I. The ordering of chaos

The writing of this book turned out to be an attempt to discover, within the limits of a special field, something of the nature of the forces that bring order out of chaos. It was a study that had to do with the discovery of a different kind of integrative force than that which results from any attempt, of whatever nature, to copy a pre-existing ordered model. The question then arises, how is this different kind of integrating force to be talked about, whether in terms of scientific concepts in general, or in terms of those so far developed in the particular field of psycho-analysis. Also the question of the nature of the force or forces that produced the free drawings brought me to see that the other question, that with which this book began, of how psychic creativity works, had inevitably branched out into the second one; that is, how is this capacity called psychic creativeness itself to be conceived, in what terms is it to be talked about? While writing the book I had assumed that I knew what I meant by ‘psychic creativeness’ and had not troubled to define it; then I had gradually discovered that I did not know precisely. But finally, as a result of this study, and also as a result of writing a clinical paper on aspects of symbol formation, I had found a definition which seemed to be at least a workable tool: that is, that psychic creativeness is the capacity for making a symbol. Thus, creativeness in the arts is making a symbol for feeling and creativeness in science is making a symbol for knowing.

II. The anal aspect of the parrot’s egg

As the first edition of this book was planned more especially for the lay public I deliberately did not enlarge upon certain aspects of the material of the free drawings. At the time of writing it seemed possible to describe the oral aspects of the problems depicted in the drawings and to some extent the genital aspects; but the implications in terms of the so-called anal phase of development were omitted. This aspect, however, is obviously of great importance in any enquiry into ways of thinking about the human capacity to make things, whether material objects, or ideas, or both combined. It is clear that one cannot present a book for analysts which deals with the theme of, on the one hand, illusion, idealisation, falling in love (transfiguration), and on the other, disillusion, falling out of love, denigration, without also talking about the child’s idealisation of and disillusion with what it gives as well as what it receives.

Since writing this book I have had much clinical material, from both adults and children, who were suffering from inhibition of the capacity to produce ideas, whether in logical verbal form or in non-logical artistic form. It was clear that these patients had an extremely idealised notion of what their products ought to be, and the task of objective evaluation of what they in fact produced appeared to be so disillusioning to them that they often gave up the attempt to produce anything. Attempts to interpret their difficulty led me to a consideration of the whole problem of idealisation and the extent to which it is in fact deluded. In so far as it applies to the human object it is obviously deluded, since no real object can ever be ‘what the whole soul desired’. But my patients often produced idealisations, in their clinical material, which seemed to be an attempt on their part to externalise, to find a way of conceiving, thinking about, one particular aspect of their own creations: that is, the experience of orgasm, whether genital or pregenital. And in this sense the idealisation was surely not deluded, because, by definition, the orgasm is a wonderful experience. (At least theoretically it is, although there may be many interfering factors preventing it reaching that stage.) Idealisation is commonly talked about by analysts in terms of its use as a defence against ambivalence in the relationships to the object; my patients’ material suggested that it can also be used as a way of symbolising the genital or pregenital subjective experience of orgasm. And in this setting the concept of disillusion takes on a special meaning, especially in connection with the urge towards passivity and the blissful surrender to the body impulses (for which the word ‘passivity’ is perhaps really inappropriate, since it is more an active letting go). For this letting go seems to mean not only a letting go of all voluntary control of the muscles, it can also mean a letting go of the discriminating capacities which distinguish differences. Thus what patients experience as a dread of ‘passivity’ often turns out to be partly a dread not only of letting go the control of the sphincters, but also of a perceptual letting go, which would mean a return to an extreme of undifferentiation between all the openings of the body and their products. Thus there is a dread of the total letting go of all the excited mess, faeces, urine, vomit, saliva, noise, flatus, no one differentiated from the other, a state of blissful transcending of boundaries, which, to the conscious ego, would be identified with madness. The dread is of a wish for the return to that state of infancy in which there was no discrimination between the orgastic giving of the body products and the products themselves. I suggest that it is this original lack of discrimination which is partly responsible for the later idealisation of the body products; and the disillusion is then experienced when the real qualities of the intended love gift come to be perceived. I find clinical evidence which seems to show that, particularly in poets and artists who are inhibited in their work, there has been a catastrophic disillusion in the original discovery that their faeces are not as lively, as beautiful, as boundless, as the lovely feelings they had in the giving of them. Thus the infant’s disillusion about its own omnipotence, its gradual discovery that it has not created the world by its own wishes, cannot be discussed fully without also considering its disillusion about the concrete bit of the outside world that it literally does create; that is, the infant’s own body products. It follows that for patients whose fixation point is at this stage, the surrender of the consciously planning deliberative mind to the spontaneous creative force can be felt as a very dangerous undertaking; for such patients have not yet grown out of their unconscious hankering after a return to the blissful surrender to this all-out body giving of infancy.

