Susan Bach was born in Berlin in 1902. She studied crystallography, and won an award from the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. Her scientific background, coupled with her deep fascination for underlying archetypal arrangements, informed her later systematic studies of drawings and pictures, in particular those produced by severely ill children. She examined such pictures for meaningful arrangements and forms, which she recognized as being indicative of unconscious processes.
Susan Bach had first encountered psychoanalysis in the 1930s. After many years living in London, she finally visited Zurich and was in regular contact with C.G. Jung and Toni Wolff.
Over a period of more than 30 years, she and a team of doctors and nursing staff investigated psychosomatic connections in the pictures of severely ill children at the Children’s Hospital Zurich. She discovered that pictures painted spontaneously by children with leukemia and other forms of cancer very often presented an image of the child’s complete situation, and that valuable information about the past, present and future of the patient’s life story was frequently hidden in the pictures. She published these findings in her book Life Paints Its Own Span. On the Significance of Spontaneous Pictures by Severely Ill Children (Daimon Verlag, Einsiedeln, 1995). Susan Bach died in London in 1995.
She founded the Susan Bach Foundation with the aim of further developing the research she had begun into significant signs in spontaneous drawings. In addition, however, other approaches and topics from the field of research into psychosomatic and synchronistic phenomena are also in keeping with the foundation’s aims and we are therefore also happy to receive applications for financial support from such areas.
“… In all these years of research I became more and more aware that a strange phenomenon emerged and became more and more recognisable: the phenomenon of forecasting signs. Once courageously acknowledged, I and my co-workers and friends could find it in almost all our material, even manifesting itself in our own personal experiences. (…) it seems to be essential (…) to conceive of wholeness in a way which includes the vital component of relationship. (…) for instance the dynamic realities of psyche and soma, light and dark, (…), I and you, good and evil, active and passive …” (from: Susan Bach – Life Paints Its Own Span, 1995)
