According to an article in the Huffington Post, a majority of Americans feel the country is on the wrong track. I think if the citizens of all the countries were polled, the answer would be the same.

I find it interesting that my attendance at the International Psychoanalytic Association Meeting in Mexico City brought me to the same conclusion about the trends of the discipline at this time. Of course I am not a majority but I do have an alternate route to travel, which may bias me somewhat.

From the various seminars I attended, my impression was that the members are either troubled or wearing a mantel of arrogance. Their speech says to everyone, “I know this stuff, I have it down cold,” (the Freudian paradigm). Never mind that the hundred some year model was found insufficient years ago. Recently at the American Psychoanalytic Association meeting San Francisco, in his plenary address, Dr. Morris Eagle said in diplomatic language that many analysts do not believe the tenents put down by Freud as realizable, such as self knowledge. The truth about oneself and/or the truth about the reality we live in. This comment elicitied no visible response in the large audience. I heard no one gainsaying it after the meeting when people are apt to gather in small groups and talk.

Perhaps this comment verifies the political scene in Washington and in the country; a politics that enables any politician to unabashedly lie about anything, to be hipocritical about anything, to be shameless about nothing.

To live in a world that cannot be sustained by truth and by the belief there is a truth to a life and to the reality to which we are born and live – is to live in a reality without meaning and without morality.

It is living again in the barbaric times of ancient civilizations where the only law was that of physical strength.

This abyss of ignorance and decency has not yet come to the analytic community but there is a quietness, I felt a greyness, I would say a depressiveness, that invaded this group of learned men and women.

In one session on the UNCONSCIOUS a middle aged analyst kept perseverating about Freud’s category of primary process and secondary process. It was difficult to know exactly what the stumbling block was for him for it would be impolite to ask a colleague of experience “what exactly troubles you about this category of primary process?” There was a discussion about Freud’s theory and, congruent to this discussion, someone threw out the question “how would it go if there were no theory?” Unthinkable! How would one venture forth to do their work? So back to Freud.

It was embarassing to me that one hundred years after Freud put forward his ideas there are really no ground breaking new ideas. At least none that I heard in this congress.

There were older colleageues that I saw and there were some of my patients there as well. I thought this would be interesting in the sense that I knew that my patients as well as I would dream about this experience. I, therefore, wish to present the impression of a patient of mine by presenting her dreams. For me this unconscious revelation tells the whole story. The dream has no reason to lie or rationalize. The unconscious, being a part of Divine Mind, can only tell the truth.

FIRST SESSION

Patient: I had a lot of dreams. It was also a bit of a tough weekend. I feel like the conference was just not that exciting. There were very smart people and they said a lot of very smart things, but overall it just seemed like there was no real soul to it, no real sense that, at the heart of it all, there are patients that need a treatment. Some of the different discussion groups were interesting, but overall I wasn’t even that excited by the topics. Usually the titles at least interest me. This time, I wasn’t even that intrigued by the offerings.

Dr. Bail: You mean it was slim pickings?

Patient: Yes, very. I was dreaming quite a lot too. Last night I had a dream.

DREAM

I am in a room and there is a birthday party and my friend Agatha is there. I am sitting at a table next to a Mexican boy who is around 12 years old and he is big for his age. He is sort of tall and has a large build. Then someone gives him a box and he opens it. Inside are clothes for a Snoopy doll and I say to myself, “God damn it, no one will give up the baby clothes.”

ASSOCIATIONS

Patient: Agatha is the one whose father has been sick in the hospital. He has been unconscious and it was very uncertain whether he would make it or not. He is starting to do a little better now, but is very weak. Her father isn’t really in the dream, but I am aware that he has been ill and she has been at the hospital with him. It was also her birthday a few days ago. It isn’t her birthday in the dream, but it is someone’s birthday. It feels like it is a little kid’s birthday. There might be signs hanging up. It is like an apartment, but I am not sure who lives there. I am sitting at this little table. It sits between the kitchen and the living room. There might be a cake sitting on the table as well. I don’t know the boy sitting next to me and it isn’t his birthday. I don’t even know who hands him the box. The clothes are inside the box.

