Chapter 14. Many Kinds of Nests: Beginning to Conceive of a Holding Environment1

During the Monday session, 10 July, having said she is now muddled about the drawings, she goes on to talk about how her mother had terrible headaches and used to go about with her hair down, no teeth, and not dressed. She shows me one scribbled face she has done and says the eyes are too close together and that means mad, no insight, no intelligence. She adds that it is me. (Perhaps significantly, this drawing seems to have got lost.) Now she shows me a drawing of an egg-shaped head (Fig. 49) entirely covered with the whorls, two of them elaborated into recognizable eyes; there are also zigzag lines across the forehead like the ones I called ‘the crown of thorns’ in the ‘Dispossessed Queen’ drawing (Fig. 46). What she says is, ‘All in a muddle: my mother.’ So here I came to see that, although this was clearly a picture of her real mother's muddled state of mind, it was also a picture of me; that is, of Susan's recognition of my own difficulties in coming to contain and sort out all the muddle that she was presenting me with, filling me up with. In fact, she is afraid she is driving me mad.

The next drawing we look at (Fig. 50) is one which shows a head on a very long neck, rearing up from a nearly horizontal line. She says it is ‘mad, vacant’. I notice both the cornucopia motif in the shadowy form where the neck emerges from the ground, and also that it is the first picture she has made so far in which there is any kind of ground line; but I notice too that what she calls the mad vacant look of the face has a tinge of silly gaiety. This, therefore, combined with the cornucopia motif, suggested that here is a picture of a false base-line; since the whole reared-up head has, I feel, the suggestion of an animated turd, I suspect the drawing is a picture of the delusory belief that she herself possesses and is even identified with an all-giving nipple-penis, made of faeces.

It also puzzled me why the mouth has such a curious shape