Why does a psychologist need a doll?

 

The doll in the hands of the patient is a screen behind which you can hide, separate from yourself and open up.

A doll in the hands of a psychologist distracts the patient from the seriousness of the process and allows a heart-to-heart talk. Children are especially impressed with the conversations with dolls. For a child, it is toys that are confidants, and you communicate with equals without tension. And adults, not without pleasure, return to their open childish essence.

Making a doll is healing, as is any act of creative self-expression.

Theory and practice of doll therapy

The author of the term “puppet therapy” is no longer found, but it is known that the practice of treatment with puppets has existed for a long time. For example, neuropathologist Malcolm Wright from Wales as early as 1926 used puppets and puppet theater to relieve vaccine-related neuroses in children. However, this does not prevent a pseudoscientific publication from time to time from publishing “sensational articles” about the creation of this method “literally three days ago” by some left-handed psychologist.

Puppet therapy can be used in different areas of psychotherapy: psychodrama, game therapy, fairy tale therapy and art therapy.

In all these practices, the theatrical beginning is clearly expressed. They are built on “playing” situations that are painful for the patient and searching for optimal life “roles”. In psychodrama, improvised performances are literally organized, in play therapy the same tasks are solved in the course of an ordinary children’s game, and in fairy tale therapy the patient “fits” into a philosophical fairy tale with a happy ending.

Modern “puppet therapists” consider puppet theater to be perhaps the most effective way of working with children. This option is also offered to adults, but less often. Children play either in specially invented performances or in ordinary plays of suitable content. Roles, of course, are distributed with feeling, sense and arrangement.

Fans of individual work arrange for the patient a kind of “one-actor theater”. In this case, the doctor suggests choosing a doll, hiding behind a screen and conducting a dialogue as if on her behalf. The very choice of the doll by the patient will tell a lot. For example, a bunny can talk about fears, a wolf – about aggressiveness, and a “incomprehensible figure with eyes” (something like a cube with a face) is completely chosen by psychopaths to be disinhibited. During a psychotherapy session, the patient may offer to change the doll so that he tries to play a different role.

For the development of the emotional sphere, there is a special set of six dolls of the same type with different facial expressions: sadness, joy, peace, anger, fear, surprise. The patient puts one doll on his hand, then another, and with the appropriate intonation says neutral phrases like “Good afternoon” or “What time is it?”. It’s funny that these types of puppet therapy are also used in the therapy of psychotherapists themselves, who, due to frequent encounters with human suffering, often develop “burnout syndrome”.

Finally, the doctor himself can hide behind the doll. As a rule, specialists drag very large dolls (it looks like “medical clowns”) around hospitals, visiting disabled children and inoperable patients.