ABSTRACT
Undoubtedly the themes of the last set of drawings had shown that one’s mind could be very concerned with this problem of differences; but also that it tended to run to extremes and having once distinguished opposites then it tried to keep them rigidly apart. Also, if I had interpreted such drawings as the Angry Ape aright, this was partly because of certain painful and intense emotions connected with earliest experiences of difference, particularly the first perceptions of the difference between what one would like and expect people to do and what they do do – in fact, the first experience of the discrepancy between dream and actuality. Of course I knew by now that this again was a central part of psycho-analytic theory: that the childhood spectacle of the parents together and oneself shut out could become a kind of prototype of the difficulties to do with the recognition of difference. I knew the theory that jealousy and fear of the creative activities of the parents can often make it very difficult to believe in creative interplay in general. But the
particular part of the problem that psycho-analysis had not so far made clear to me was to do with this creative interplay between dream and external reality.
