by Dr. Margaret Lowenfeld

FOR the past 20 years, we have been studying children using methods to enable them to talk, as it were, without the use of language. A careful and detailed analysis of the productions children have made, using materials specially designed for their use, has brought to light an activity of the human psyche that so far has not been described. This is non-verbal mental activity, which seems to start at the beginning of life and to remain at the core of the psyche. This mental activity will be referred to as ‘thought’ in this paper.

To describe this activity in words is a task set about with great difficulties. The difficulties will be stated first, to show why it is that many gaps must appear in this account. To give a complete account, one should first describe it, then show how it operates in normal healthy childhood, say what happens to it in adult life, and against that background describe it as we see it in our patients. But this would be a matter of intolerable length and quite outside the limits of this paper. Moreover, there has been no opportunity to study this activity of the psyche in normal children in anything resembling the same detail as has been possible in disturbed children. Also, the amount of available evidence on the nature of non-verbal thought in adulthood is too scanty to give more than indications of probability. Thus all that can be done here is to put forward some of the evidence which has been collected as to the existence of this activity, and then to describe it as it has appeared in child patients.