I used to have a Snoopy doll. It was a little stuffed dog and there were clothes for it so you could dress him up in a tuxedo or as a cowboy. I don’t even remember what outfits I had for him. I think I liked to dress him up, but I was never one of those kids that played make believe games. My sister and I were talking about that the other day. She was talking about how when we were little, I would set up these elaborate houses for our dolls, but I never liked to actually play with them. I just wasn’t that kind of person. I wish I could have been. I always wanted to believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, but I never could. I was like a little adult.

So these clothes were small. They were little doll clothes and I just thought that no one wants to give up his or her baby self. I was frustrated.

INTERPRETATION

Dr. Bail: Psychoanalysis is sick as shown by Agatha’s father. All the analysts would have to let go of their baby clothes. Really, all people have to give up their “baby parts,” or baby clothes, and psychoanalysis has to turn to a theory that focuses on that. They have to get to the infantile roots or it will not work.

SESSION. THE FOLLOWING DAY

I was thinking about yesterday’s session and the conference and I had two dreams.

DREAMS

In the first part, I am at a restaurant and I see my friend Tamera. She is wearing a very short gray mini dress and I go up to her and I see that her buttocks is hanging out. I pull down the dress a little and then I notice that she is very thin and her pelvic bones are visible and her legs have a very wide space between them. The dress is nice, but she is so very thin. I also see that she has a scarf tied around her head, but I can’t tell at first whether it is a bandage or not because it is beige and pretty large.

In the second part of the dream, I am in a little house, like a cottage. There are guests coming over and I am showing them the house. It is small in the front where you enter. It has a little garden and picket fence. It is very charming. When we go inside and head further into the interior of the house, it is very clear that there is a recent, modern addition. There is a great room, a dining room and doors that open onto a patio. It is really nice and it keeps the architectural style of the old house, the same type of roofline, but it is clearly contemporary and very lovely. It is nicely decorated and I am amazed at the amount of space it has. I leave the guests and go upstairs to a bedroom and I seem to have a lot of my things there. Maybe it is a vacation home, but it seems that I live there some of the time. I am not completely sure, but I have many things in the bedroom. I look in a small box, a jewelry box on a desk. I realize that I have a lot of very beautiful gold jewelry. Some of it has stones and metal work. The jewelry is really nice and I put on a ring and then I try on another. I am sort of shocked that there is so much abundance. I had forgotten that I had so much and I am surprised and pleased to see so many choices. I think I am looking for a tray to put some perfume on, to protect the desk just in case the bottles leak, and I find it.

ASSOCIATIONS

Patient: I think I was still figuring out the conference and what we were talking about yesterday. I think I also wanted to feel like even though I don’t really use the same theories or ways of describing things, that I still understand people. They are really smart and there is no denying that, but at some point there is a lot of talking about things that are either very old or seem like minute details that don’t matter very much if your whole understanding of the person is off. If you can understand the main idea, then it is fine to argue about what the exact mental process is. If you miss your patients, then it really doesn’t matter what the exact mechanism is that lead to a thought. I don’t want to take anything away form them. They are all very smart. I just felt like it doesn’t really get to the main issue of the patients.

The dress that Tamera was wearing was very nice. It was like a gray mesh and when you layer it, it becomes opaque. It was just very short. So when I walk over to her, I see I need to pull it down for her. She is exposing herself. She doesn’t seem to notice at all. She doesn’t say anything about my pulling her dress down and she shows no embarrassment. Then I notice how thin her legs are. It is like I can see through the lower part of the dress and actually see that her legs are very far apart and I think I can see her bones. I saw this woman in one of the discussion groups that I thought was either anorectic or ill. She was sitting in the front of the room and had on a very skimpy summer dress. I could see her spine and her shoulder bones jutting out from under the skin. I was sort of distracted by it and I wondered whether it was an analyst or a patient. There were a lot of female analysts there who were very nicely dressed, very chic also. The dress in the dream is very nice. It is just very short.

