Why, in all the years of civilization, with the best of human intentions and access to myriad resources, has so little difference actually been made in the lives of so many?

It is not for lack of trying, or a dearth of good-heartedness. Today, as in the past, those who have, have repeatedly attempted to help those who have not. Thousands of words have been written and spoken about altruism, the need to better the lot of those who have inadequate everything—water, food, shelter, health care, compassion, love. It is not only celebrities and the very wealthy who attempt to make a positive difference in the lives of the needy; witness the thriving charitable institutions in the U.S. and other developed countries, and the efforts of less wealthy nations to help the poorest of their own poor citizens. And all of these contributions, mightily conceived, some even mightily executed, are admirable.

Nonetheless, there are still countries filled with human beings in great need—people who survive day-to-day or moment-to-moment, and die by the thousands, the millions, from lack of care. There is still rampant cruelty and rampant indifference; sadly, there are still governments and individual iron-fisted tyrants throughout the world who have no interest whatsoever in anything but advancement of their own greedy and selfish agendas.

The terrible truth is that, despite good intentions, either nothing appreciably changes for the better, or no change for the better really endures. The problem is that all of these great endeavors have never really helped the needy or the poor over all the countless years of civilization.

Why is this so?

Because people’s lives cannot be improved outwardly before they are, first, improved from within. From the deepest recesses within, the unconscious. We have not yet learned how to tame our internal enemy, born from wounds in the unconscious which, never discovered, never healed, continue to compel us to do the worst to ourselves as well as to our fellow human beings. We cannot fix ourselves, so how can we begin to fix the woes of the world?

I am speaking here of the wounds of the soul, of the unconscious, about which I wrote at length in The Mother’s Signature: A Journal of Dreams (2007). My investigations into the reasons behind people’s misery, fears, self-loathing, and cruelty to self and others revealed that the unconscious mind, terribly wounded at the very moment of conception, is the indisputable genesis of these ills. Moreover, I discovered that the original source of the trauma—the mother’s projection of her unconscious, unbearably painful feelings into the nascent being of her unborn infant—can be located and eventually mitigated through dream analysis.

A Brief Note About Dream Analysis

When I say that dream analysis can eventually heal a profound trauma from the beginning of life and before, I am speaking of dream analysis that differs from Freud’s theory of how dreams are understood. Freud’s theory, based on Newtonian physics (the science of his time), rested on the premise of “wish fulfillment,” primarily requiring an interpretation of each dream as a sexual or aggressive wish—a function of “drive discharge.” My theory rests on the truth of one’s experience of life from the very beginning to the end, thus illuminating a life in its entirety.

The world’s consciousness is confused by the jargon of leadership - by the bullets, the lies, the rulers are content with causing confusion. I see the same stories on television or the Internet, everywhere in the world: evidence of cynical exploitation of the population, cynical because the people are told “this is good for you.” Maybe these leaders can create a completely docile world that will make them more money, get them more land, more air, more water—as if they will never die. These leaders’ actions suppose an eternal life including the best of everything, all the ills concealed somewhere, somehow. And no one has to consider what everything means, even the meaning of one’s own life, which can only be found in each individual’s unconscious.

Where Does Psychoanalysis Fit In?

One profession could help dispel the illusion and help people access their own unconscious, but currently this group falls short of the promise. This group—psychoanalysts—is not immune to grandiosity or rigidity, a wish to stay time, to stay place, if only they could, as they tried to do at the 2007 International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) Congress in Berlin. Summer in Berlin, meeting place of some 2,850 participants—analysts, analysts-to-be, and guests. Over two hundred presentations, a lot of talk, a lot of revelation.

But, according to the IPA president’s presentation, membership is down, membership is dwindling. Novices are not appearing, they are not signing up, not with a curriculum that has not changed fundamentally in one hundred years. There was joy, bonhomie - what a wonderful Congress! In one breath we say, “Our future is bright,” but in reality, enrollment is diminishing - but our future is bright.

Is it? Instead of an incubator with new babies, are we dying out? For those who think that I may be exaggerating, I offer the following. It is October, 2007, and soon there will be an election to choose the new president of the American Psychoanalytic Association. One of the contenders for the position, in his mass e-mail to the membership, asks, “Is our organization a museum?”

The theme of the Berlin Congress was “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through.” The situation, however, is closer to “I remember, but I have not been able to work it through analytically.” There appears to be no existing method in any of the world’s schools of psychoanalysis that can help one “work it through.” Only by going to the unconscious, through the portal of dream analysis, can anything be constructively and genuinely worked through and worked out. Yet, except in Los Angeles, this method is not taught in graduate schools or psychoanalytic institutes today.

