All things in heaven and on earth have a beginning and an end—except for human beings, for though we each have a beginning, we almost never reach an end for what we might be in this world. We come into life only partially realized, and we cling to our earliest emotional and mental states so desperately that growth and maturation cannot flow, even as the physical organism begins its ascent through time, through youth, maturity, and involution. All of this clinging is quite unconscious. The mental apparatus may comprehend and master the technical world—the numbers and facts that explode in knowledge of outer space and the scientific wonders that bemuse us constantly—but while we may be smart enough to derive the very origins of life, we remain at a loss when it comes to really living it, or how to live it in peace and happiness.

Tens of thousands of years of rivalry and warfare, of philosophers’ essays and poets’ visions and spiritualists’ prophecies, and we have no dearth of answers and solutions that have ended as glorious experiments in the rubble of history. How can anyone say that mankind is a species above all others, one that learns from experience? Though we stand above all other creatures in the world, we still do not know how to love one another, to be at peace with our own selves.

We have, as humans, the gift of consciousness. We have the potentiality for having a mind, the way we have memory. A moment’s thought, however, and we realize that our consciousness is very limited, even when we have to focus on tasks that require concentration. Our memories are faulty, as a glance at our own, inspected, will reveal. And do we make use of our experience? This is unlikely, to hear it from the men and women who are constantly and intermittently falling in love with exactly the wrong person, the husbands and wives who have the same struggles until death do them part. We repeat our mistakes endlessly, in all aspects of life, but in none more than in love and human relationships.

Besides a conscious mind we also have an unconscious one, which is the far greater part of the mind—dimensionless and immeasurable, much like the universe, though crackling with activity and life. And the unconscious mind is just as frightening as the farthest, most unfathomable reaches of the universe; it has a vastness that would send you reeling with shivers if you let it.

With the advent of psychoanalysis roughly 100 years ago, this profound science of human nature, one might have expected that by now all human mysteries and contradictions would be sorted out the way that quarters and dimes and nickels are whisked into their proper slots by the change sorter. But psychoanalysis is still in its infancy, and its answers have not had a great reception in the hearts and minds of mankind—yet. It takes time to embrace something entirely new, and so far the absolutely correct model has not yet been revealed—one so true and right that it captures our inner conviction the way a painting, a piece of music, or a sculpture does when it expresses something absolutely essential about the world and our lives. We have not found a model that is absolutely right in the way that the discovery of DNA was right, when we could read the proof and see the results and understand that something truly marvelous and new had been put forth in the world.

But, in a way, the answers are right in front of us. We have a method to access the vast Stygian darkness of our conscious and unconscious minds, just as we have telescopes to peer through the heavens and reveal them to us. We have our own Rosetta stone to make the unfathomable clean and bright, though we do not always see it as such, or acknowledge its power. It’s called the dream.

Mankind has been analyzing its dreams for as long as it has been dreaming them. The earliest histories tell us how rulers of kingdoms and generals of armies employed interpreters to reveal the meaning of their dreams to them; Joseph, a slave in Egypt, was one of the earliest and most famous of these soothsayers. Even now, the tellers of fortune and future are dispersed throughout the world, not only to help the beleaguered but to forecast the next lover, expose the sex of the pregnant woman’s child, reveal the outcome of a business dealing. We have always longed to know the future and to understand what exists in our deepest hearts—just as we have always known instinctively that the answers lie in our dreams.

Our science is to plow up the present and find it is a carbon copy of the past; to reveal the truth of someone’s life by burrowing into his or her mind and finding what is buried there—and then dismantling it, healing the rifts that split our minds and selves in two. This is no easy task: dismantling the lies that one has lived with since birth—lies created by others and by oneself—is laborious, and can only be performed through the collaboration of analyst and patient. As painful as it is, this task will deconstruct the wretchedness and despair of one’s life to reveal the truth the dreaming contains, a truth that will warm the gut the way a powerful, delicious liquor does. For, simply put, it is the truth that cures all illness, as surely as it is falsehood that causes it. This is fundamentally what psychoanalysis does: traces presumably adult conflicts, depressions, manias, losses, and illnesses back to their infantile roots, and reveals the truth behind them.

The concept of a split in the personality has been written about for a long time, even by the discoverer of psychoanalysis, Freud himself. Melanie Klein also postulated a split in the infant’s mind—indeed presented a whole theory explaining that the infant’s mind is riven by its hatred (read envy) of the mother’s breast. This hatred has to be set aside in order for the infant to cherish the mother enough to be able to feed and survive in the world. I do not subscribe to this theory, though hundreds of analysts throughout the world do. I do not believe that an infant constitutionally brings such hatred or envy into the world. It is just not the way of human life and evolution.

