Invasion and Separation

Once I went to some art classes and I was impressed by the fact that, at the end when we were invited in turn round the room to hold up our paintings, not only were all the paintings of the same thing different, as one might expect, but also people added things that were not there and left out things that were. This led me on to think about insides and outsides, because it seemed to me that our individual fantasies endowed the concrete outside object we were trying to paint with all sorts of properties it did not possess and that what one produced in the end was not so much to do with talent, or lack of talent, but with what one brought from one's own inside to the concrete object. Thus the act of looking, even at an inanimate object, was much more complex than I had supposed. This, of course, became infinitely more complicated when the object happened to be a person.

One of my former patients who was an artist may provide an illustration of what I mean. This man drew pictures of me in the privacy of his home; some of these he showed me, and I found he had portrayed me as a hebephrenic-looking woman who did not resemble me at all, though he was quite a good artist. Later he explained how he felt he could never really paint except when he was alone. When it came to painting portraits with the sitter in front of him, he experienced great difficulties. It seemed that the proximity of the sitter not only inhibited him to the extent that he had to pretend to paint and do most of the real work from memory afterwards, but also the sitter somehow got inside him, and persecuted him, and interfered with his creativity. Apparently the results were similar to the pictures he painted of me, because his sitters complained that he made them look depressed, ill, and ugly. So that his portraits seemed to reflect the bad things that had got inside him and invaded him. This patient had later to be admitted to a mental hospital. In his case I do not think it was possible for him to keep