Chapter 10. She Makes Contact by Doodle Drawings: Faecal Symbols as Devils or Chrysalises

During the first weeks at Mrs Brown's Susan still managed to get herself to analysis by herself, but there came a day (23 February) when she could not do it any more. The day before this she had come in crying miserably and saying she has no concern, since the E.C.T. When I remind her of the great concern she has recently expressed for Mr X she says she could not have been fond of him or she would not have treated him so badly, and she moans, through her tears, that she used to be able to feel sad, miserable. I say, ‘And what are you feeling now?’ She says, ‘Oh, well it's on a different level.’

The next day she comes in and says she had to get Mrs Brown to come with her because she felt she could not walk; she feels very badly about this as Mrs Brown is seventy. Then suddenly she remembers a dream about the old man:

He is masturbating his penis himself and not wanting her to do anything about it; she is so relieved.

I note this, remembering that she has always said she has had no feelings of relief of any kind since the E.C.T.

Now she tells me another dream: She is eating a blue sausage in a sandwich. Her association to blue is, ‘Like the old man's penis.’

Now she says that this morning she was terrified of her own shadow and that now her eyes will not focus; also that she had no control over her fingers when she tried to play the piano. She adds that yesterday she found she could have some genital feelings and suddenly felt how tall she is, perhaps for the first time in her life.

At the end of the session she says in an agonized voice, ‘Must I lose myself?’ I seem to have said, ‘It's not an unheard of thing to have to lose oneself to find oneself.’

It is in this setting (6 March 1950) that she begins to draw during the session, making scribbled shapes that seemed to me to be totally without any sign of aesthetic sensibility. One shape was an obvious penis, shown coming down from the