Images that transform

I’ve always been struck by Jung’s advice about how to deal with emotional problems: don’t work on the problem, but find an image and work on that. I think he was generally meaning that people should draw or paint their states of mind. I was never any good at either, and anyway, now I can’t use my hands. But many years ago I had a dream where my piano was at risk of being stolen. This distressed me very much and by the end of the week I knew I needed to work it out, so I tried drawing the piano. I can’t draw. I couldn’t get the keyboard at right angles to the back of the piano; my drawing was all on one plane. That didn’t matter. As soon as I got my strange version of a piano down on paper, I realised what the dream meant: the piano represented my emotional depths and I was allowing other parts of me to steal them.

So ever since, I have known that Jung was right and that images can be transforming.