Donald Woods Winnicott is famous not only as a psychotherapist and scientist, but also for his invention of the projective method of drawing “doodles.” He used it with great success in the diagnosis and psychotherapy of children and adults in a wide variety of situations and cases. Here is one of them: This material has not yet been presented in Russian. This is my translation from English. “Ashton” - 12 years old Ashton was referred to me by a general practitioner who wrote: ... exceptionally smart, but unfortunately with many of the difficulties inherent in geniuses. He is very irritable, nervous, worried about his health. He invariably gets sick with a fever when it comes to returning to school. He recently developed seizures and it is difficult to manage at home. In addition, he has great difficulty sleeping and frequent nightmares... his parents have different views on how to cope with the problem... Ashton turned out to be an exceptional person, as will be seen from the description of the interview with him. He had a married sister with two children; thus he was an uncle. Note. I am giving a minimum of information to cover up the case. Inevitably, much is lost in this process, but the key features of interaction with the boy are preserved. Forming contact turned out to be easy. I quickly received evidence that the boy had a high intelligence, the same applied to both parents and his sister. I laid out the paper in front of us and we started a game of doodle.(1) He turned my first doodle into a fish.(2) I turned his doodle into a snake and a snake charmer.(3) He turned mine into a fish swallowing a turtle or into a big jellyfish. He was very pleased with these doodles, which seemed to mean something special to him.(4) I turned his doodle into a dog.(5) He turned mine into a sitting rabbit.(6) I turned his doodle into a face.( 7) He turned mine into a wooden shoe. (8) I turned his doodle into a pound sign. (9) He turned mine into a bottle opener. (10) I turned his doodle into a figure or doll, and on that occasion we talked about the things people take to bed with them for company. He said that he had two teddy bears. (11) He turned mine into a fish head, like in one advertisement he saw. At this point I was able to start the theme of dreams. “When you dream, do you see something like this (fish head)?” He drew (12) Detail of “a strange dream that is very difficult to describe or draw.” It is ghostly and moves. “It tied me up with pieces of rope. When I broke the ropes, it looked at me quite angrily.” Now Ashton began to behave in a way that is difficult to describe. He expressed himself very complexly, even unnaturally, like a very mature and erudite person. He operated through the intellect, so to speak, and quickly grasped intellectual concepts and connections between ideas. Ashton began to talk about his dreams and unpleasant sounds. “You can’t paint it: it looks like a house collapsing.” “Once I had an unpleasant experience: I was in bed, and since I could not sleep, I listened to music, that is, I mentally played a Beethoven symphony. I must have been half asleep, because when there was a pause in the music, it was not followed by a continuation, but by a strange noise.” He found it all scary, and it became clear to me at that moment (because of what happened with the chaotic and disorganized noise) that music meant a lot to him. Music displaces hallucinations. After this we talked about music and drawing as a way to control hallucinations. Then he said, “I recently painted an abstraction. This is quite a complex drawing, but I can show part of it.” At this point he drew (13) A detail of the abstraction that he wanted to show me. (14) This is the whole abstraction, and I know that I could not pick out the important part of it on my own . (My parents sent it to me later.) As it turned out, this was the main point of the interview. I felt that he trusted me with the key to his abstraction, although abstraction in its own way