It is part of psycho-analytic theory that, when the infant has reached the stage of recognising the loved mother as not created by the infant but as a person in her own right, from whom love is received and to whom love is to be given, then arises the problem of how the love is to be given, how it is to be communicated. And this stage leads eventually to the need to accept a different medium for the expression of feelings from the child’s own body products; and also to the need to accept the necessity for work with that medium, since the beautiful mess does not make a picture or a poem all by itself. Thus it seems to me that in the analysis of the artist (whether potential or manifest) in any patient, the crucial battle is over the ‘language’ of love, that is to say, ultimately, over the way in which the orgasm, or the orgastic experiences, are to be symbolised. It certainly seems that the analysis of this primary identification of the living feeling experience of the body with the non-living material produced by the body would be likely to be critical for any artist (in the wide sense), since an artist’s work is essentially concerned with the giving of life to the bit of ‘dead’ matter of the external world which is the chosen medium. For, in a sense, what the artist idealises primarily, is his medium. He is in love with it; and this fact may also lead to difficulties through exaggerated ideas about what the medium can do. But if he loves it enough so that he submits himself to its real qualities, at the same time as imposing his will upon it, the finished product may eventually justify the idealisation.

Thus the way in which it was found possible to help patients with a fixation point at this stage was, not by interpreting to them the phantastic nature of their idealisations, not by showing them their mistake in so idealising their own body products; but by showing them that the idealisation was not a delusion, in so far as it referred to the intensity of their own orgastic sensations, it was only a delusion when they clung to the belief that the ‘mess’ was itself as beautiful as the feelings experienced in making it.

In the light of these considerations it became possible to see further into the meaning of the Parrot’s Egg symbol. Thus the storm represents the parrot’s angry disillusionment at realising the need to give up the belief that everyone must literally see in the anal product (the egg) the beautiful feelings that went to produce it; that is, at the need to give up the subjective valuation and accept the objective. Thus the battle is with the mother (Grey Lady), not only over the evaluation of the love gift, but also over what is a suitable and convenient stuff for symbols of love, love ‘poems’ to be made of. It seemed to me that the same theme is also elaborated in ‘Queen Elizabeth and the Bashful Parrot’, though with the emphasis this time on the pain of recognition that the faeces are in fact dead, for the symbol of the crosses in the background was associated with graves. The Dog-Cat picture (which was actually drawn in black and yellow) also, I think, illustrates the stage at which there is no differentiation between ‘dead’ faeces and the ‘living’ feelings, since the dark shapes surrounding the anus-sun take the form of animals; that is, they are felt to be living and do in fact (according to the associations) represent moods.

