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A Norwegian woman of twenty-three gives birth to her first child two years after the death of her mother and one year following the death of her grandmother. She suffers a puerperal depression for which she is hospitalized. Therapy, drugs, and shock treatment all fail to help, but psychoanalytic psychotherapy is begun with Dr. Naevestad with good effect. When a depression ensues some months later, the therapist remembers a time during the hospitalization when the patient, Marion, felt joy using crayons; and so she suggests Marion try again, hoping also for more active self-expression from this compliant, self-effacing woman. Marion responds with pictures of flowers and birds-essentially a child's drawings except that the images are scattered haphazardly across the paper. She brings them to her sessions but has little to say about them. The therapist dates these many drawings and places them in a drawer. The drawing stops, until one day Marion spontaneously begins again. She continues to draw during the next two and one-half years of treatment.
It is a selection of these drawings that makes up this beautiful book, along with Dr. Naevestad's retrospective analysis of them and her general discussion of the treatment and of relevant analytic theory.
This is an unusual book among the small number that present the artwork of a patient in therapy, since it is not an example of the therapeutic use of drawings. All but a few of the drawings were made between sessions. They never became the focus of the therapeutic work but were integrated in the ongoing therapy the way dream images would be, and were often incompletely understood. At the time the drawings were presented to her, Dr. Naevestad had neither the time nor the need to scrutinize them. Her intent in making them available now is to show how they contain the unfolding issues of the treatment, the essence of the struggle.
According to Dr. Naevestad, the drawings seem to have brought the patient to a deeper psychic level.