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The main effect of the drawings making up this book—over a hundred in number—is to show how far the medium can serve to underline many characterological traits in terms both of their common occurrence and their content of neurotic and psychotic elements. In a single drawing, consisting of a single figure, the artist has often succeeded in arresting the unconscious content of an attitude with incisiveness and impact which few efforts in prose could equal. It is an effect sought after patiently and with knowledge of the fact of unconscious dynamics underlying human behavior. Both the student and worker in psychoanalysis may well find in these pictures a fresh and helpful representation of several classic psychical states; shown for the most part as the unconscious, rather than social usage, views them.
There can be no better description of the aims of the artist in this work than that given by Arthur Steig in the foreword. First made clear is the fact of spontaneous unconscious expression as an integral part in the work of all artists—a quality “embodied in the work of all artists—whether consciously exploited and manifest in the content of the work, as with the surrealists, or whether wholly ignored, as in the works of the academicians—and observable primarily in such undeliberated elements as brush strokes, pencil sweeps, and minor plastic textures”. From this