I have not talked about the old man of “Venice Beach” for a while. He has been working steadily at analysis, driven now by his curiosity and his wish to reach a state of peace with his early life in New York. It was a time in which the country was just beginning to emerge from a profound economic disaster. “Strange,” he says, “the country seems to be going into that same economic disaster at the end of my life.” However, he does not find it strange that people do not learn from experience. He scoffs at the “college boys” running the show. The Vietnam War with its McNamara was an intellectual disaster. The current wars make him deeply disappointed in everyone in Washington. “They are still frat boys at heart.” But then he says, “I have not learned from experience either,” and adds, “until I came here and learned why.” He recognizes how misleading our aphorisms are—“You learn from experience,” “Things will get better,” “Put your shoulder to the wheel.” “Hell,” he says, “better get your ass to an analyst.”

He remembers the beginnings of his early success. I paraphrase: poor family, no one to help him, only his talent that he was just beginning to see, no way then to know how it would unfold or how it would grow to a great success. He recalls his tremors, his doubts, his bursts of arrogance and, little by little, his success.

Looking back he says, “Somehow I still think and feel it is not real. I feel I am fooling everyone and wonder when I will be discovered.” When he is in the grip of that feeling, looking at his success does not mollify him. Obviously there is a rift in his integration.

Dream One

I am in a clothing shop. I see a wine-colored sport shirt. I look at the collar size. It says 17-1/2. I think that is just too big and I put the shirt down.

Associations

Patient: When I think of the color, of course, I think of my wine collection, which I prize very much. I like my wine. I don’t drink too much of it these days. I am preoccupied with this or that. I am old and afraid and I think I am dying.

Dr. Bail: I don’t think so for I know you have had up-to-date medical examinations which reveal no serious pathology, though I do not doubt your malaise. What about the size, 17-1/2?

Patient: 17-1/2 is too large. I know you like to talk about numbers and I am sure you will say something about them, so back to you.

Dr. Bail: You already know my predilection for the Tarot cards which can be so accurate in their reading. So I will say the number is correct and it is right in the area of what you are struggling with now. You see, 17 is the star card and in truth you have been a star even if in reality you had not achieved the success that you have. Even if you had been an ordinary person living an ordinary life, you would still be the star of that life. The 1/2 is important because it says you are halfway to the moon (card 18). You are saying it is too big for you. Is it too big to make the connection with the Divine? The star quality is you. Is it too big for you to walk past your fears and into the sacred? It is not. Some part of your unconscious says that it is. That part is your feeling that you are a fraud. I would say the same to any person that has worked through as much as you have.

The patient went on with another dream.

Dream Two

We had a nice house and family. My wife was setting the table for dinner. There were four of us and two guests. There was a fear in me of there being someone out to kill me. It dominated me. I thought they wanted to kill my family as well. I went to the bathroom and defecated. A knock on the door announced the two guests. One sat at one end of the table and the other sat on the side beside me. My wife was on the other end. I really only saw the two guests. I moved my chair closer to this second guest who came wearing a Burberry raincoat. You know the fashionable kind of the 40’s, the kind that the movie detectives wear like Humphrey Bogart who played Sam Spade. This man, on sitting down, said, “I am not going to kill anyone.” When he said that, I knew he was the killer. As a precaution, I had put aside a bat with which to protect myself and when he was not looking I hit him unconscious. I told the other man, now that I was standing, to keep his hands on the table where I could see them.

Associations

Patient: Of course these days you can’t really say who the good guys are. Once you could. In the movies you could. The good guys wore white hats and rode white horses. Today everything is deception. Look at Madoff, look to the governors, look to the Congress. Who can you really trust?

Dr. Bail: I think your inner consciousness is taking care of the aspects of yourself that are struggling to keep you from your higher self, and you are recognizing that and feeling that even though you are about to be killed, it is not so. You take charge. You prepare and you do something. You knock the internal saboteur unconscious. That is you saying, “I am taking charge of the unconscious level of myself against the internal saboteur essences. I am clearing them from me.”