In the second part, I think it is like a vacation cottage, but there has clearly been a big addition to it. It is very charming and pretty and there is a garden in the front and lots of greenery. I am not sure whom I am showing around the property, but it might be friends. My family is there I think, but I don’t see them. I seem to have a lot of my things there, but I can’t quite remember putting them there. There is a lot of stuff there though. There is all the jewelry and other items as well. I am happy to see it all and can’t quite believe I have it all. It is quite a difference between the skinny legs of my friend and this beautiful house and all the jewelry. I have thought a lot about what I heard at the meetings and I have to wonder where I would be if I had that type of analysis instead of yours. I think I would not have gone into this field. I think I would be in very bad shape. I have been feeling very grateful that I had this type of treatment.

INTERPRETATION

Dr. Bail: I think you are saying that the unconscious talked about at the meetings is very thin. That is also why the scarf looks like a bandage. The old theories do not offer very much for the unconscious. The house, in contrast, is a very large and abundant place. It is a representation of my new theory. It is built on traditional psychoanalysis, the small house, but it expands it a great deal. The conference showed people who are at the height of psychoanalytic thinking internationally, but your dream says that it is very thin. It doesn’t offer the patients enough. The abundance of the second dream shows what is possible.

COMMENTARY

These are simple, complying dreams that put the pointer precisely on the problem. It is however not only a problem for psychoanalysis. In a way the revelation in the dream is so clear that it has a painfulness to it when one lets the emotional waves come in. It means that not only are analysts suffering and do not consciously know it but their patients are suffering as well.

It is axiomatic that patients can only acquire self knowledge to the extent that the analyst has explored the limits of his own. I can verify this psychological fact with several examples but I will only say that in one seminar a patient dreamed that she wished her analyst would stop “feeding her from a book.” A tragic dream to her for there is nothing anyone can do for that patient or for that analyst especially when one is a guest. To bring this problem into the country and the world at large we can see the parallels. It is striking how a damaged person can reflect the damage and its impact on that particular life.

Accordingly it is possible to go to this country, which is so swamped by conflict, in so many lies given credence by shameless politicians. Obviously there have been elected to public office an incredible number of damaged (psychologically) people. It follows that damaged people can only produce damaged solutions. There is no balance to a distraught mind and heart. We must remember that the universe is run by laws that require balance. This is true in science, equally true of the world of human beings who might be looked at as trillions of electro-magnetic bits of energy pulsating away. Universal intent is to balance the universe. There would be pulsations of great discord indicating great discord in matter, of which we certainly are an example.

Today we can look at this discord registered in America and across the sea to a bombing in Norway, riots in London, civil wars in the Middle East, wars in Africa and militaristic camps in North Korea and Burma; disquiet around the globe.

A train running on the wrong track will have to get on the right track. This common sense fact leads to the question “how?” The answer is to change the paradigm by which one is living. Not easily done!

Any analyst knows that patients may come quickly to have their pain removed. Medication might be able to do that. Those more serious people may want more than medication. If so – to the surprise of the patient - there are powerful forces within them that absolutely refuse to let that happen, even if it is of benefit to them. Here the knowledge and skill of the analyst are of paramount importance in “dueling” with this “conservative force”. I say conservative because it wants no change, whatever the consequence to the personality.

Now multiply that by millions in this country, and some six billion in the world. Unknown to themselves they are prisoners of an unconscious imprint given to them unknowingly, unwittingly, unconsciously by their mother. I have written about this extensively in other essays. It is the saga of the Internal Saboteur.

Therefore, when we come to the train metaphor, there can be no getting on the right track unless the train on the wrong track crashes. Metaphorically translated to the personality, it is usually at this point that patients come for help. At this point one can build the correct track and a correct train to run on that track. Even here the choice is the patient’s.

This is what must be done in society at large, in all societies. The discontent in the world is the result of a paradigm that the world, each country, each culture has been running on uneasily and not to well for far too long.

