Alonso G. Smith

Psychiatric Maelstrom

Psychiatric Maelstrom

1949, oil/panel, 25" x 30"


Despite "hindsight", the therapist tunes in on a troubled mind he has opened; therein he finds emotional dysfunction and screaming voices of multiple personalities. He also finds a recorder pick-up-head's tongue has isolated a painful memory and its ear has stopped the disc over "agony". The frustrated therapist, encountering resistance, threatens the patient with an anachronistic fool's bauble; but the bauble taunts the sufferer with the possibility of escape from his emotional maelstrom in a red canoe. Forbidding jagged mountains, planks, and ominous clouds discourage escape from needed revelations; even the spirit of mundane activities, offering fish and egg and aspirin, cannot help. However, a "handily" placed star of hope promises enlightenment for the open minded.