The Language of Drawings: A New Finding in Psychodynamic Work

If a person is struggling with feelings that involve pain or anxiety, then we find a complex network of difficulties affecting that person’s capacity to express what torments him. Whatever the person’s age, they very often have no access to the words that might convey their internal conflicts. People interacting with that person may believe he is deliberately refusing to express what affects him, but it is certainly true that most times this is not the case.

When dealing with children, these difficulties are even more acute. Many years ago it was found that children often expressed in their drawings elements of the conflicts they were experiencing of themselves and the world in which they lived. The author followed this practice in his work – not only with children and adolescents, but at times also with adults.

This fascinating book arose from his discovery that single drawings could at times represent only a part of an underlying emotional experience that "completed" its expression in another picture drawn after that first one. At first, it seemed a mere coincidence, but time came to show him that this was a strategy similar to what we find in ordinary verbal language and that drawings clearly constituted a language of their own. He therefore subjected the phenomenon he now found to further investigation.

The author’s hope is that his subsequent findings may prove to be a valuable clinical tool for colleagues in their work. This research should give closer and more detailed understanding of this splitting mechanism, so well known in actual words, but apparently not previously describe in drawings.