ABSTRACT
Pony was the only child born to a couple whose ability to love and care for each other, much less her, proved to be fleeting, transitory, and unsustainable. From the outset psychotherapeutic treatment had the reconnaissance task of finding Pony. Perhaps more than anything, animals invoked and made manifest Pony’s magical world. Not for the sake of inventing alternate, different, or better categories of human life. More than any other of her tattoos, this image embodies the conjectured mentality of the cave artists insofar as it establishes a mimetic identification with another (animal/human) being that consists of both attraction and repulsion. To the extent that body image, memory, and emotional experience are together impacted through the re-exteriorization of the body covering, Pony seeks to overlay and over-write her trauma. It charts a journey, by way of dialogical collaboration, whose arrival in form is itself the intended therapeutic goal.