The patient listened quietly and intensely to what I said. “Let me think about that,” he said. Later he said, “Though I felt what you said more than I intellectually understood it, I have still another dream. I am sorry I am working you so hard.”

Dr. Bail: I certainly do want you to think about what I said. I know that when I give interpretations it is sometimes difficult to integrate the feeling that sweeps through you and the words that I am speaking.

Now let’s hear your next dream.

Dream Three

I was at a clothing shop. In this shop you buy a jacket and wear it and after a while you bring it back and they adjust it to you after you have worn it. As you know this is not how it is done. It was a jacket that I wear a lot. It is Beige cashmere, simple. It is old but still elegant.

Associations

Patient: I saw a documentary on “Ghosts”. The man said more and more people believe that there is more after we die. People don’t die and that’s it. He went on then to say a lot of people feel we become ghosts, good and bad. I am not sure of that. I think we are recycled into the angels we were.

You know I think I have come around to your point of view. There may be a lot to reincarnation. I think that the jacket is what we come into this world to do. It takes a time, maybe a long time to find out exactly what it is. Then the jacket is more fitted to us. That’s a very long association.

Dr. Bail: I think you are saying this is the inner you. This jacket will be adjusted to be the outer you. The jacket being adjusted would be the inner you preparing to be the outer you. As you have described this jacket, it is one of simplicity and it is elegant as well. I think that what is elegant is the humility of yourself. It is said in the dream “we can make it.” The tailor says, “We can adjust it.” So your inner consciousness shows you the beauty, the humility and the vibrancy of who you are.

Patient: Well, that’s good news. Am I coming out of retirement?

Dr. Bail: I think you have never been in retirement.

I want to remind the reader here that the next dream is from another day.

Dream Four

I recall a naked, flabby-waisted woman sitting on top of me. I was to bring myself up holding onto her waist or buttocks. It was hard to do. My abdominals were not very strong.

I was living with a foreign woman. She was not friendly.

Associations

Dr. Bail: I can make an interpretation for you because we have gone through so much and you understand a great deal and, in a way, this dream is in the ballpark of what you have been dealing with. This is an indicator of your changing. I gather the flabby-waisted woman is an older woman. Is that right?

Patient: You are right.

Dr. Bail: So this is an expression of the old paradigm, the old imprint that was hard to get off, that old mother energy which you have had to deal with so much here. Not only for you but for everyone. You say there is another woman, not friendly, so there is another aspect of your unconscious that has not befriended you yet.

Patient: Isn’t that the truth. So when?

Dr. Bail: (Dr. Bail shrugged.) I don’t know when. I am not a psychic.

I am continuing the essay as if it were one continuous session. As in life, we have discontinuities but really it is all one life.

Dream Five

I was with a friend who had a box full of scorpions. He had a pair of tweezers and was removing them one by one very carefully. He put them into another container. I sat beside him watching quietly and intently.

Associations

Patient: Of course you know I am a Scorpio and we get a good and bad rap as a group. Here is my friend in the dream. I don’t know who he is and, since I don’t, I assume he is a part of myself and that part is dealing with the scorpions very carefully. Obviously, they can poison you.

Dr. Bail: I go to your good and bad guys idea. So here you have two realities—scorpions are poisonous. They can poison you to death, to transition or to transformation. You do note it is your sign. It is a sign of yourself, your Scorpio self. The dream indicates you are willing to help yourself, and me, make that inner change.

Patient: I can see that, so I don’t have any questions about it.

But to continue...

Dream Six

There was a third man in the room looking over the mail. He noted the color of the 8” x 10” envelope was very yellow. Apparently a new executive in the postal system had come to revamp the mail system; therefore, the color of the envelope.

Dr. Bail: So?

Patient: The mail is how we communicate, at least we used to, in the United States and in the world.

Dr. Bail: The mail is our message system. Are you not saying my inner messaging is changing? In this large yellow envelope, the higher consciousness of the Divine is revealed.

