The scribble

Doodle drawings and clinical work

 

Fifteen years ago I introduced into my clinical activity, both during the observation phase and during the therapeutic work, the use of doodle drawings in the sessions to facilitate the construction of psychic processes; some articles have been published in Italian journals of psychoanalysis.

The experience acquired and the results achieved have enabled me to put forward the hypothesis that by using doodle drawings, it is possible to gain access, as in dreams, to the so-called implicit or procedural memory and construct significant moments of meeting with the patient.
I started to become familiar with and use doodles at the beginning of the 1980s, during the supervision seminaries with Marcelle Spira who trained in Buenos Aires under Pichon Riviere and in Geneva with Melanie Klein[1]. It was, in fact, this eclectic teacher who made me aware of the potential of using doodles which she herself had learnt in Buenos Aires, in the groups led by Pichon Riviere. Prompted by an artist of the Argentine avant-garde, at the beginning they were used as a game; however, they soon became a vehicle for expressing the unconscious image of one’s own corporeal self. There is no need to point out that Winnicott also made a first use of doodles when treating children in difficulty.

 My use of doodle drawings differs from that of Winnicott in the interaction between patient and therapist; moreover, I have also slightly modified the method learnt from Marcelle Spira. The method acquired from  Spira consisted in telling the patients to close their eyes and to allow the hand to move freely and follow any doodled and improvised lines. Subsequently, patients had to copy an element of the doodle in which they saw an image with a complete meaning onto a second sheet of paper. I have left the first part of the instructions unaltered – a free-hand drawing, doodled with eyes closed -, but I ask the patients to use their left hand and then, to associate several pictures in the same doodle, turning the sheet round by 360°. I then ask the patients to draw two other doodles on different sheets of paper and to give each one a title. The last phase consists of the construction of a temporal sequence and the narration of a short story in which other elements gradually appear next to the evidence of the first association, of the first immediate recognition of a complete picture.
Telling the story enables the construction of a dialogue involving past, present and future and the creation of a story seen and experienced in the here and now of the session.
As Stern affirms: “Perhaps the most important aspect regarding the tripartite now moment is that all the parts that form it converge, subjectively, into a single, unified, coherent and global experience within a “subjective now”[1]. He also states: “The challenge consists in imagining the now moment in a sort of balanced dialogue between the past and the future”.
As occurs to the musical phrase described by Stern, with the doodle drawing too various potential futures can be formed in a continuous “trialogue” while the story is being written.
The surprise at “seeing” new material, created unconsciously and quickly during the session is sometimes so great that the pleasure of this playful discovery also continues at home, as a continuous and surprising game that links the patient to the analytical work with the analyst even after the session has finished. The doodle, created from a mark made without any awareness or rationality whatsoever, draws from the unconscious, like a micro-dream in the session, with the surprise of seeing that, drawing from one’s inner self, the results are infinite and continuously varied and unexpected. Every day there is movement and change, every day the internal object undergoes small changes, life is transformed and, thanks to movement, it generates new bridges rich in creative potential.

The need to create belongs to every one of us. Marcelle Spira maintains that it is the need to feel that we not only possess the capacity to destroy, but also the capacity to create. M. Spira, picking up from Bion, stated that the creativity of the artist, like that of the analyst, comes through the capacity to receive and the capacity to receive comes through the senses, through the possibility of being a “white canvas” on which everything can be written without prejudice and without preconceptions. Everyone puts together their own world in a personal way, creating their own world, a personal world.

 Drawn on paper with eyes closed, I would say in the Bionian condition of “being without a memory and without desire”, the doodle draws from the most primitive corporeal memory by means of a primitive sensoriality which is de-structured by the gesture of non-sense. My observations have shown that the doodle represents the psycho-corporeal self which reveals the original, primitive emotion encysted in the body that becomes a speaking body  dialoguing with the self which observes and sees.

The therapist sees together with the patient the primitive, corporeal affective structure which, if it is listened to and appreciated as an authentic gesture of self, assumes for the patient a significance that I would define as “revolutionary”. The patient feels himself to be at the centre of the other’s attention, but above all at the centre of himself. For years he has fought to bring together scattered pieces of his life, often trying to find an equilibrium between what he felt and what he believed that the “others” wanted from him and now, to his surprise and with the wonder of a child in his eyes, the core of his life appears. It appears in the story written in the historical memory of  the body and of the mind that speak and tell stories; they tell stories that are about long-standing sufferance and old grief that have been forgotten by the conscience because they were too painful to be lived through or because they are deep rooted in a far-off past in which the memory did not yet exist and the experiences could only be remembered in the body; but they also tell of dreams, desires and hopes that can open up different futures. Today, with the shared  listening of the therapist, emotions of the past and of the future are willing to come to light, to show themselves, to be seen and recognised as the fruit of the real self.

“The world in a grain of sand” Stern would say.

Obviously the therapist’s shared listening and watchful eye are essential: a look can kill, a look can be impersonal as in the “I am watching you, but I don’t see you” of the models in Vanessa Beecroft’s performances; a look can bring life as my granddaughter Sofia astutely realised in a phrase addressed to her mother, “Mummy, if you watch me, I see you”.
The Cartesian assertion “cogito ergo sum” provides for a before, a “cogitatus ergo sum”; only if I have been thought of can I exist today, or, better still, only if I have been understood can I exist today. As Dina Vallino asserts, “To be understood for a small child is part of the feeling of existing and the lack of this experience of being there produces a global suffering and a feeling of annihilation very similar to the sensation of being able to disappear into nothing.”

Today I continue to develop my theoretical-clinical research with about ten colleagues and I am thinking of collecting in a book; the research has been extended to the couple, to the parental couple, to the mother with the son or daughter and the father with the son or daughter, as an opportunity for co-construction in the relationship with the involvement of one’s own corporeal self.
Talking about the moment of meeting, Beebe  remembers Sander’s quote giving the example of the game of doodling used by Winnicott as an “inviolable moment” in which the child realises he is known.

I experience similar moments on a daily basis with my patients.

  

Bibliography

 -Daniel Stern “The present moment in psychotherapy and everyday life”, Italian translation – Raffaello Cortina Editore, Milan 2005 

-Antonio Techel “L’utilizzo della musica e dello scarabocchio in un asilo nido” in Rivista Italiana di Gruppoanalisi vol. XVII n. 1/2003 Editore Franco Angeli 

- Antonio Techel “Il creare del paziente, il creare dell’analista. Lo scarabocchio: un possibile ponte verso il proto mentale” in Rivista Italiana di Gruppoanalisi vol. XXII n. 1/2008 Editore Franco Angeli