A professor at Ohio State, and a child who would not look up

This is a student report on Dibs, the book by Virginia Axline, a professor at Ohio State University in the United States. She published a work on play therapy that, the notes say, was widely praised around the world, and is here called a world authority who developed that method. Through it she opened the mind of a child named Dibs, who had been behaving strangely, and helped draw out a giftedness so that he could grow as a gifted child. In the book she writes that she wanted Dibs to come to her first; adults, she says, always try to approach the child first, and that is precisely the problem. Specialists in child counseling, the writer adds, often name Dibs when asked to recommend the bestseller most read by readers in the field, which is why the writer had wanted to read it.

Dibs was five, from a relatively well-off family, with one sibling. He had already spent two years at kindergarten, yet did not mix with other children in class. He crawled about the room, hid under desks, rocked his body hard back and forth, and would not look people in the eye. He seemed, the notes say, a lonely child shut in a world of his own.

Axline did not simply take him for a child with autism. Through time spent with the family she looked at him as a wounded child — though, the writer remarks, it is not easy, in ordinary thinking, to see a wound in a child whose parents are able and whose circumstances are comfortable.

Thursday sessions, a buried soldier, and a first hug

Dibs called Axline “Miss A.” They agreed to meet every Thursday. While he played with toys, she asked no questions and did not interfere. She let him do as he wished, respected him, and listened in earnest to whatever he said. He came to like the time in the playroom very much.

In one session he played with toy soldiers, buried them in the sand, made something like a grave, and said that the soldier in the grave was his father. The father, the notes record, had often locked Dibs, still young, in a room, had not been warm, and had never shown him love. The mother, too, was unusual in the writer’s telling: she had once been a successful surgeon, and believed she had had to give up that work and become a housewife because of an unwanted pregnancy — Dibs — from her relation with the father. She was found to have held, without herself knowing it, a kind of anger toward him.

Then, after a session, as he left the playroom, he ran to the mother who was waiting and held her tightly with both arms. She said this was his first spontaneous show of affection, and she was so startled and moved that she wept. At home he began to look her straight in the eye and to answer when spoken to; he played well with the sibling he had always seemed to find a nuisance and to dislike; at kindergarten he mixed with other children and adapted quickly. The change opened the mother’s closed heart as well, and the father, too, was greatly altered: he began to speak to Dibs and even to travel with him, and to show him far more interest than before. Play therapy, the notes say, restored a self not only to the five-year-old but to the father and the mother as well.

The word “I,” a meeting two years later, and a diagnosis left unfinished

Above all, Dibs had become a child who could feel happiness. He now referred to himself with the word “I.” Before the sessions, he had called himself “Dibs,” as if giving himself orders and answering them. After many changes, he no longer needed play therapy; he had recovered himself.

Two years passed, and Axline met him again. He was now going to a school for gifted children, and his schoolwork was said to be strong. He had spent a somewhat dark early childhood, the notes say, but he had come out of that darkness and had learned that he himself could adjust and cope with the sunny and the shady parts of his own life.

Before reading the book, the writer had thought it was simply an account of treating a child with autism. Dibs, however, was not simply a case of autism. The condition he had been living with was reactive attachment disorder, an impairment with points of difference from autism. What, then, is reactive attachment disorder? The notes begin an answer: a young child is born weak and powerless, and cannot survive properly without help from the people around; the presence of a mother who raises the child is therefore tied directly to whether the child can survive. The unique body ends there, and the rest of a clinical definition is not invented here. The same Korean essay, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. A student book report on Virginia Axline’s Dibs, naming her as a professor at Ohio State University and as the author of a widely praised book on play therapy.
2. Thursday sessions without questions or interference, a buried toy soldier, a first hug, the word “I,” and a meeting two years later at a school for gifted children.
3. The writer’s first reading of the book as a story of autism, and an unfinished opening to reactive attachment disorder, left as the unique body gives it.

Last updated: 14 November 2026