III. Infantile prototypes of creativity

It is basic to analytic theory that, after experience has forced us to realise, as infants, that we have not made everything, we transfer this belief to our parents and feel that at least they have. And then follow all the vicissitudes of discovery round about the themes of the parents’ real physical creative powers. Some of the pain connected with these discoveries is shown in the content of the drawing ‘Ape in the Garden of Eden’. In the main part of this book I discussed the subject of the aggression that results from the child’s jealousy of the parents’ love relation. What I did not mention was the masturbatory aspect of the child’s relation to the parents’ sexual life. It is a commonplace of psycho-analytic theory that the child has a phantasy of containing the parents inside him, in some sort of relationship, and a relationship which the child seeks to feel he or she can control omnipo-tently; and this phantasy serves as part of the child’s way of coming to deal with the painful fact of recognising an actual dependence upon the real parents. But this phantasy is not only intimately connected with masturbation, it also seems to serve as the child’s pre-verbal symbol for thinking about its own creative capacities – at least when it has reached the stage of becoming aware of and accepting the parents’ genital creative function, and has passed the stage of believing in an omnipotent fiat of creation. This means that doubts about the goodness of wishes towards the external parents, doubts about the capacity to master such jealousy as the Angry Ape’s, lead to doubts about the goodness of the real creative forces inside itself. It certainly does seem that in some patients the difficulty in coming to trust and have faith in the fact of the creative forces within themselves is intimately bound up with their unconscious conflicts over masturbation phantasies. Since these patients often have difficulty in achieving a masturbation phantasy in which they feel themselves to be conducting a benign intercourse, they do in fact feel themselves more likely to conduct a malevolent one, and so they come to feel they have no reason to trust in the goodness of the ‘baby’ which will result from that internal intercourse.

IV. Changes in the sense of self

In this book I have tried to describe how, under the particular conditions of making the free drawings, something new, unexpected did in fact emerge. The phrase ‘contemplative action’ had seemed an appropriate description of the process: ‘contemplative’ to distinguish it from practical expedient action, ‘action’ to distinguish it from pure contemplation, to bring in the fact of the moving hand.

The essential thing about this contemplative mood, combined with action, was that it involved me in a giving up of the wish to make an exact reproduction of anything I had seen. Since obviously one cannot anyway produce a truly realistic copy of any object known in the external world, for marks on a two-dimensional surface can never be an exact reproduction of a three-dimensional object, it would seem that this was not a very difficult wish to give up. Nevertheless, in spite of my early discovery that no attempt to copy the appearance of objects was what my eye liked there was still a continual inner battle to be waged against the urge to attempt this mechanical copying; and this, in spite of years of experience of the fact that it was only when I had discarded this wish to copy that the resulting drawing or painting had any life in it, any of the sense of a living integrated structure existing in its own right. Of course I knew that many of the greatest artists said that they did copy nature, but I had began to doubt whether this really meant what it seemed to mean. I began to suspect that they were in fact trying to describe the process of surrendering themselves to the deep spontaneous responses of nature within them, that were stimulated by the contact with nature outside them.

I have also tried to describe how, whenever I was able to break free from the urge to make a mechanical copy and a new entity had appeared on my paper, then something else also had happened. The process always seemed to be accompanied by a feeling that the ordinary sense of self had temporarily disappeared, there had been a kind of blanking out of ordinary consciousness; even the awareness of the blanking out had gone, so that it was only afterwards, when I returned to ordinary self-consciousness, that I remembered that there had been this phase of complete lack of self-consciousness.

In considering what might be the relation between this change of consciousness, the surrender of the wish to work to a copy and the sense of an ‘independent life’ in the result, I was reminded of two sets of ideas. On the one hand, there was all that analysts have to say about certain kinds of changes of consciousness, described variously as states of elation, as blankness, as oceanic feeling; and, on the other hand, the blankness referred to in various mystical writings, including ‘emptiness’ as a beneficent state, which is, for example, the central concept in the Tao Te Ching.

I do not want to enter into a discussion of which of the psychic institutions, ego, super-ego, id, can be looked upon as responsible for the vitality and ‘newness’ of a good free drawing, but only to bring into focus the fact that there is some force or interplay of forces creating something new, and to suggest that the way we think about it in ourselves affects the way it works. And I want to suggest the possibility that a number of states of mind that are different from everyday conscious awareness may be in part an expression of the unconscious or half conscious need to give this creativeness its freedom; they may be in part distorted forms of an essential and normal phenomenon. And perhaps some of the aggressive attitudes of children have a similar meaning. I have elsewhere* described as a holy war such attempts of people to keep in touch with this inherent creativeness, a war that is also shown, I think, in the Angry Parrot’s dilemma. For it seems to me that there may be an added reason for a child’s violent defence of its own spontaneity; that not only are instincts arrogant and imperious, seeking their own satisfaction as soon as possible, not only is impulsive action pleasanter and easier than waiting; but also any rigid division into

twoness, into awareness of the separateness of the ‘me’ and the‘not-me’ (even though this is essential up to a point for the practical business of living), any copying of, obedience to, an imposed plan or standard, whether inner or outer, does necessarily interfere with this primary creativeness.

