Tomoaki Kano

How do adolescent clients today become adults through psychotherapy? This study reports on the content of psychotherapy for an adolescent man who expressed a desire to become a manga artist, focusing primarily on his dreams. While the client spoke of wanting to become a manga artist, he did not take any action toward that goal. Instead, he remained in a world of potentiality where he took no action and was considered to be in a state of psychological childhood. Through his dreams, the coexistence of opposites became evident, and he gradually acquired a body that experienced suffering, leading him to clash with others. The client eventually got a job at a company and decided to make manga his hobby. It was thought that this choice was made as he stepped into the world of reality from the world of potentiality and achieved psychological adulthood.

This study examined the process of play therapy in school counseling with a first-grade elementary school girl who had been diagnosed with ADHD and whose chief complaint was reluctance to go to school. Although the client seemed to be able to distinguish between herself and others, she tended to mix aggression with fusion or to distance herself too much from others. However, a mutual relationship gradually developed between the client and the therapist, and through physical confrontation, the client gained a sense of self and others, leading to separation. Subsequently, movements to form a connection with the separated other emerged, and the anticipation of the actual separation from the therapist gave rise to movements toward resonance with the other and internalization of the other. Such developments in deepening the connection with the other suggest that play therapy contributed to improvement of the client’s actual interpersonal relationships.