My theory is that the split of the baby’s mind comes about by the impact of the mother’s unconscious projection of her unwanted and self-hated parts into the infant’s mind. This projection, or imprint, shatters the baby’s mind as if a bullet or knife were cutting into the tissue itself. The baby protects itself from the now-poisonous deposit by trying to sequester it, allowing itself to feel only love for the mother who has given it life. Despite the baby’s efforts (and the mother’s love), the mother’s projections will fester in ways that the child will not be able to fathom, just as the physicians who attend the child throughout its life will not be able to fathom the roots of its illnesses. And we all become ill: with addiction, or hypertension and other physical illnesses, or any number of psychiatric diagnoses. When we are not manifestly ill we quietly suffer headaches, chronic fatigue, colds, viruses, and all the so-called acceptable illnesses rooted in this most ancient of traumas, this rift in the mind that can be felt as a big bang in our own individual universes. I liken these attacks to the big bang theory of the universe, that profound, cataclysmic moment that astronomers and astrophysicists spend lifetimes sorting and tracing out and reconstructing. It is not different in the world of psychoanalysis. We too do all that—at least those who are conversant with my theory and method and painstakingly track the manifestations of trouble in their patients’ everyday lives, in an effort to approach the terrifying abyss in the personality identified as the split.

The feeling of trauma at that ancient moment is so great that those who, during analysis, come close to their own moments of splitting will wake up with the worst nightmares of their lives. And no wonder: the anxiety comes from having just been annihilated, and it takes time for this stuff to settle down, for us to forget this trauma. And though in real life one may never know of the event of one’s splitting—for I believe it can only be resurrected by analysis and only after many other issues are dealt with—the effect of this explosion will play out in the twists and turns of our lives. No one escapes this—no human being. It is this cataclysm that each of us must face as we go back into our lives, deeper into our unconscious minds, down to where the dream gives meaning to the events of our lives. It is through the dream that we are able, eventually, to face the big bang of the personality, to know its every detail and then master it. For only the truth of it all will allow healing to take place.

And yet strangely—or not so strangely, depending on your view—we will fight ourselves and the analysts, the interpreters of our dreams, almost to the death to avoid traversing that last gritty mile, down to our deepest, most essential selves and hearts. So great is our fear that we may quit our quest altogether—for to complete the journey would be to defy the initial imprint from the mother. The imprint is usually so solid and fierce, so deeply embedded into our personalities that we feel that defying it would be akin to defying God.

This struggle will last a long time, for the rifts in the personality will always find ways to conceal themselves. Yet, in the end, if the person is courageous enough and if the analyst is holding his or her compass firmly, there will be a reconciliation that heralds a healing of the split. The task may seem perilous at the time, for the only way back toward unity is to suffer through the shattering once more. If one does not relive the split then all that can be accomplished is change on an intellectual level—which cannot and does not heal the whole mind and spirit. One will know psychoanalysis not as a holistic science, but as an intellectual undertaking only; there will be no fundamental change in the inner core, only an increase in wisdom as one learns to apply intellectual solutions to the problems of everyday living.

If we extrapolate this individual situation to mankind at large, we realize that mankind itself has suffered a similar split and shattering. Today we are in a state of chaos—wars, terrorism, man against man, country against country—and yet as the scientists have concurred, all of mankind originated in Africa. The ancient shattering that we no doubt suffered at one point deep in our history has been as horrific for mankind as it has been and is for the individual baby. If we can envisage the arduous path we must take to connection, to acceptance, to the belief that there is only one God—not a Catholic one and Jewish one and Muslim one, only one—when we come to that perception and realization, we will have reached the point of unity for the one human being, the one soul.

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We experience signs as we approach a safe haven, and when it comes to our own paths towards wholeness and peace, the signs are our dreams. I want to present two dreams of a man who has been in analysis a long time with me and has nearly completed his journey. He is a writer, 53 years old, who suffered from writer’s block. In the course of his life he noted a pattern: a few successes were almost always followed by failure or by an inability to write easily, as he could usually do. He and I have dealt with many issues, which he has surmounted, having to do with his wife, children and family. His analysis is focused almost solely on himself now, and for him the end is in sight. He is familiar with the split in himself and has been alternately appalled and amused by how it has played out in his life.

Over the course of our analysis, many issues have come to the surface about his family. He was the youngest of four children and he felt the most loved; he himself was married with children but there were problems. I will not go into detail about these other issues here, but after many years it became clear to him that for some reason he would only allow himself small successes, enough for him to keep working but never large enough to achieve the sort of success he longed for and knew he was capable of having. This inability, we eventually found, stemmed from an imprint his mother had given him unconsciously (in the way all imprints are given), an imprint that made him feel he could never really tap into and unite the creative essence within him. It turned out that his mother had longed to be a performer but sacrificed her dreams in order to care for her children, whom she unconsciously resented for removing any chance she had ever had of becoming an actress, maybe even a star. In short, his mother’s unconscious hatred for him was contained within his own personality, manifested in a steady stream of hatred towards his own creativity, also unconscious. The desire for success and the inhibition against it were revealed in my patient in many ways, and ultimately, after we had dealt with many of those issues, he had two dreams that revealed he’d come to peace with his mother—and himself.