But that does not seem to bother anyone. Famous men and women sit at the councils, quoting Freud, quoting Klein or Bion, proudly announcing the great working through, though nearly all these analysts adhere to a predominately Freudian model some one hundred years old. Even Freud could not work it through with his model; in 1938 he gave it up, writing that there will be a pill to solve it all, to work it through for all of us and all of mankind.

Freud’s prophecy has partially come true. Drug companies, oil companies, huge conglomerates are making a bundle, and nobody is working anything through. Drug manufacturers in particular are the dark ones, the shadow entities, making a bundle and helping the addicted to solve the problems of their lives by not remembering and not working it through. Companies in power, people in power, do not benefit by helping individuals to genuinely work things through; they prefer to dumb everything down, which coincidentally helps their own bottom line and helps keep those already in power, in power.

But we cannot simply blame those in power, because most of the world really does not want to remember, does not want to work it through. The truth that resides in the unconscious is simply too painful for us to bear, unless we are helped through by analysis.

To genuinely make a difference, one would have to enlist the unconscious, an entity of which few people know. Much of the analytic world has given up entering into the unconscious by the dream. Not many analysts pay attention to dreams.

The Big Bang

If we look at the world today, it is a reflection of the mass unconscious—beaten, flayed, raped, skewered, drawn and quartered. Man’s inhumanity to man begins with man’s unrecognized inhumanity to himself. The model is born of the fetus’s receipt of the mother’s unconscious projection of what is unwanted and unbearable within her. To a greater or lesser extent, all kinds of pathology follow this model. It is the beginning, the human’s big bang, and it is the model for pillage and plunder that we see all around us. There is really only one antidote, and that is love, combined with an awareness of what has happened to create this unsavory state of consciousness. The path to discovery is through the unconscious, accessed via dream analysis.

Unless one knows about this early state (about which I have written in The Mother’s Signature), anything supposedly worked out will not really work, and will not endure. Any attempt at understanding or healing a person that does not address this early state of mind is akin to mowing weeds. You can cut them down, but you can be sure they’ll grow right back if given the slightest opportunity.

It is as futile as trying to fathom the knowledge of the universe without having discovered the big bang and the consequent evolution of elements, stars, galaxies, planets, meteors and all the tiny elements which came along the journey in time, countless billions of years. What astronomers see in the sky today has been traced back to a time so ancient we cannot comprehend it, which is called the instant of the big bang.

Just so must we in psychoanalysis go back to the big bang of the human organism, make it as well known in the human consciousness as eBay, Yahoo!, Microsoft and all the rest. This excavation of the unconscious must be done with love, for it is love alone—and a lot of it—that will temper the chaos of the infantile unconscious, a chaos that manifests and spreads throughout the world in all the horrible crimes people commit against themselves and against their fellow beings. In analysis, I think of love as understanding the patient, as a mother would understand her baby.

An envelopment of love will ultimately make us all aware of the love of the divine for the universe and all that is in it. There can be no remembering or working through unless everyone understands that we must comprehend the instant of the human’s big bang before there can be peace in the mind and soul.

What is Freedom?

In the history of civilization, many have written works that have endured to the present, through thousands of years. Every culture has its writers, poets and artists, its great philosophers and spiritual leaders whose work has endured.

We in America have also had the good fortune to have gathered up in Philadelphia in the eighteenth century the finest minds ever bent on a novel conception, the rights of man, the right to be free to worship and free to live. These giants of thought were familiar with the works of others blessed with a similar vision, such as Voltaire and Rousseau. But in the end, if we look at the results today, nothing ever written has helped humankind achieve the freedom these great writers describe.

We have to ask why.

Since many leaders lie to the people and set forth a model for life, lying, surely an antithesis to freedom, is sanctioned. But lying makes one sick and makes the recipient of the lie sick. The sickness is unseen. It lies within the mind in the unconscious and does its dirty work. We know that smoking can kill, certainly can cause illness. Why then do people still smoke? Why this arrogance in the face of the truth of science? It is all of a piece. No society ever built with divine love as the centerpiece has ever swept a culture and benefited everyone, with the isolated exception of Buddhism. Why not? Certainly not for want of intelligence, philosophy, or science, for want of curiosity or religiosity. We are curious about the entire world, the sky, the stars, planets and galaxies, but there is one frontier that has been bypassed even by the curious: the unconscious mind, which stirs anxiety and avoidance.

The Unconscious as the Path to Freedom

My research reveals that the unconscious is much more complex, yet more meaningful, than anyone can have imagined, and that it contains the answers to all the questions people have. It gives back answers that are true, certainly as true as any answers discovered by the physicist, the astronomer, the biologist, the chemist, the geneticist, and others in the hard and soft sciences. And the unconscious can provide access to true freedom.

