Drawing It Out: Befriending the Unconscious

By Sherana Harriette Frances

This unique text shows us that the path of self-understanding and higher consciousness may not be revealed through words but through images. The author has presented us with the images coming from the depths of the unconscious and has eloquently described their eventually integration into her conscious life through careful attention to their details. It is not only an important contribution to the psychology of the unconscious, but a fascinating personal chronicle.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0966001958
• ISBN13: 9780966001952
• Release Date: November 2001
• Publisher: Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 8.5" x 10.9"

Customer Reviews

I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

There is a freshness about this work-in-two-media. With the rendering (and rending) of the artist's soul there is also, thank goodness, the reassurance of language-like a bridge over it's troubled waters. As a word person myself, I am particularly facinated by the picture part of the work, but also by the interplay between the two.The essential candor of the visions demands from the artist an equal openness in the text, so that the two potentiate each other, so to speak, like the gin and vermouth which become something else in a successful martini. It is powerful stuff.And then, too, William Blake, a master in two media, comes to mind. The probing and the sharing of the inner workings of a human being are about as intimate as one can get, aren't they? And yet, the artist's own determination to give an honest portrayal allow the work to transcend the wrenching experience of it's raw, very raw materials.I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

Drawing It Out: Befriending the Unconscious

This is a dramatic, moving and eloquent document. No hippie hunting ecstatic experience, no mere tripster, Sherana Harriette Frances records, in word and drawing, the symbolic death and rebirth of a woman artist through medically guided use of LSD, in the early sixties.Every first generation American child of immmigrant parents lives in some degree the shock, the alientation from family and the necessarily sometimes brutal struggle to translate oneself out of the parental culture without destroying familial bonds.Ms. Frances, in her agony of escape and rebirth from child of immigrant Cretan parents into her life of American woman artist, offers through these drawings, as well as in her own very literate written report, the agonizing stages of this liberation.She has created an original testament to the profound struggle required and to the everlasting power of art to convey that struggle in appropriate metaphor.She took the ancient Minoan bull of her ancestry by the horns and rode him to the kill - to her resurrection as American woman and as artist. Brava!...

Suicide is painless ...

"Drawing It Out" brings to mind the closing lyrics of thetitle song from "Mash": "'Cause suicide is painless. It brings on many changes. And I can take or leave it if I please. ...And you can do the same thing if you choose." Like Suicide, Self Procreation/Re-Creation "brings on many changes," but it's hardly ever Painless, as Ms. Frances' gripping chronicle of her odyssey makes overflowingly clear. The text is deceptively plain-spoken. Until well after the fact, I scarecely realized how deftly she conveys complex, elusive notions and feelings as if in a treasured letter from a dear friend. As for the images, words can't describe them. Powerful, moving, disturbing, revealing, truthful, tormenting -- toss a stack of such adjectives into a hat and cook until you concede that words can't describe these drawings. "Drawing It Out" is an enthralling exhibit of a Spiritual Epiphany -- "a sudden manifestation of the essence or meaning of something" (American Heritage Dictionary). Don't read "Drawing It Out" unless you're prepared to risk the challenge of searching-out the Epiphany of YOUR Self... Pretty Scary Thought, eh?

"Beautifully written, beautifully drawn."

In this deeply moving and courageous account of personal transformation, artist Sherana Frances offers the reader a unique glimpse into the psyche of the creative spirit. In the 60's, Frances was part of a controlled study of the effects of LSD. During that experience, she drew from herself a kind of artistic expression that became her own unique path on her journey of self-discovery. She literally and figuratively drew it out. The astonishing a sensuous series of sixty-one drawings, created at that time and over the decades that followed, is accompanied in this book by a poignant, intensely personal written account of her life challenges and the evolution of her consciousness. It is not unusual for people to use journal-writing as a tool of personal exploration. Frances, however, has chosen drawing as her tool, resulting in an entirely unusual process of epiphany and self-revelation. This book is as beautifully written as it is beautifully drawn, and the candor of her account reveals the author's uncommon courage. Explaining his own artistic motivation, Andrew Wyeth wrote, "I think one's art goes as far and as deep as one's love goes." Nowhere is that more evident than in Sherana Frances's DRAWING IT OUT.

A riveting read with drawings to match

Drawing It Out is an intimate and inspirational account of the author's one-time experience with the drug LSD under controlled conditions, and how that experience led to dramatic, life-changing events portrayed in the book, not only in words but in 61 of the author's powerful drawings.Her story is riveting and offers an unprecedented graphic look at how a contemporary woman's personal transformation unfolded over a period of 20 years. The author reveals the hidden processes of the unconscious mind as she navigated her way through painful relationships, emotional pain, loss and death.Not only for those interested in the therapeutic value of psychedelics, but for everyone interested in personal transformation through the power of art and the human spirit.