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The project 'A fairy tale workshop in a paediatric oncology ward' is part of a more complex intervention that aims to support children, parents and professionals of a Paediatric Oncology Ward. The ill child is often unable to express his anxieties and to ask for explanations about the situation that he is experiencing. Through the 'Fairy tale', children were offered the opportunity to get in touch safely with danger and death anxieties through the use of displacement and identification mechanisms. The technique used was the tale-telling methodology developed by the French psychoanalyst Pierre Lafforgue, adapted for use in a hospital environment. Staff consisted of two child psychoanalytic psychotherapists, four psychologists attending psychodynamic training, and a storyteller. We describe how children have used the workshop and the effects of this experience on parents and nurses.

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The paper describes the psychoanalytic psychotherapy of a patient who had originally been referred at the age of 15 because of his social isolation. In fact, he suffered from high-functioning Asperger's syndrome and lived in an almost delusional world populated by a number of imaginary companions, which he used to counteract a deep void and sense of deadliness within him. After five years of therapy, the patient was able to move on, allowing him to be successful in his academic studies, and to abandon his imaginary friends. This paper focuses on a subsequent phase of the therapy when the patient, as a young man, began to show an interest in and attraction to the world of intimate relationships. The paper is grounded in Meltzerian theory, especially his ideas about the role of beauty in the mother-child relationship, and about the world of intimate links as opposed to conventional ones.