memoirs
Among the mishmash of memories of four decades of clinical work, there are certain periods that stick out. One series of sessions that I recall, somewhat hazily, occurred when I was an intern at University of Nebraska Medical Center in 1984. I was supervised by Louise Eaton, a psychiatrist in Nebraska at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, and by Gary Gaard, a very supportive psychologist. The client was a four-year-old girl with Down syndrome, very slight of build, with a bowl-like haircut, and almost completely mute. She could draw, though, and produced one of those tadpole-like drawings with two long lines dropping from a circle. The therapy style was a certain kind of play therapy in which you avoided any kind of evaluation. The idea was that praising did not help, since it implied the potential for criticism. So you avoided both. Every day this four-year-old would serve me tea in the unit playroom. There were plastic cups, and we would carefully lay them out. She would pou...