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It was within the framework of contemplating the post-E.C.T. drawing that I began to feel ready to face the task of looking through all the drawings, in order to try and understand more of this visual language through which Susan was seeking to communicate with me and herself. The only other person who had seen them was her psychiatric consultant who had asked to look at them and had gone through the whole four thousand odd and commented: ‘There is not a single one that is an exact repetition of any other.’
I found that my own preoccupations about them continued to centre on her variants of the circle, especially the Alternating Profiles (Fig. 57) with the full-face circle now becoming related both to the circle made by the mother's arms and the baby in the post-E.C.T. drawing, and also to the circular forms of the Baby Seal and Coiled Snake drawings.
When I thought of all the various versions, particularly the two interlocking circles of, for instance, the Cheeks-Breasts drawing (Fig. 18) or the Cheeks-Buttocks one (Fig. 86), they did all seem to suggest a feeling of bodily fusion with parts of me-mother. She would agree, intellectually, with the idea that part of her was feeling totally fused with me, or part of me, so that interpretations in terms of any relationship to me as a whole separate person made no sense to her; but, at the same time, we could not proceed from that assumption because at once it seemed to rouse in her the terror of being fused with a mad mother, and this then made her swing back to a sense of two-ness again, which was once more intolerable because of expecting to be herself utterly destroyed by the mad-mother-me, either from inside or from outside.
During these years, 1951 to 1957, she did only two sheets of drawings, one of which (in 1954) contained another of