Several months ago he recounted this dream. He said: “I was going with my mother and father to the corner restaurant. As we approached it, I saw that it was dark and I said that it was not open. But a moment later the lights went on and we saw that there actually were people inside. We went in and were given a small table, not large enough for three. I was angry with my mother. My father wanted me to sit next to her, but I did not want to. We then got our table changed to a larger one, a more suitable one, I felt.”

I commented that there were a number of associations that showed he still harbored a transient negativity towards his mother, despite the amount of work he had done on the damage he had suffered and despite the fact that he had quite consciously forgiven his mother and was on very good terms with both his parents. Years ago this negativity had manifested itself in a violent hatred, but by now the feeling was so harmless and mild that within the dream the situation sorted itself out. Everyone was comfortable and happy.

A few weeks later he had what I feel was a significant dream, one that heralded that the end of his analysis was not far away. He described it this way: “I was in a Chinese art gallery and there were two pictures of Chinese girls. One of the girls was about six years old, and the other about ten. They were stunning. I had come in a rickshaw; I must have been in Hong Kong or China. My daughter, who was with me, also saw the pictures. She became smitten with them instantly. The artist, a Chinese woman, was with us as well.”

He paused, and said, “I know what the six and ten are. They have to do with the Tarot cards; you know how long I’ve been fascinated with them.”

“What are the six and ten in the Tarot deck?”

He said, “The six is the card called The Lovers, and the ten is the card called The Wheel of Fortune.”

I nodded, and said, “When you talk about the art gallery, it is clear that it is the creative gallery you are talking about, and we know from its being Chinese that it is also the spiritual gallery within you. [For him, all things Chinese represented his spiritual self.] To understand the beauty of the Chinese girls, ages six and ten, we have to go to your Tarot cards, which represent the balance within you, male and female, and since the ten is the wheel of fortune, it signifies the expansion of your consciousness and, with it, your joy.”

He took this in and continued with the dream. “We are lucky to move into this artist’s home. She is very attractive, in her 30s. The house is spacious and comfortable and I bring my own paintings with me, even though I feel it is absurd for me to do so, since mine are very amateurish compared to hers. Still, I hang my paintings on the wall. My daughter, who is a child, falls asleep. I try to pick her up but I cannot. She gets up and goes to bed herself. When I return I see a policemen stretched out in a chair. He is a friend, the woman says. We are planning to go to dinner, but I wonder if we can leave the house and my child alone. I know as the dream ends that this Chinese woman and I will be lovers.”

I said, “Very good, for the woman represents the unconscious artist within you, as it becomes united to your consciousness. You are going to become the woman’s lover, achieving a balance between your conscious and unconscious mind and allowing your creativity to blossom and expand. You are moving into the comfort of her home, and you bring your own paintings with you—your conscious talent, which you feel is inferior to what your unconsciousness can do. This is what is revealed. The Chinese woman is your higher essence moving right through you, allowing your talent to be brought forward. This dream signifies an almost complete healing of the writer’s block that brought you into the analysis originally. Your child, small again, represents the innocence within yourself. And the child is able to fall asleep comfortably; she feels secure and safe. You say you worry about her falling asleep and being left alone, and yet you have someone there caring for her. That is your policemen—your friend, the inner protector that is always there.”

The dream was then: a message from the unconscious, heralding its own wholeness and healing.

He said, after I was silent, “Well, I knew everything you said, or rather most everything.”

We as analysts are quite used to this confession, especially when it comes after a complex matter has yielded slowly to analysis, or when it comes in dreams that are less and less inscrutable after the patient’s defenses have softened and melted away—when the dream becomes almost transparent because the analysand has no need to distort or deny the truth inherent in the latent dream content.

I asked, “What part of the dream did you not get?”

He said, “The part about my child, and the policeman. I tried to fit this in with what I have learned from all these years of analysis, all the insights and pain and unpleasant awarenesses, but I could not see it.”

I asked, “Did you sleep well last night?”

He answered “Very well, and I woke refreshed this morning.”

I said, “Again, your inner protector, the policeman, was watching over your child self and your feminine, or creative self. This means that your creative child self will no longer be in danger as you do your work in your daily life. It means that your consciousness and unconsciousness are no longer in conflict.”

Arriving at the end of the analysis does not mean that all of our suffering will end. Nothing can protect us from the daily insults of everyday life, but after analysis we are able to meet those challenges as entirely different people—wiser, and with the deeper wisdom that comes from understanding one’s own mind. The unconscious can give us knowledge not only about ourselves but about our family and friends, the past and the future, and even our most transient acquaintances. It has information about the state of the country and, indeed, the world. But despite all this, prize of knowledge hard won, there will always be a law of cause and effect to which all of mankind is subject. Ultimately, a personal analysis will teach us—teach us sincerely—that all our actions, or non-actions, have consequences, and that we must behave in accord with the laws of the unconscious, which are akin to the laws of the universe. And to know that is to know one of the most essential ingredients of life.