Withdrawing from reality: working with a young child through his difficulties in attending nursery and the separation from his parents

摘要

This paper is about work with a 2-year-old boy who could not cope with the separation from his parents when he attended nursery. The paper describes how his anger and aggression stirred up by the separation could not find any space or understanding and was therefore split off by him in order to preserve his own ego, and how this split off aggression resulted in his intense withdrawal from his environment, to the extent that he presented with autistic features. The paper describes discovering and working through the little boy's aggressive feelings, and also the transformation of his perception of the world from a two-dimensional one, where he had adhesive relations to all the objects around him, to a more three-dimensional one, where an internal space developed in which language and relationships could unfold.