V. Rhythm relaxation and the orgasm

Rhythm and balance were essential ideas in the associations to the drawing ‘If the Sun and Moon should doubt …’. But the concept of rhythm presupposes a time factor, which cannot in fact be present in a drawing itself, though there is rhythm and therefore a time factor in the movements of hand and arm that make it; and also a time factor is implied in the contemplation of it, the contemplating eyes do move according to what are usually called the rhythms of the picture. A rhythm has a beginning and an end, but a picture, once it is painted, does not begin anywhere or end anywhere, all its elements co-exist simultaneously; in this sense perhaps it is true to say that a picture is timeless. But whatever the linguistic difficulties of using the word rhythm to describe an ingredient in pictures, the fact remains that the concept of rhythm must be included in any attempt at verbal-isation of the nature of the unconscious forces that produce a free drawing.

In the chapter on rhythm I have already discussed the idea that the inherent rhythmic capacity of the psychophysical organism can become a source of order that is more stable than reliance on an order imposed either from outside, or by the planning conscious mind. But here our struggles to adapt, in infancy, to social living, provide a potent source for anxiety when we are trying to learn to paint; for the desire for the primitive rhythms, such as sucking, free bowel movement, babbling, masturbating, may all be reactivated when the adult sets himself the task of surrendering the conscious control of movement of the hand while still going on moving it.

The study of technique for achieving bodily relaxation has shown that release of any particular muscle is largely achieved by the apparently simple act of directing attention to it, letting consciousness suffuse it. But, in any one of us, if the need to relinquish the wish to return to the infantile phase of surrender to a total release, including the release of sphincter muscles, has not been adequately worked through, then the idea of the surrender of any muscular tension is bound to be associated with social anxiety, sometimes very acute. In this book, and also in others, I have tried to describe the observed effects of changes in body awareness and in muscular tension which resulted from different ways of focusing attention and different ways of drawing. But such phenomena clearly cannot be studied unless we also take into account that involuntary suffusing of the body with maximum intensity of feeling which goes with the experience of the orgasm. And the orgasm cannot be discussed, in the setting of the theme of this chapter, without also considering what are its symbols in non-logical thinking, how it is conceived of on the level of non-verbal imagery. The subject of the capacity to make one’s attention suffuse the whole body, and the relation of this to the genital and pregenital orgasm, both as experienced and as thought about, would lead to a field of discussion beyond the scope of this book. Such discussion if undertaken would have to include a psychological study of the symbolic meaning of light and colour, subjects which have been only very briefly touched on in Chapter Four.

Clearly the subject of colour is, on the evidence of language alone, very closely bound up with the feelings. For instance, we talk of an emotional statement as a highly coloured one, and of its high points as ‘purple patches’. We are ‘green with envy’, we ‘see red’, or we ‘feel blue’. And the subject of light, which includes the inner light and the light of dreams is equally closely bound up with the theme of consciousness. That consciousness can in fact also suffuse the whole body, though it does not ordinarily do so, is perhaps expressed poetically by the psalmist’s phrase ‘clothed with light as it were with a garment’. There is also the fact that the sense of inner ‘beingness’, of ‘dead’ material acquiring life of its own, is the fundamental test of the goodness of a work of art; for a good picture is one in which every mark on the canvas is felt to be significant, to be suffused with subject. Similarly a good dancer gives the impression that there is maximum intensity of being in every particle of the living flesh and muscle and skin, the body itself having become the objective material suffused with subjectivity; and in good sculpture the whole mass of ‘dead’ metal or stone has been made to irradiate the sense of life.

VI. Painting and symbols

I have said that the question of what kind of entity was produced by the method of the free drawings was not explicitly raised in the main part of this book. What kind of thing it was that appeared within the framed gap provided by the blank sheet of paper had become more clear to me when I thought more about the function of frames.

