Dibs in Search of Self Study Guide

Axline was born in Indiana in 1911 and raised in Columbus, Ohio. After teaching elementary school for several years, she enrolled as a graduate student at Ohio State University, where she collaborated with Carl Rogers on person-centered therapy. In 1945, Axline became Rogers’s research associate at the University of Chicago Counseling Center, where she developed her approach to child counseling. She gradually developed non-directive play therapy, and later, child-centered play therapy. In 1947, Axline published Play Therapy, which enumerated her theory of child psychotherapy. In 1950, Axline completed her Doctor of Education at Columbia University. She taught for six years at NYU’s School of Medicine and School of Education, and for seven years at Columbia University. She then returned to Ohio. In 1964, Axline published Dibs in Search of Self, which is still hailed as one of the most influential books in the field of play therapy. Axline died in 1988 in Columbus, Ohio.

Axline’s development of non-directive play therapy was adapted from the work of Carl Rogers’s, who created person-centered therapy in the 1940s. Person-centered therapy’s goal is to create an empathetic environment in which patients can learn to accept themselves and achieve personal fulfillment. It is now recognized as one of the major schools of psychotherapy. Axline worked under Rogers in graduate school, applying basic principles from person-centered therapy to children in play environments. She believed that not only should the therapist be empathetic and non-judgmental, but that they should also allow children to self-direct their play and set the therapy’s pace. Person-centered therapy builds on humanistic psychology, which grew in opposition to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory (established in the early 1890s) and B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism (established in 1938). In Dibs in Search of Self, however, Axline repudiates both of these therapeutic methods.

In 1947, Axline wrote Play Therapy, which outlined her philosophy on non-directive child play therapy—the method she uses with Dibs in Dibs in Search of Self. Eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau also wrote about some of the foundational principals of play therapy in his book Emile, and Friedrich Fröbel emphasized the importance of symbolism of child’s play in The Education of Man. Gary Landreth’s Play Therapy (1991) details various developments in the field of play therapy since 1947. For case studies in child psychology, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, written by child psychiatrist Dr. Bruce D. Perry, focuses on several stories of children dealing with trauma and immense stress as they develop, detailing how their brains have the capacity to heal. Other popular child psychology books that detail how to deal with children’s emotional struggles include The Whole Brain Child and No-Drama Discipline, both written by Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson.