Mirroring in the analysis of an artist.

A patient, a young woman artist, once remarked, 'I am always looking in the mirror and that's why I can't paint'. Miranda in W. H. Auden's The Sea and the Mirror said, 'My dear one is mine as mirrors are lonely'. Both these quotations refer to the wish to be free from the residual derivations of infantile mirroring which Winnicott defined by saying that the mother's face is the child's natural mirror; a young girl, when she has recourse to the glass mirror, is reassuring herself that the mother-image is there. The paper traces the connexions between mirroring and a painter's stated personal dilemma of knowing that looking in the mirror was an alternative to being able to paint and yet of needing to look in the mirror to reassure herself. To have framed that dilemma had involved work to effect a shift from narcissism to reflective self-awareness. The theme of mirroring, as previously described by other clinicians, is enlarged upon to show how the painter's dilemma could be reconstructed in terms of the early mother-child-mirror dissonances. The patient's experience of her self-image through painting began to become more accessible as an accompaniment to a move 'through the looking glass' into the mirror dialogue with her infantile mother-image.