Frames can be thought of both in time as well as in space, and in other human activities besides painting. An acted play is usually, nowadays, framed by the stage, in space, and by the raising and lowering of the curtain in time. Rituals and processions are usually framed in space by barriers or by the policemen that keep back the onlookers. Dreams are framed in sleep and the material of a psychoanalytic session is framed both in space and time. And paintings, nowadays, are usually bounded by frames. But wall paintings are not, and when the wall is the wall of a cave the painted image must come nearer to the hallucinated images of dreams. Thus when there is a frame it surely serves to indicate that what’s inside the frame has to be interpreted in a different way from what’s outside it; for painters nowadays do not seem so concerned to achieve a near hallucination. Thus the frame marks off an area within which what is perceived has to be taken symbolically, while what is outside the frame is taken literally. Symbolic of what? We certainly assume that it is symbolic of the feelings and ideas of whoever determined the pattern or form within the frame. We assume that it makes sense, for instance we assume that the people on the stage are not there just by accident. In the same way, as analysts, we have learnt by experience that an apparently casual remark made within the frame of the session also makes sense if understood symbolically.

I did not make much use of the word symbol in the original edition of this book. This was because I was then still confused by the classical psycho-analytical attempt to restrict the use of the word to denoting only the defensive function of symbols, to what Ernest Jones called ‘pure sym-bolism’. But now, having in the meantime published a technical paper, based on clinical material, on the subject of symbolisation, and having come to the conclusion that I could not usefully restrict the concept in such a way, I can accept the idea that a work of art is necessarily and primarily a symbol.* Also in the first edition I talked about the role

of images but did not recognise, and for the same reason, that a mental image is a symbol. Thus whereas before I could only talk about the artist as making new bottles for the continually distilled new wine of developing experience, now I could talk of him as making new symbols. I could look on the artist as creating symbols for the life of feeling, creating ways in which the inner life may be made knowable; which, as Freud said, can only be done in terms of the outer life. And since this inner life is the life of a body, with all its complexities of rhythms, tensions, releases, movement, balance, and taking up room in space, so surely the essential thing about the symbols is that they should show in themselves, through their formal pattern, a similar theme of structural tensions and balances and release, but transfigured into a timeless visual co-existence. Thus the artist surely amongst other things that he is doing, is making available for recall and contemplation, making able to be thought about, what he feels to be the most valuable moments in this feeling life of psycho-physical experience. And in his concern for the permanence and immortality of his work, he is not only seeking to defy his own mortality (as analysts have said), he is perhaps also trying to convey something of the sense of timelessness which can accompany those moments. He does in fact make tabernacles to house the spirit, with the result that others can share in his experiences, and he himself can have a permanent record of them after the high moment of transfiguration has passed; and it may be a high moment of rage and horror and pain as well as of joy and love. So that broadly, what the painter does conceptualise in nonverbal symbols is the astounding experience of how it feels to be alive, the experience known from inside, of being a moving, living body in space, with capacities to relate oneself to other objects in space. And included in this experience of being alive is the very experiencing of the creative process* itself.

work of art may be the lost object that the work re-creates; but for the artist as artist, rather than as patient, and for whoever responds to his work, I think the essential point is the new thing that he has created, the new bit of the external world that he has made significant and ‘real’, through endowing it with form.

VII. The two kinds of thinking

Perhaps the solution of the controversy over where the deepest meaning of art lies, can only be found through a fuller understanding of the differences between the kind of thinking that makes a separation of subject from object, me from not-me, seer from seen, and the kind that does not. We know a lot about the first kind of thinking, we know its basis in the primary laws of logic, which say that a thing is what it is and not what it is not, that it cannot both be and not be. We know also that these laws of reasoning work very well for managing the inanimate material environment. We divide what we see from ourselves seeing it, and in certain contexts this works very well. But it does not work so well for understanding and managing the inner world, whether our own or other people’s. For, according to formal logic, all thought which does not make the total separation between what a thing is and what it is not is irrational;* but then the whole area of symbolic expression is irrational, since the point about a symbol is that it is both itself and something else. Thus, though separation of the seer and what is seen gives a useful picture in some fields it gives a false picture in others. I think that one of the fields in which formal logic can give a false picture is aesthetics; and that the false picture is only avoided if we think about art in terms of its capacity for fusing, or con-fusing subject and object, seer and seen and then making a new division of these. By suffus-ing, through giving it form, the not-me objective material with the me – subjective psychic content, it makes the not-me

