Notes for Dr Margaret Lowenfeld’s presentation at the August 1968 World Federation for Mental Health Internation Congress. Notes are naturally incomplete, contain errors, and unfortunately were not filed alongside the relevant slides referenced to in the presentation, however the document is still very informative.

As Dr. Mead has explained to you the purpose of this technical session is to put before you an approach to some of the problems that distress and concern us which is embodied in four concrete tool still in process of evolution, a situation which will be very familiar to many of you in lines of work other than ours.

The process out of which these tools grew has been the study of children in states of disturbance and disharmony within themselves and clashes between them and society. Taking both sides of my work together, that in Harley St. and that in the Institute of Child Psychology, the range of ages has been from a few weeks old, to later adolescence with, of late, study of selected adults has been added to check the theories of development that I was gradually hammering out.

Although for many years I have been familiar, both from personal and theoretical experience, wit the main theories of human dynamics, I have not found it possible to feel comfortable with views of the source of personal and sociological sufferings and struggle which were worked out, as it were, backwards to children from the experience of adults. Instead I have sought to find ways of gaining direct contact with children and seeing what through media they could and wished to manipulate and use, how their ‘selves’ were developing within them, what experiences they were having, what concepts they were forming of themselves and of the people and objects among which they lived.