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The aim of this paper is to present some drawings from two patients of mine—a child, Ruth, and an adult, Miss A., both suffering from acute social anxieties. Ruth's drawings were made between the ages of 10 and 13, Miss A's when she was 28, Ruth's were all made during the sessions, Miss A's mostly between the sessions. Miss A. made over 4, 000 drawings during a period of about nine months, when she was in an extremely regressed state. She said she did not think while drawing what she was drawing.
In discussing the drawings I shall not be talking about the reparative aspect of them, but about the light they throw on the specific problem of how love and joy is to be expressed, communicated. I shall be talking about the interplay between the wish to communicate, to share feelings, and the strivings after primary narcissistic states; and how this interplay is shown in the drawings, in the specific fields, both of anal erotism and that part of oral erotism which has to do with the use of the voice and facial expression.
Both these patients made drawings showing something special happening to the body boundary; it is either blurred or multiple or radiant or luminous: for instance, a duck (Fig. 1) drawn by Miss A. and representing herself. Miss A. told me that she had, at the age of 20, experienced very intense sensations spreading over her body, which made her feel luminous and transparent. She said that other people noticed something happening in her and said she looked beautiful; she insisted that whatever it was that happened, it had nothing to do with sexuality. She also drew very many flower-like shapes radiating from a centre, the centre being occasionally a mouth, as in Fig. 2, or an eye. Although she described the luminous states as having to do with 'beauty', she seemed uncertain whether they sprang from love or hate. In fact she remembered saying at the time that love and hate were the same thing, but no-one had understood her. When I said that perhaps