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The return to drawing, but now doing it only in the sessions, happened just after a dream which had seemed to me to mark an impending change, one that might be crucial in her task of ‘getting into the world’.
She dreamt she was wiping her bottom with a piece of meat, either liver or lights, but it was breathing.
Of course, on one level there was mockery here—I was only something to wipe her bottom with. But I felt there was much more to it than that, since this was the first time that breath had ever come into her dreams, as such. Thus the idea of the breathing bit of meat being ‘either liver or lights’ suggested that she was getting nearer being able to conceive of being an active ‘liver’ herself, beginning to consider breathing with her own ‘lights-lungs’ and own rhythms, letting go any attempt to remain identified with her fantasy of the foetal state. I did not say anything about this; apparently I only talked about some impending change in her feeling about analytic care as a process of having her bottom wiped. However, in a few days' time she produces a drawing which does seem to be to do with a breaking out of the fantasy of being in the womb.
It is on 6 December 1957 that she spends the session drawing, covering the whole sheet with shapes and captions (Fig. 102).
In the centre is a large circle which she says is a womb. In it, to the left, is a confused shape. She says the empty oval at the top of this is the baby's head. On the other side of the womb from the baby is another shape, slightly reminiscent of a duck. There is a wavy line running from a black spot in the baby to the eye of the duck. The word ‘home’ is written three times, but outside the womb shape, to the left and below; and there is also a ship just below the womb, with sails and a mast that pierces right into the womb and a flag on the mast with a hammer and sickle on it.