Michal Heiman | Children’s Talk
Born in 1954, lives and works in Tel Aviv
Reality and Playing No. 3 – Looking for Sarah – A proposal for a Visual Reconstruction of a D. W. Winnicott Case Study, 2012, video, 18:00 min.
Michal Heiman’s work reflects the artist’s continuous preoccupation with the interface between psychoanalysis and art. Her film refers to psychoanalyst and pediatrician Donald Winnicott’s text, “Interview with an Adolescent: A Therapeutic Consultation,” published in his last book, Playing and Reality (1971). During the interview, Winnicott invited Sarah, a sixteen-year-old girl, to join him in a “squiggle game,” a technique he invented for communicating with children through drawing. In his book, Winnicott depicts and verbalizes all the stages of squiggling without showing the drawings themselves. Their absence, contends Heiman, does not allow her (a reader for whom the visual aspect is an important tool) to have a critical and more complex look at Winnicott’s interpretations of Sarah’s drawings and dreams. Moreover, the therapist decision to omit them from the book erases an essential part of the joint process. “Was there a Sarah?”
