Chapter 24. Her Use of the Diagonal: Experimenting with Ideas of a Duality and an Interface between Opposites

In these last chapters I have tried to describe both the development of Susan's use of water1 as a symbol in her drawings and also how I came to look at this and use it in my own thinking when I studied the drawings in sequence. What surprised me was to find that I do not seem to have tried to interpret it at all during these months; it was not that I had seen its relevance but waited before talking to her about it, it was that I had apparently simply not thought about it. When I did begin to become aware of this fact I had to undergo quite a long process of self-searching before I could feel fairly certain that I had found out something of the reason for such an omission.

I found my thoughts on this problem began to crystallize around the picture of the yacht with the deep keel (Fig. 104) and my idea that this yacht represented the analysis: if this was right, then Susan had certainly expressed, through it, a feeling that the unconscious psychic functioning that was the background of our analytic work together was a common undifferentiated sea. Of course, one could say that this was an apt symbol of her illusion, or even delusion, of a basic state of unity between us, a delusion of no-separateness; but—and