The Church Symbol Analysis

The church represents Dibs’s self-determination and willingness to pursue the unknown. There is a big church across the street from the Child Guidance Center, where Dibs has his play therapy sessions with Dr. Axline, and he often looks at it out the window of the playroom. He comments during several therapy sessions that his mother and father do not go to church, but his grandmother and the family’s gardener, Jake, do. Dibs expresses a desire to go to church and believe in God, which shows his willingness to break from his parents’ expectations, even though he acknowledges that he doesn’t fully understand God.

At Dibs’s final session, he asks to go to the church, and he and Axline go together. This is a sharp contrast to Dibs’s first session, when he primarily looked around the playroom and named all of the objects in it. Whereas that activity was intended to maximize his safety and comfort, here Dibs shows that he now feels confident and secure enough to explore and discover something unknown. At the church, the music scares Dibs a little, but he’s also awestruck by its beauty. Ending with the visit to the church thus represents Dibs’s transformation into much more self-determined and courageous child than he was when he began therapy and still felt beholden to his parents’ expectations. Even though Dibs still has fears, he’s now able to overcome them and try new things on his own terms.