Chapter 18. The Post-E.C.T. Drawing and the Circle: A Symbol of Fusion of Mother and Child

Having given some account of Susan's external situation during this period from 1951 to 1957, I was now faced with finding a way of describing, in a sufficiently condensed way, what went on in the so-slow work of analysis during these years.

It was only when I came to look back on this period in order to write the book that I saw how the analytic work could be described as revolving around an incident that occurred on 7 January 1952, while she was still at Mrs Brown's. It was on that day that she had brought me a drawing which she said she had made nearly ten years before, on the first night at the X's, which was also the night before her first meeting with me and her first session. What she said was that she had just found it amongst her belongings where it had presumably lain for all these years, during seven of which I had had no idea that she could draw at all.

Before describing it, however, I will try and give some idea of the context in which it emerged. Since, as someone has aptly said, the child's external world is the mother's inner world, it is therefore true that it is the analyst's own inner struggles with the world of theoretical concepts — testing them, doubting them, refining them, rejecting them, using them — that must determine what one does with what the patient gives and therefore what goes on in the analysis; it is this that is really the patients' external world during the sessions. I will therefore try to give some brief account of what I was struggling with in the matter of theory during the year before Susan brought me this post-E.C.T. drawing, including the questions I was asking myself at the time and the kind of models for ordering my experiences with her that I was consciously or half-consciously making use of.

First I must say something about the general way in which I had made use of the fact of her having produced the 1950 drawings.