Ithell Colquhoun at Tate Britain. Sex, The Unconscious, and Transformation.

When I look at Ithell Colquhoun’s The Second Adam (1942), I don’t just see a surrealist painter painting. I see a psychotherapist at work.

Colquhoun was unusual among the Surrealists: she placed feminine power at the centre. In The Second Adam, the body becomes landscape, the erotic becomes transformation. Male and female forms dissolve into each other, echoing Jung’s idea of the “union of opposites.”

From a psychotherapist’s perspective, this matters. Our unconscious often speaks in symbols like these — dreamlike, fluid, unsettling. They remind us that the boundaries we cling to (male/female, body/spirit, conscious/unconscious) are less solid than we think.

In therapy, as in Colquhoun’s art, the task is not to repress the strange and erotic energies of the psyche, but to contain and work with them. Dreams and thoughts that seem to rise from the unconscious are we work with.

Transformation comes when we stop trying to split ourselves apart and instead allow integration.

For me, the Second Adam shows us that renewal is possible when we let the unconscious, the body, and the sacred speak in the same breath.

The show at the Tate Britain continues until the 19th October 2025.

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