Patient: Are you saying I am revamping my inner messenger, my inner consciousness?

Dr. Bail: I am. If you think back to your dreams of yesterday, there is a close connection that runs throughout. There has been a recapitulation and a further clearing, a further transformation, a change inwardly.

COMMENTARY

Theories are formulated by the observation of the facts. Our facts are the dreams our patients bring to us. To my mind there is no doubt as to the existence of a quality called “the internal saboteur” because in real life, where there is no analysis going on, human beings are constantly doing themselves in, unaware that there is a reason for this unfortunate circumstance. It is usually ascribed to bad luck. There is a lot of bad luck in the population of the world since so many suffer.

I have tried to show the evidence that impels me to say that at the very heart of our lives, and consequently in the collective unconscious, such an entity exists to keep us down, to keep us ignorant, to keep us feeling undeserving, poor, fearful, and guilty.

Have all of us not felt at some time we were being watched or someone was out to get us? A mysterious eerie feeling that makes us jumpy if not paranoid at times? I am sure this wisp of a feeling is what lies at the heart of so many mystery and horror books and films, where a gifted writer or filmmaker can project this terribly uncomfortable feeling in a story or a film. These stories and films give us goose bumps as evidence piles up and fear of an almost unbearable kind leads to screaming, especially in the movies.

In real life, charismatic leaders can and do take advantage of these inner unnamable anxieties and project them onto an imagined enemy. This concretization brings relief not only to soldiers in combat but to populations who can then point to an enemy. In the unconscious the political leaders stir the source of the mass unconscious fear.

In these last two essays I have given examples of what the internal saboteur looks like and it is important to know that its faces are limitless. The long-ago movie star Lon Chaney was called the man of a thousand faces. The internal saboteur has a million.

It is further interesting that the patient’s dream of the flabby-waisted woman on top of him is similar to an ancient notion of a succubus, a female demon that is having sex with a sleeping man and controlling him. This was a step away from witchcraft and all the suffering that witchcraft and witch hunts spread throughout the centuries. A variety of old texts and story books can project on one’s unconscious an artist’s portrayal of a witch-like woman on top of a man. The probability is that this is a reminiscence of the person’s big bang, which happened to him as a fetus a considerable number of years ago. It can be said unequivocally that these “essences” have held mankind enslaved to its lowest common denominator.

If, however, as I believe, individuals dreaming of a change in their cellular structures is an early harbinger of a sea change, then the news is entirely good. It portends there is a beginning. Psychoanalysis is a discipline that aids in cleansing the system so that it can take in new knowledge without distorting it, new knowledge that is helpful.

We note a very important fact, which is that before the internal saboteur can be rendered helpless, there must be a cleansing. The patient’s dreams revealed this direction. Remember that in the patient’s dream concerning being murdered, he has to defecate—that is to eliminate and cleanse himself. That is the simple truth. The more complex truth is that an analysis must cleanse all the parts of the psyche, for it harbors the original trauma and every conceivable trauma of living a life. All a helpless person’s assaults upon the personality, intended or not, are in a psyche’s wounds; old bitter words, bitter feelings, aggressive acts, old fears, old guilt—all are registered therein—unbeknownst to and toxic to the person.

The cellular structure of this detritus must be cleared away. This is essentially what analysis has to do. It is the reason why I have shown the analyst to be primarily a toilet, a urinal, that daily has to detoxify what has been toxic to the patient. He must detoxify and restore in clean condition the trash he has been given. His other job is to little by little disarm and render helpless the ubiquitous and perfidious internal saboteur, thus allowing there to be a transition, a transformation, of the old self. For example, the scene of the flabby-waisted old woman and the patient points toward an old paradigm and to a new beginning, which was contained in this patient’s latter dreams. When these actions are performed, the patient will naturally come into a higher state of inner functioning. The patient’s inner structures will have changed, as I tried to show above.

The patient comes to the truth of himself.

In my opinion these are the goals that ought to be the signposts of where an analysis is going and the dream is always the sign that tells us the place where we are.

July 2011