by Stuart Iiro was a 9-year-old Finnish boy who suffered from syndactyly, a congenital defect characterized by fused fingers or toes. He was sent to the hospital to undergo surgery. But unlike children of his age, who tended to cry and be terrified by medical treatment, Iiro was completely obedient to his doctors and nurses as if he were eager to be operated upon. Although his obedience made him well liked by the hospital staff, they also wondered whether there was more to the boy than meets the eye. Subsequently, Iiro was introduced to Dr. Donald W. Winnicott during his visit to Finland. Winnicott was a greatly influential British psychoanalyst in the mid 20th century. He gave Iiro a consultation in the form of a squiggle game. In this game, Iiro and Winnicott took turns drawing some squiggly lines while the other made them into whatever occurred to his mind. The game was simply a safe setting for Iiro to be creative. Once he felt safe, Iiro began to grow conscious of the inner self behind his compliance.
In the beginning of the consultation, Iiro made a lot of sketches related to ducks, including one with a webbed foot, and one in which a duck was swimming serenely on a lake. Through these pictures, Iiro seemed to show positive feelings about ducks, yet he was not able to make a connection between his own disability and the ducks’ webbed feet. He was not able to figure out the signification of the ducks he had drawn. He even turned Winnicott’s squiggle of a hand—hoping to get him to discuss the deformation of his own hand—into a flower. While Iiro worked on his drawings of ducks, Winnicott also asked him about his future aspirations. The discussion started with the squiggle of a horn, which Iiro associated with his fondness for music. Iiro wished he could play the flute the way his brother played the cornet. When asked about future careers, Iiro remarked he would like to be either a building contractor or an art teacher at a school. Nevertheless, with his deformed hand, these aspirations were nearly impossible to accomplish. As the squiggle game went on, Iiro became more settled to the disability he had formerly rejected. Having perceived this, Winnicott made the following interpretation. “If we think of you as small, you would like to swim in the lake or swim on the surface like a duck. You are telling me that you are fond of yourself with your webbed hands and feet and that you need people to love you the same way as when you were born. Growing up, you began to want to play the piano and the flute and to do handicrafts, and so you agreed to be operated on, but the first thing is to be loved as you are and as you were born.” In response to this interpretation, Iiro replied, “Mother has the same thing that I’ve got.” After the consultation, Winnicott had an interview with Iiro’s mother. As Iiro said, his mother also suffered form syndactly. When they talked about Iiro’s disability, the mother burst into tears. She confided to Winnicott that, for her, Iiro simply personified her sense of guilt for having handed down her own disease to her children. She confided further that having discovered the inheritance in Iiro, she began to hate him on the spot and demanded that he be sent away. It was not until she found out that surgery could fix Iiro’s fingers and toes that she began to love him once again. Though Iiro won back his mother’s love, he had paid for it by being caught up in the obsession for surgery as well as his dream to accomplish what he could never really do. While doodling the ducks, Iiro became in touch with what he truly was before being shocked by his mother’s despair. And the consultation simply offered him a secure setting to regress to this phase. He could freely turn Winnicott’s squiggly lines into the happily swimming duck his true self resembled, and what he did in the process was retained, respected, and discussed. Having been loved as what he truly was, Iiro finally reclaimed his love for himself. a
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May 2024
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