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Many years ago, shortly after I began psychoanalytic training and my analysis, I conducted a psychodynamic psychotherapy with a depressed young man who experienced traumatic neglect by his mother. As he spoke in boring detail about what appeared to me irrelevant topics, an image of Picasso’s enigmatic painting La Vie frequently flashed into my awareness. La Vie was painted at the beginning of Picasso’s blue period. It is somber. At one side of the canvas is a young man embracing a woman pointing at an intimidating older woman holding a baby.
After some work in my analysis about the loss of my mother’s interest in me because of her mental illness, I turned to my experience with this depressed young man to understand what was taking place in the therapy. I also learned that Picasso painted La Vie after his friend, Casegemus, had killed himself, thinking he had killed the woman he loved, who had recently rejected him. Picasso was extremely mournful and, I imagine, depressed. As I thought about my patient, myself, and Picasso, I developed a better understanding of my patient and the therapeutic process.
As I look back many years at this situation, I was in a very complex state of unconscious communication between my patient, myself, and an intrapsychic object of Picasso. I was immersed in a psychotherapeutic process with my patient, working on components of his depression, while focusing on my depression, which merged with my reaction to Picasso’s La Vie.
I was also unconsciously communicating to my patient that I was trying to understand his depression through parts of my depression, which contributed to the depth of my empathy. I was also showing myself that, through Picasso’s genius, I could see that much more can be done with depression than remaining depressed.
Over the years I have frequently returned to the phenomena of unconscious communication that began in a clinical setting.
When Harriet Pappenheim suggested an issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry devoted to clinical m