‘real’, realisable. Clearly the great difficulty in thinking logically about this problem is due to the fact that we are trying to talk about a process which stops being that process as soon as we talk about it, trying to talk about a state in which the ‘me-not-me’ distinction is not important, but to do so at all we have to make the distinction. But it is only, I think, in this way of looking at it that the phrase ‘art creates nature’ can make sense. So what the artist, or perhaps one should say, the great innovator in art, is doing, fundamentally, is not recreating in the sense of making again what has been lost (although he is doing this), but creating what is, because he is creating the power to perceive it. By continually breaking up the established familiar patterns (familiar in his particular culture and time in history) of logical common sense divisions of me-not-me, he really is creating ‘nature’, including human nature. And he does this by unmasking old symbols and making new ones, thus incidentally making it possible for us to see that the old symbol was a symbol; whereas before we thought the symbol was a ‘real-ity’ because we had nothing else to compare it with. In this sense he is continually destroying ‘nature’ and re-creating nature – which is perhaps why the depressive anxieties can so easily both inhibit and be relieved by successful creative work in the arts. And in this sense also it can be seen how invention, both in science and in the arts can be rooted in the same process. For instance, Ernest Jones in his paper on ‘The Theory of Symbolism’, introduced the idea that in science the process of discovery and invention consists in freeing the tendency to ‘note identity in difference’. He thus draws attention to the non-logical aspect of the process.

I think the Mount of Olives drawing, with the dead bones blocking the way ahead, does symbolise a blocking of this kind of non-logical thought through an excessive reliance on logical processes. Thus it seems to me that the drawing has meaning, not only in terms of the not yet worked through feelings of guilt over cannibalistic phantasies of oral incorporation; but that it also refers to the artificial keeping dead of the method of thinking which does not stay detached and apart, that expresses itself pre-eminently in the arts. By its title the drawing makes a connection with the New Testament. This is a reference to a phenomenon which had been continually in my mind while writing this book; the fact that when thinking about the kind of surrender of conscious planning experienced in making the drawings, phrases from the Gospels kept cropping up in my thoughts, such as ‘Consider the lilies of the field’, ‘Take no thought for the morrow …’, ‘The meek shall inherit the earth …’. In fact it almost seemed that on one level the symbolism of the Gospels was a kind of poetic handbook for the way in which psychic creativity works. Certainly this non-logical type of thought does depend on a willingness to forgo the usual sense of self as clear and separate and possessing a boundary. I wondered, is it possible that the teaching of the Gospels is partly to do with a logic of non-logical thought; and also that of the Tao Te Ching, with its opening phrase, ‘The Tao of which we speak is not the real Tao’?

VIII. Painting and imitation

I have said that I did learn to paint, in the sense that I learnt to overcome internal and external difficulties so that I could spend most of my week-ends and holidays in a group painting. For, after many years of waiting, I had finally found people to teach me who did see that the essence of painting is that every mark on the paper should be one’s own, growing out of the uniqueness of one’s own psycho-physical structure and experience, not a mechanical copy of the model, however skilful. Incidentally, in this connection, I showed this book to a painter who, while turning over the pages to look at the drawings said: ‘That one is not you, nor that, nor that, they are unconscious copies of some picture you have seen.’ I had myself recognised the obvious derivation of ‘Mrs. Punch’ from the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland, just as the chair in ‘Nursery’ derived from van Gogh; and also that the design in the ‘Blasting Witch’ was a close unconscious copy of the design of a picture I had often seen in a friend’s room. But the painter had never seen this friend’s picture and it was a surprise to me that anyone could know, without having seen the ‘copy’, that the line of the drawing was not my own, not growing out of my own psycho-physical rhythms. Of the wavy line at the top left side of ‘The Eagle and the Cave-man’ he said: ‘That is good, that is from you; though the shading is not, that is mannered, banal.’ The point of view prompting these criticisms confirmed my growing conviction that a work of art, whatever its content, or subject, whether a recognisable scene or object or abstract pattern, must be an externalisation, through its shapes and lines and colours, of the unique psycho-physical rhythm of the person making it. Otherwise it will have no life in it whatever, for there is no other source for its life.

