Poldi and Egon Schiele

While reading Buxbaum's case studies, I encounter a ten-year-old boy named Poldi, who, according  to Buxbaum herself, should not have been in an analysis; but she wanted to try. This was Vienna, 1927, when she was presenting cases in Anna Freud's child analysis seminar.
Poldi's story connects me to the Expressionist painter, EgonSchiele, brilliant and crazy in his way of contorting the human body, as if it were not human at all, rather as much an animal as a man, woman or child. The internal conflicts, the moodiness and self-examination via canvass. The exactness of his animalistic shapes of human beings just like us, like me. In his mind, body parts are rearranged – an arm where a leg might be, eyes looking half-crazed, a shoulder here, a leg there. (See Alessandra Comini)

Egon Schiele and his magnificent oeuvre of Expressionist art heralds the time of this strange and brilliant artist who died too soon, in 1919, at the age of twenty-eight, of the Spanish flu, three days after his wife, Edith Schiele, also of the Spanish flu.

Poldi is just ten when Buxbaum introduces him to us, via Anna Freud’s child therapy session. He continues therapy with her through age twelve, half the age of Egon Schiele when he was painting his finest works, including “Egon Schiele: Self-Portrait” (1912)

I think of Poldi in connection with the artist Schiele, because from the age of five Poldi masturbated publicly, as Schiele's characters do...

That's all for now. I won't give away the whole story, but I'll be back soon. I want my note cards, files and folders to have more of a life than just sitting in their flash drives.

Thanks for being here,

Esther