In my early twenties, I was suffering from a severe neurosis. I took a simple psychological test in a small clinic. A counselor asked me to draw a picture of a tree. The tree I drew had a thick trunk with fine striations all over the bark, mixed with whorls in some places, and the top half of the tree was full of leaves. The lower half was full of fruit, but the upper half had none.

Looking at the drawing, the head doctor at the clinic said to me, "Look. The striations and scrolls you have drawn all over the trunk represent your psychological conflicts and the wounds in your heart. The leafy part symbolizes your vision of the future. The lower half of it is full of fruit, reflecting the fact that you once experienced a golden age. The absence of fruit in the upper half suggests that you have no vision for tomorrow. The fact that you drew a tree so tall that it sticks out of the paper shows that you think too highly of yourself."

It's interesting how you can read so much into a person's mind with the simple drawing of a tree. He was also the doctor of my grandfather, who had already passed away by then. I ceased to go to the clinic for a while for some reason, but after a few months he saw my condition worsened, the doctor finally decided to send me to the psychosomatic medicine department of the university hospital. He wrote a letter of introduction for me. Without it, the psychosomatic medicine department of such a large hospital would not see you.

I took another psychological test at that hospital. It was a Rorschach test. I won't go into details. Anyway, I was found to be seriously ill. The conclusion was, briefly, that it would be impossible for me to return to society for some time and that treatment at home was preferable. Since childhood I had grown up with mental conflicts, and now that I was in my early twenties, my mind finally broke down. It then took me many years to recover. I am still suffering.

[For the record, the university hospital was later demolished, and today the central library and the new city hall are located there. The clinic doctor passed away many years ago.]