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During the eight weeks of my summer break Susan wrote frequent letters to me from the hospital, sometimes four posted by different posts all in one day, calling me by my first name and ending ‘with love’. Afterwards she said that she hoped these verbal expressions would perhaps make her experience the feelings belonging to them, but they had not. In the letters she said she was feeling quite terrible and was angry with the psychiatrist in charge, who, she said, had been tough with her and done nothing to help. When she returned, 7 September, she brought me a whole box full of drawings. I have selected a few to reproduce here, those that meant most to me.
There was one picture (Fig. 67) that gave me a feeling of bewilderment, so that I was constantly putting it back in the box without reaching any clear idea about what she was trying to tell me. The first thing about it was that the caption seemed to have so little connection with the picture; it says:
This is the story of a great big fat cow with lots of milk which I want but can't have so I hate and want to bite it all up.
Certainly there was irony in this, and perhaps a rather rueful mockery of all my interpretations about the lost relation to her mother's breast. But the picture itself seemed to be about something quite different: I saw a look almost of complete disaster in the helplessly staring eyes of the central sun-face; also the unbalance of the picture, the way the base shape tips to the left while the out-thrusting segmented phallic form arising from the head seems to be trying to maintain the balance, but extremely precariously; or is it even causing the unbalance by the energy of its thrust?
My first thought about it was that the picture stood for some kind of birth process. I found myself calling it ‘The Dissolution of the Sun’ because of the dread in the staring eyes; but