To those that can envisage the long march of humanity, its ups and downs, to those that are open to new ideas, I say the new paradigm has to acknowledge the existence of the unconscious, has to listen to its cornucopia of knowledge which enables me to remind the reader – consider how thin is the unconscious in the patient’s dream. Psychoanalysis, like the world, has reached a dead end. All it can do is put bandaids on a threadbare garment, a garment that does not exist anymore, only shreds of numerous bandaids.

Since this rave has begun imbalance has become more marked and I think certain groups have hunkered down, like the Tea Party, the Republican Party or the Evangelicals. Again I think it will not matter anymore whether one hunkers down on the shore when a tsunami is on the way.

I can say this because history shows elevated civilizations have been leveled to rubble, civilizations with intelligent men such as every country has today. Intelligence will not matter. As the unconscious is portrayed in the patient’s dream, it is even thinner in the halls of power in every capital of the world. In fact the concept of an unconscious does not exist in those worlds.

A universal law is now in effect and no one can stop it. We cannot aim a nuclear bomb at it. One cannot fight this force because it of Divine origin, by which I mean scientific. It is Divine Mind that rules everything in the universe of which we are a miniscule, though important part.

******************

In this context I would like to bring in a dream of the old man from “Venice Beach”, a patient I have written about throughout his course of treatment with me.

He begins the session with an expression of his disgust (not alone) with the interagency of the Tea Party members of Congress, of the placation the Republicans have shown them. Most have gone to the administration, to Obama, for his willingness to give away the store. The old man remembers that Wall Street money backed Obama’s election and he guesses Obama is helpless to do anything except listen to his backers and slowly dissolve the social gains made from post World War II under the leadership of FDR.

He has not become depressed. He is aware that there seems to be a greater event happening unknown consciously to us. But he says he has a presentament. “My dream is that there is a war between Israel and Egypt and somehow the balance is tipped to Israel. “ After a silence he said, “I don’t know why I think of Israel really, the people who fled Egypt, the whole Moses thing. I am wondering how did this guy get to do what we are told by the Biblical story? Why did people follow him and how did he know to walk up Mt. Nebo to get the laws? Really, to conclude there is only one God?”

Patient: You know, Dr. Bail, I realize I was thinking about this while sitting looking at the ocean the other day. I spend many hours looking at the ocean. Sometimes I fall into a reverie, sometimes I fall asleep, sometimes an idea comes from who knows where. There is something leveling if one looks at the ocean all the time. People seem to recede in the background. The important people, about whom the media talk, are not important. It seems as if very little is important. The ocean is important and the clouds and the sky. You know, and I know you know, the Jews were slaves and he freed them. Maybe it’s true and there is a metaphor here that Moses represents the essence of change of consciousness. He made the world he lived in believe there was only one God. As you would say, this is an evolution of human spirituality and a big one.

Dr. B: I agree with the metaphor. I think you are seeing this upheaval in the United States and in the world as not simply ugly times.

Patient: I recalled the end of the dream, which was that action is taken so that in time the leader must act responsibly, and I think he does.

Dr. B: That’s a good end. To continue, I think I see you this massive change of consciousness in the world. It is called the “new world”. The dream is saying that humanity will again “cross the Red Sea” or move beyond a certain level of their flow of consciousness and enter into a new collective domain of awareness. I think you are flowing again in the universe in your dream time.

Patient: I feel old, weathered, as I watch the ocean. All as if I were a star in the heavens seeing it all unfold amidst all the folly of people. Once I was pretty foolish myself.

CONCLUSION

It seems to me a predominant task currently on earth is to discover what our goal is and ask the much asked question “why are we here”. Our goal must be with a greater design of the universe while living our lives on the earth plain.

I think it does not have to be so hard here, so full of anxiety and terror, so unbalanced, so loveless. There are troubled peoples feelings and designs veering off into awkward direction with insufficient and/or false knowledge. We must look to our most precious asset, The Feminine Unconscious.

August 2011