James Hillman and Michael Ventura
We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—And the World's Getting Worse
(1992)
[61]
...
Life Lived Backwards
Dear Michael,
There is a painting by Picasso done when he was ninety-one, the year before he died. It is titled Le jeune peintre (the young painter). ...
When I first saw this painting—and it is a big one, nearly a yard tall—I had that frisson André Malraux says leaps from one work of art to another via the human person. This haunting, simple image turned out to be the initiatory experience for my theory of life lived backwards. Here is the invisible Picasso Caught on the canvas, a self-portrait of the daimon that inhabited him all his life. At the end, it emerges and shows itself.
