Figure 161 shows a little girl who loves her daddy and one can only conjecture about the closeness of the relationship.

Sometimes a new baby comes along and drives children close to the parents as in figure 162.

Sometimes a new baby comes along and it is just too painful to accept, so the baby's presence is denied, as "he's in the other room," as in figure 163.

It seems that in such an instance comfortable individual identification is so incomplete, that any addition to this unit is too much of a threat to include in the drawing.

Figure 164 is that of a twelve-year-old boy, hospitalized for severe ulcerative colitis.

He has a history of severe emotional deprivation, because of a depressed mother in the first year of life. The mother is depicted as a stove and the nourishment he gets from her is all-important in his life. A vacuum cleaner appears, and it is in relation to this deprived boy with a pathological intestine. This drawing symbol appears repeatedly in children with a history of oral deprivation.

Sixteen-year-old Tim drew figure 165.

His mother was an alcoholic, usually down at the corner tavern. Because of maternal deprivation, Tim was driven to run through life seeking that elusive butterfly of love and denying the painful existence of a non-mothering mother. Tim had about given up seeking mother love; Tim was also dying of severe intractable asthma. It seems almost superfluous to add words to this exquisite dynamic drawing. The inability to express direct hostility to the mother, but only drawing her "absent" and substituting the search for beauty in the form of the butterfly, as displaced destructive hostility is done much better in drawing than in words.

Kathy, an eleven-year-old girl produced the drawing in figure 166. It captures the central theme in many girls’ drawings. She makes herself an idealized type of beauty, when in reality Kathy is a very homely girl, while her sister Vicki is very pretty. The little girl's wish fulfillment and clenched fist directed towards her sister poignantly reflects her desire to outshine her rival.

The overpowering and dominant mother--Figure 167 portrays a drawing of Nancy, a little nine-year-old girl with an overly close or symbiotic relationship to the mother.

The mother was a very successful businesswoman, who overpowered and dominated her family. This is an example of genuine identity confusion. If the child identifies with the effeminate or weak father, she would of course have run the risk of being rejected by the mother, as he is. However to identify with the mother, she would of course have had to relinquish her femininity, as her mother has hers; so the child in her confusion and paralyzing ambivalence remains symbiotically tied to the mother and development remains static. It is interesting to point out further that in this case as in most cases, development is not really static but goes on. In the case of Nancy serious somatic symptoms developed.

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