The unconscious has precision, and it provokes a sense of wonder, awe and beauty if one really gets into it and makes it a place where one knows the divine. As it is in the stars or in the genes, the divine is in everything large and small. Just as a pattern evolves in the natural sciences, there is a pattern that can be ascertained in research of the unconscious.

Great patriotic flashes do not make a difference, nor do great sentimentality and spectacles at movies or theaters, no matter how great the play, no matter how great the evocation. Great revulsion at the despicable in movies or plays also does not do it. Why has nothing made a lasting difference in the condition of humankind? For this we have to understand that the answer lies within the heart and mind of humankind. It lies in humanity’s journey from conception to gestation to birth. It lies in what the mother’s unconscious mind felt about the child both before and after he or she was conceived. It may be found in the human heart after the blinding jolt in which the child receives the painful feelings within the mother, unwanted by the mother, now the child’s to carry and to deny, thus changing the child’s life forever. This—the mother’s imprint—is the source, the impetus of the future man or woman. From this will depend the future nature of this being, how he or she will live unknowingly marked by this unconscious aspect of the mother, adapting, shape-shifting in life. The child is the unknowing recipient of unconscious messages the mother put into its mind before birth, some of which messages will surface years later.

This happens despite the mother’s genuine, conscious love for her child.
If one follows the course of such a person’s life, one would see the life unfolding as the mother unconsciously wished, and the death is the death the mother unknowingly envisioned.

It is this abyss, this unconscious, that we all must look into, and have it look back at us. All that without quailing, without fainting, without running away. For here in this abyss lie all the answers to the plight of humanity today.

The divine has nothing to do with our plight, though cunning people will try to implicate the divine in human affairs, and manipulate little-understood knowledge about the workings of the divine in order to gain money and power. All links claimed by such people between the divine and the sorry state of humanity have to be de-linked. It is linked only because it provides those who use the divine with a terrible power, and infantilizes those who believe these users. People are infantilized enough simply through the process of being born without adding to the burden through these lies.

Facing the Abyss

Pythagoras, that wondrous mathematician, said if he had a plank long enough and another block of wood to act as a fulcrum, he could move the earth. Obviously, he had a vision, but didn’t have the mathematics and physics to execute that vision.

From the aggressive event of imprinting—completely outside the mother’s awareness—which is felt as a life-threatening blow by the fetus, comes all the aggression we see today and read about in our history books. Civilization is a story about endless aggression, invasion, conquest, plunder, killing, and controlling or enslaving populations who have anything of value.

There is no surcease of aggression or oppressive regimes anywhere in the world. Heads of state do today what they have always done: inspect the military power of the host. Is it not ridiculous that this is still done today?

Who would say that we have advanced as a civilization? Movies and TV echo endless stories of guns, spies, killing and violence. These are our modern times.

And all of this is derived from an early assault which is never forgotten by the human personality and is endlessly passed between generations— from the unrecorded past to the present and into the foreseeable future—unless we as a world begin to see and understand it all.

Here is where the leaders in the psychoanalytic world can in fact make a difference. Analysts can make a difference in individuals’ self-understanding—ultimately their self-love—by using dream analysis to reveal the truth of people’s original trauma and all aftereffects of the inchoate experience. They must address the mother’s imprint: the trauma that is the template for all the traumas of humankind.

I like the idea of gaining perspective from some distance above the earth, looking at the great folly called mankind at this juncture in the evolutionary swing. We are like the lightening bug that has not yet lit up with the light of God—we are awaiting the abyss. We flicker with signs of development and then go dark. As far as the eye can see we are in the dark.

The principles of nature seem to be few but are multi-faceted in practice. It is always the function of scientists to concentrate findings into simple and elegant lines. The more simple and elegant, the more likely the discovery is to be right.

When I see humanity from out there beyond earth’s gravity, it seems people are divided into two large groups: one might be called the mother group, in which the power lies, and the other is the infant-traumatized group, dazed by the bang its mother unknowingly inflicted. Certainly this is the origin of sadism and masochism. Here also is the genesis of the haves and the have-nots.

It would seem all of us are following that fundamental arrangement. We do not seem to be capable of thinking ourselves out of this box, but I would say that is because no one has ever opened this box and thought about it in this particular way.

In the end, making a difference will come about when we as human beings all, together, can look into the abyss of the unconscious and stand firm, eyes wide open as the abyss looks back at us.

Yuan, H., Haig, D., & Karumanchi, S. (2005). Angiogenic factors in the pathogenesis of pre-eclampsia. Current Topics in Developmental Biology, Volume 71, Chapter 9, 297-311.

Zimmer, Carl (2006). Silent struggle: a new theory of pregnancy. New York Times, March 14, 2006, Science Section.