foster placements were those where the children’s parents were welcome visitors and, twenty years later, Berridge (1985) found that one reason why some children rejected foster care was because it implied rejection of their own parents and they preferred residential care because it did not. Yet some residential workers and many social workers lose interest in parents (Thorpe, 1973) and government policy in England has been for as many children in care as possible to be adopted rather than make their parents partners in bringing up their children as intended in the 1989 Children Act and required by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

It is difficult in a summary such as this to convey the depth and power of the descriptions of Dibs’s encounters with Miss A, one reason why it has been a regular on so many students’ book-lists for nearly half a century, but it is important not to be carried away by the work with Dibs. The key to her success, as she points out, was as much her uncritical, accepting and respectful relationship with his mother. He had then asked to go to the office where he had looked up ‘yeast’ in the dictionary, written a Morse code message which he had also written on another card in the card file, had told her what other presents he had received and had thanked her for her birthday card. So she had asked him what he was like. “He’s a brilliant boy. Full of ideas. Concerned about everybody and everything. Very sensitive. A real leader … he acts on the things he believes in”. In Chapter 24 she recounts how, two and half years later, she had heard Dibs talking to a friend outside her flat and learned that Dibs had moved into a house down the road. She had later met him in the street; he had told exactly how long it had been since their last session because he had framed the date of the last visit. Haley received a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and honed her sifting and winnowing skills at The Daily Cardinal. She previously covered politics for The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, investigated exotic pet ownership for Wisconsin Watch, and blogged for some of your favorite reality stars.Bazeley, E T (1928) Homer Lane and the Little Commonwealth London: Allen & Unwin See also Children Webmag February 2009 In Chapter 4 she recalls that it was several weeks before the consent form arrived while Dibs had carried on as usual. When he had arrived for the first session, she had taken him to the playroom, which was more attractive than the one at school but with the same equipment. He had then made an impossible demand of the mother doll, shouting at and threatening it before breaking off to play tenderly with the sister doll and talking about school and the things he had made at school for the members of the family.