Feingold Gallery: 1967

(posted for a friend)

How I constantly feel.

Everyone's deepest secret fear?

At first my least favorite picture because it is so disturbing and haunting. Now, my second favorite. Abandonment and helplessness.

Loss and the ultimate in abandonment...mother and child came to mind at the time of separation at birth....a longing and wanting.

Trapped with no one to care.

We are born, thrown out into the world alone. There is an instant of perfection, and then a lifetime of falling apart.

The image of a baby crying is hard to look at in and of itself, but the words on the bottom "left for dead" make it seem so hopeless.

Birth as both the beginning of life and the end of complete safety. Fear and abandonment.

Terror, pain, desolation and destitution. An explanation of what might be at the heart of much of his unhappiness: that he was left for dead, or if meant less literally, maybe he is asking himself if someone with his disablities should have been left for dead? What consistutes "life"?

Is this a child? Someone not only ignored, but doomed from birth? Perhaps a genetic death sentence. 

what becomes of a baby left for dead--death in abandonment, or life in the worst of circumstances? 

Yeesh, this one is scary.  How does this have to do with mental illness?  Is it supposed to?

This image is awful! My heart aches for both the child who will have to face the world alone, and the mother who was put into circumstances such that she was made to leave her child.

I see an aborted baby. 

Ryan, your question is a good one. All the words that comprise the answer to your question lies literally, in four of the words in your question: "Mental-illness-is-scary". df

At first I scanned all of your pictures, but this one ultimately pulled me in. Like the others have said, it is perhaps because it is such a gripping image and it invokes my own feelings of not wanting to be abandoned. It is a common human emotion, shared probably more intensely by those with disabilities (or different abilities). In my own experience as a parent of a child with autism and in my volunteer music therapy work with those with Alzheimer's and dementia I can see this image of an infant as very applicable. Both groups of people find it difficult if not impossible to readily communicate with the world and in many ways might feel like a helpless baby left for dead. For me, the message is that the rest of us need to be their voices and their advocates and promote the fact that all people and all life is valuable and must be respected and protected.