The toy nursing bottle represents Dibs’s progression from insecurity to confidence. A nursing bottle is quite literally a marker of infancy, as it mimics the experience of breastfeeding and provides babies with nourishment and comfort. Dibs often drinks from the nursing bottle in the playroom, particularly in his early sessions with Dr. Axline, and he sometimes pretends that he’s lying in a crib as he does so. Acting like a baby seems to be a way of hiding from the burden of his parents’ high expectations for his behavior—and in this way, the nursing bottle enables Dibs’s insecurity and gives him a degree of comfort.
At other times, Dibs affirms that he doesn’t need the nursing bottle, suggesting greater maturity and security in himself. But Dibs does recognize that it’s okay to drink from the nursing bottle if he wants to, even as he does so less frequently, indicating a greater acceptance of his more infantile tendencies. In this way, he learns that he is happier when he can determine what he wants to be and do, rather than trying to live up to his parents’ ideas of how he should act.
Finally, at the end of Dibs’s last session, he says that he doesn’t need the nursing bottle anymore; he hurls the bottle away from him, and it breaks. This suggests that Dibs no longer needs the nursing bottle—and, by extension, he no longer feels the need to hide behind an infantile persona. He’s grown more mature and confident in himself through his therapy sessions, and he now feels comfortable acting however he wants to.
The Nursing Bottle Quotes in Dibs in Search of Self
I was interested in the manner in which Dibs had been displaying his ability to read, count, solve problems. It seemed to me that whenever he approached any kind of emotional reference he retreated to a demonstration of his ability to read. Perhaps he felt safer in manipulating intellectual concepts about things, rather than probing any deeper into feelings about himself that he could not accept with ease. Perhaps this was a brief bit of evidence of some conflict he had between expectations of his behavior and his own striving to be himself—sometimes very capable, sometimes a baby.
The Nursing Bottle Symbol Timeline in Dibs in Search of Self
