ABSTRACT
The painter by virtue of his artistic capacity is able to transform a landscape into a painting. He does so by virtue of invariants that make his representation comprehensible. The invariants depend on the technique he employs: thus the invariants in an impressionist painting are not the invariants of a painting by a member of, say, a realist school of painting. The analytic theories associated may be classified by their association with the type of transformation. The type of transformation will depend on the analyst and his assessment of the demands of the clinical situation. As the painter’s transformations vary according to the understanding his painting is to convey, so the analyst’s transformation will vary according to the understanding he wishes to convey. The catastrophic event may be described in terms of the theory of transformations: this involves regarding the transformation, implied by employing the theory of transformations, as itself belonging to the group of transformations.
