The first edition of this book was planned primarily for teachers, and published in the Heinemann Education Series. The demand for a second edition has given me the opportunity of writing an appendix. In this I have attempted to state the basic problems raised in the book in terms of certain orthodox psycho-analytic concepts.
Anna Freud has also added a foreword to the second edition, for which I am extremely grateful. In it she has made a most illuminating comparison between some of the problems of the patient, in relation to his analyst, and the problems of the would-be painter in relation to his paper, paints and emerging picture.
Since the purpose of the book was to record a personal experience, in order to understand it, any major revision would be inappropriate. I have therefore let the original version stand, naïve though some of the attitudes expressed at the beginning may seem to me now.
In the introduction to the first edition I pointed out that the reproductions of some of the drawings were made from tracings of the originals. This would obviously be indefensible if the drawings were works of art, since the tracing process obliterates those subtleties of line upon which the vitality of a drawing depends. But these drawings are not put forward as works of art; they are intended to illustrate the gradual discovery both of ways by which the creative process is freed and of the content of unconscious ideas which interfere with that freedom.
It was not in fact until I had gone through the stages of discovery described in this book that I became able to see that what I had called ‘free’ drawings were most of them unfree. By this I mean that, though they were free in content, in the sense that the method of doodling, and making running comments while I doodled, had apparently made possible the free symbolic expression of unconscious ideas, yet they were not free in form. In most of them there was a rigidity of line (even in the originals) which was at once apparent to the eye of a perceptive painter.
I owe thanks to many friends and colleagues who read the manuscript of this book and helped with criticism and encouragement. Most particularly I wish to thank Dr. Sylvia Payne, Dr. D. W. Winnicott and Dr. W. Clifford M. Scott; also Mrs. Peggy Volkov who edited the first edition. I am also very grateful indeed to Mr. Masud Khan who instigated the preparation and publishing of this second edition. For most valuable comments on the Appendix I wish to thank especially Mr. Anton Ehrenzweig, Mr. Heinz Koppel and Mr. Harold Walsby. I also wish to thank Mrs. Jeannie Cannon (in whose class the ‘Mining Landscape’ was painted) who first provided me with a social setting in which some of the discoveries I had made in solitude could be developed and tested in company with others. I also wish to thank Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co. for their permission to quote from M. P. Follett’s Creative Experience. And finally, I owe a deep debt to Prof. M. Bohusz-Szyszko, in whose painting classes I have been able to begin the task of learning how my own observations, however small their scope, do make sense in the total setting of the difficulties facing both the modern European painter and the student of aesthetics.
M. M.
London, 1956