I also learnt to understand something about the use of colour which made the colour in the Angry Parrot seem crude. For I remembered how I had painted the original drawing with what I would now call an intellectual attitude to colour, I had thought what colour I wanted to put next, rather than looking quietly at the first colour I had put and listening to it, allowing it to call for what colours it needed around it, colours that grew out of its own nature. Also I became able to see the difference between a painting and a coloured drawing and became able to paint by starting with the colour masses rather than with the outlines.

IX. A place for absent-mindedness

The kind of thinking that does not distinguish between the seer and the seen (or perhaps we should say, the phase of thinking, for normally it seems that the two kinds alternate with each other), is certainly continually talked about by analysts under the name of phantasy. But I think it is a pity that the expressive word ‘reverie’ has been so largely dropped from the language of psycho-pathology, and the overworked word phantasy made to carry such a heavy burden of meaning. For the word ‘reverie’ does emphasise the aspect of absent-mindedness, and therefore brings in what I feel to be a very important aspect of the problem, that is, the necessity for a certain quality of protectiveness in the environment. For there are obviously many circumstances in which it is not safe to be absent-minded; it needs a setting, both physical and mental. It requires a physical setting in which we are freed, for the time being, from the need for immediate practical expedient action; and it requires a mental setting, an attitude, both in the people around and in oneself, a tolerance of something which may at moments look very like madness. The question then arises, are we going to treat all phenomena that are often talked of under that heading as symptoms, something to be got rid of, or can we, in our so objectively-minded culture, come to recognise them as something to be used, in their right place? In our childhood we are allowed to act, move, behave, under the influence of illusions, to play ‘pretend’ games and even get lost in our play, feel for the moment that it is real. In adult life it is less easy to find settings where this is possible (we get other people to do the pretending, on the films and the stage), although we do find it within the framework of the analytic session as patients.

I have suggested that, just as sleep dreaming is necessary (said Freud) to preserve sleep, so both conscious and unconscious day-dreaming is necessary to preserve creative being awake. Clinical psycho-analytic experience suggests that many of the impediments to going forward into living are the result of a failure of the child’s environment to provide the necessary setting for such absent-mindedness. For it seems likely that, in this phase of not distinguishing the ‘me’ and the ‘not-me’ we are particularly vulnerable to the happenings in the inner life of those nearest to us emotion-ally.* Two of the most disturbed patients I have had, who also had marked artistic gifts, both showed attempts to cling rigidly to the laws of formal logic (although they had never heard of the explicit statement of these laws). One of them would say furiously, in response to an interpretation involving symbolism, ‘But a thing either is or it isn’t, it must be one thing or the other!’ And the second patient would always insist that the literal meaning of any object or activity was the only possible meaning. And both of those patients had mothers who were mentally extremely ill. I suggest that such a human environment forces a child into desperate clinging

to the phase of thinking that does distinguish between the ‘me’ and the ‘not-me’, because this is the only protection against an impossible confusion between their own and their parents’ inner problem. But this (which is one possible meaning for the phrase ‘premature ego development’) leads them to great difficulties in managing their social environment, for they continually try to employ the kind of thinking (formal logical) which in fact gives a false picture of that world of human feeling (their own and other peoples’) that they are trying to understand and manage. And the result is that whole areas of their experience become cut off from the integrative influence of reflective thinking. What they are essentially in need of is a setting in which it is safe to indulge in reverie, safe to permit a con-fusion of ‘me’ and ‘not-me’.

Such a setting, in which it is safe to indulge in reverie, is provided for the patient in analysis, and painting likewise provides such a setting, both for the painter of the picture and for the person who looks at it.