“I am an artist”

Encopresis, an anal symptom, is a struggle against the anxiety of loss, and procures for the subject a form of pleasure mingled with pain, to the detriment of speech and mental processes. In therapy, Vincent, who was born prematurely and was encopretic later, threw himself into a series of drawings which help him express the fantasies associated with his anal retention, and then to reconstruct himself in the archetypal world of nature spirits. Finally, he uses them to become human, an artist of the “soul of the belly”, endowed with treasures of vitality and creativity.