Life Paints Its Own Span ─ On the Significance of Spontaneous Paintings by Severely Ill Children

The pioneering work, Life Paints Its Own Span, is a comprehensive exposition of Susan Bach's original approach to the physical and psychospiritual evaluation of spontaneous paintings and drawings by severely ill patients. At the same time, this work is a moving record of Susan Bach's own journey of discovery.

Susan Bach was born in 1902 in Berlin. She took up crystallography and submitted a prize-winning doctoral thesis in the Friedrich-Wilhelm University of Berlin. This scientific training underpinned her later systematic studies of spontaneous paintings and drawings, especially pictures produced by severely ill children. She had already begun work in psychoanalysis as the Nazification of Germany took hold in the 1930s and had come to the realization that spontaneous pictures were of tremendous significance. She and her husband, Hans Bach, traveled as refugees to London, where she was part of a pioneering development in the use of art with patients in mental hospitals. In 1947, she discovered that spontaneous pictures accurately reflect somatic as well as psychological states. Subsequently, Susan Bach established an analytical practice and consulted with C.G. Jung and Toni Wolff in Zurich, where she made lasting links with the staff of the Children's Hospital and collected drawings and paintings. This work culminated in the discovery of inner knowingness, demonstrating empirically the reality of the collective unconscious.