You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I have already written something about these two patients, the one called Ruth in the postscript to ‘The Role of Illusion in Symbol Formation’ (see Chapter 9) and Susan, whose experience with toys I have already described (see Chapter 6), although here she is called ‘Miss A’. In this paper I tried to combine something of what I had learnt from both Ruth and Susan through their drawings.
The aim of this paper is to present some drawings from two patients of mine — a child, Ruth, and an adult, Miss A, both suffering from acute social anxieties. Ruth's drawings were made between the ages of 10 and 13, Miss A's when she was 28; Ruth's were all made during the sessions, Miss A's mostly between the sessions. Miss A made over 4,000 drawings during a period of about nine months, when she was in an extremely regressed state. She said she did not think while drawing what she was drawing.
In discussing the drawings I shall not be talking about the reparative aspect of them, but about the light they throw on the specific problem of how love and joy is to be expressed, communicated. I shall be talking about the interplay betwen the wish to communicate, to share feelings, and the strivings after primary narcissistic states; and how this interplay is shown in the drawings, in the specific fields, both of anal erotism and that part of oral erotism which has to do with the use of the voice and facial expression.
Both these patients made drawings showing something special