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During the period when I was preoccupied with Susan's alternating profile symbol and seeing it as expressing her problem of how to find the healthy interplay between the states of unity and of separateness, I came to want to use the term manic-depressive swing to describe the movement between the two states. This, however, brought difficulties, I felt, because of the need to sort out the relation of the fused whole-circle state both to what is usually called ‘manic’ and even to what is usually called ‘mania’.
Although my analytic training and experience of life had both taught me the central importance of being able to face fully the fact of separateness and therefore the vulnerability to the pains of loss, it was clearly true that one must also be able fully to experience the opposite: the joys of fusion, of which presumably the genital orgasm is the prototype in maturity, but which has surely a variety of forms in other types of activities—for instance, the timeless moment in the height of artistic and musical appreciation.
So, when I thought over those moments at N.I. in which Susan had felt as if surrendering herself to an ideal something, I asked myself what had gone wrong with the process; if the capacity for self-surrender is a part of health, then not to be able to have some ecstatic moments must imply a block in development. And when I asked myself this question about what had gone wrong, I remembered her drawing that I have called ‘Aura’ (Fig. 58) with its emphasis on an intensity of out-raying forms, the body itself being rigid and wooden, certainly not markedly feminine; in fact I began to speculate whether those moments of feeling herself transfigured, at N.I., were not in part based on a process of identifying herself with a magnificent and all-glorious phallus (‘People were staggered when they looked at her’), an identification which would be more a defence against feminine feelings than an expression of them.
I thought here, too, of how she had always,