Patient: I am very glad to be here today. I have been upset since I had sex with my wife a few days ago. She had her period, which was OK, but the next day I looked at my penis, which I rarely do, and I saw that the head of the penis was discolored. It scared me even though it was not painful. I showed it to my wife but she waved it away as if it were no great matter, very blasé. I can't imagine what it might be. She did say herpes but I don't ever remember having herpes on my penis.

Dr. B: So when are you going to see the doctor? Have you made an appointment with a urologist?

Patient: This afternoon so we will know from that point of view.

Dr. B: So what about your dreams? This has been a few days running. Maybe your dreams have something to say about your condition?

Patient: I did have a dream and I was in my bed. It was morning and my daughter comes in to the bedroom. She is a teenager. Apparently she had taken a shower and was holding on to her head screaming and soaking wet. She showed no embarrassment at being naked and her breasts were large.

As a matter of fact, she has all the characteristics of being a teenager, especially about privacy. However, she doesn't mind sitting in my lap. She knows I love her very much. I remember when she was born and I first saw her. I felt an unutterable love for her and have never stopped loving her. The dream is accurate. She does have a long body, long legs and large breasts, like my wife. But she does resemble me so it is a rather interesting combination. I know enough from all of our work to know symbolically, being wet, she must represent my feminine unconscious. I didn't know what it meant that she was holding her head and seemed to be in pain.

Well, Dr. Bail, I finished my last project and curiously I am not too anxious about not having work for the next eight weeks. I can sit and write which is what I hope I will do. When I read the essay about me on your website, I became a little anxious.

Dr. B: Why?

Patient: I never liked being in the limelight and pointed out. I remember in high school being on the basketball team. The coach was talking to the fellows saying, "Look at Frank. He's not a great player but he keeps trying. He is persistent and he probably will play." After he said that I couldn't dribble the ball or catch the ball and that was the end of my basketball career. So I don't like being in the limelight. It scares me. However, that doesn't mean that people don't know me. A lot of people know me and says nice things about my work.

Dr. B: What about the other dream?

Patient: In my second dream I was being given peanut butter and jelly sandwiches by my son's teacher. There was also zucchini in it.

My son is very smart, you know. He is going to a charter school that is fantastic. They get to read about Ulysses, Homer. They discuss whatever it is in the Socratic method. They talk about philosophy. His teacher, a woman in her late fifties, is the founder of this unusual school and my son is very lucky to be able to go there.

Dr. B: So what about these sandwiches?

Patient: Well, peanut butter and jelly are really for kids and everybody likes that kind of sandwich.

Dr. B: And the zucchini?

Patient: When I was a kid my Dad planted a garden and grew zucchinis. I am working my way toward becoming a vegetarian. That is probably why that is in the dream. The teacher in the dream wasn't exactly like my son's teacher who is the head of the school. She was younger but she resembled this woman. They school also teaches music. Each child is given an instrument to learn to play. It is free. My boy was given a bass. He told me it scared him. He didn't know whether he would be able to do it. He reminds me of me.

Dr. B: I guess he has to learn to be able to say, "I don't know", and he has to be open to being taught. I think that was very difficult for you when you were growing up.

Patient: Right on. I have also been having the feeling that this is a very critical year for me. I remember talking to this Sikh and she told me this was a critical year for me. She gave me a prayer to say to break up the blocks from maternal induced trauma which reside in the body in the brain stem at the base of the skull. Amazing don't you think?

Dr. B: Yes, I think so. Intuits may apprehend a situation spot on but do not have a picture of the psychological implication of the situation. So that brings us back to your first dream.

Patient: Oh, by the way, she also said that I should look in a numerology book and look up the cube that was on a certain page. What was written on one side of that cube was, "Go West". When I went through various maneuvers I came to the tarot cards and to the Wheel of Fortune, which means destiny. So this is an important year for me, as I will come face to face with my destiny.

Dr. B: Well, let's leave the question of your destiny over here for a while and let me go on to say what I think the meaning of the dream is.

I think it is really a description of your daughter's birth and three things are contained in that image. One that it must have been a hard passage. Second that she was feeling the impact of your wife's unconscious projection, receiving what I call her imprint. Third she was experiencing the trauma of transition from a watery environment to a gaseous one. There would have been a lot of pain. And then you know and I know that her first years of life with your wife were hardly peaceful. They were filled with turbulence, yelling, exasperation and anger. So it is not as simple as it appears to be in the dream.

As for you getting the sandwiches it sounds like you are identifying with your son although you are older than he is and even he is not getting peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Now I think there is one more item from these dreams that needs to be addressed and that is the large breasts on your daughter which you say she has. In the context of the dream, since I put this down to a birth dream, it is as if she is saying, "It does not matter what you, Mother, give me or don't give me. I can feed myself." And I think that expresses how you felt when you were born and in the early months of your life having a very difficult Mother to contend with. You too were saying, unconsciously, "I can feed myself."

Lastly I think that I am the teacher who gives you the peanut butter sandwich and the zucchini, which of course if healthy because it is a vegetable, because in our work here we do talk of grown up things like philosophy in the context of the problems of your personality. We do use the Socratic methods in our discussions. The food you are portraying in the dream is really the food of a small boy or girl so metaphorically you are saying that you like very much the food you are getting in this room and enjoy going to this school with its new ideas.

COMMENTARY

There are many complex issues that the patient brings in with these dreams, using his daughter and son as representations of himself, as one removed, sort of speak.

The first dream contains the moment of his daughter's imprinting and later her birth. The majority of patients have the experience identified as the "big bang", meaning the moment of their being imprinted. This usually is an experience of blinding pain in the head. This is due to violent projections of something the mother unconsciously does not like or want in herself.

Later the daughter comes out of the shower and is unashamed of her nudity. Of course, babies being born have no concept of shame, a much later entity that may befall some.

Our interest lies in the large breasts of the daughter. As I said they represent the feeling "I do not need you, Mother. I can feed myself". Obviously this is a fantasy for every baby needs the mother to survive.

At this time what was important for the patient was to know this and, in context with the analysis, patients like this are prone to come for therapy but do not progress because they are not paying attention to the analyst. They do not want to feed from him, acknowledge his importance, be dependent on him for food (help).

At this time, this has not been a problem in this work for he has progressed and has been able to descend further and further into his unconscious; for example to access the moment of pain in the imprinting process.

What is important is that the patient for some time has been obese. His eating habits have been exceedingly profligate and for years he was unable to lose weight.

However, due to a physical exam it was suggested that he must do so and now and for the past while he has been able little by little to shed some pounds. He also exercises. This prior abundance of weight was maintained because it was the source of his feeding himself. For some time he has been able to really listen and depend not only on his therapy but other sources of information that interested him, like the Sikh woman who advised him. His work with me could fill out this simple dictum that his mother had to leave (internally).

The second dream tells of his son's encounter with his teacher and his ability to let the teacher teach him. We see here how in using his children as representations he is able to say a great deal about himself.

There is finally the issue of his penis and the issue of the discoloration of his penis that an investigation found was not a herpetic lesion. So the question is what was it?

I would suggest the discoloration was a representation and a repetition of his actual birth (remember the dream is about his daughter's birth) and that his penis was traumatized in that birth experience. This does happen. As an intern on the Obstetric stint of my duty, I have seen this.

Altogether from these dreams and the one's he has had prior I would say that his therapy is proceeding well.

Those who deal with intractable cases of bulimia and obesity might consider this unconscious feeling of being able to feed oneself as a source of the problem. I am not saying here that this is the final solution as bulimia has other complex meanings that have to be discerned. But I think the answer to obesity might lie in this area.

July 2010