There is probably no human problem that cannot be helped or cured if a person will give himself up thoroughly to the analytic cure. It is part of the flaw within human nature that human beings cannot do so.

The human intellect has been so fruitful for the progression of man in all of his technical advances and has made sorties into philosophy - certainly a human concern - over these many thousand years. There is virtually no activity on earth that has not been invented and/or perverted by the intellect.

These ruinations have given us illustrious names attached to strikingly innovative theories from the earliest times to the current ones. I read an opinion in the New York Times that stated all philosophies are of no value at this current time of financial, social, political and philosophic crises. All bets are off. Since philosophy has essentially to do with epochs, I leave you to ponder the meaning. To me it means that our civilization is disintegrating since the core of every civilization is its morality.

The past gives us no clue about how to deal with the present or the future. Certainly our awesome poet, Yeats, can be quoted as being a prophet with his poetic line, "The beast slouching to Bethlehem". It would seem as if the beast is already within. It is clear to a few enlightened thinkers, and I mention Paul Krugman as a person who feels we are financially going in the wrong direction. Note he is the most recent Nobel Prize winner for economics. Morally he feels we should investigate the lapses committed by our government - not that moral lapses have not been committed elsewhere in the world - but primarily in glaring view of the world by this country, by certain legal authorities, and others who, for whatever reason, did not have the moral integrity to resolutely state what was right. They transgressed that moral law within every human being.

It is a sign of the degradation of our society, probably all existing societies, that they have to debate the issue of what is torture and what is not. Let he who has a question submit to the test else he speaks from ill-conceived psychopathology and from theory. There is no more seductive pied piper than an intellect gone astray.

There are certain issues beyond theory: raping, torturing, killing as invaders of every civilization in memory of man have done to build kingdoms and to maintain dominion over people. Invasion of another's land is a moral crime tantamount to invading one's house.

In short, whatever hurts another and causes pain to another is a moral transgression. The human race has not learned that the complicated knots that plague all societies come originally from such moral transgressions.

To bring this discussion to the province of the analyst, people come to this specialist for problems of marriage (relationships), problems with children (relationships), problems in work (relationships), problems with peers (relationships). I could go on from page to page of the psychiatric handbook of symptomatology called diagnoses and all have to do with relationships. Psychoanalysis does not see eye to eye with the handbook in psychiatry; for example DSM 4 and later will be DSM 5 and perhaps more.

Psychoanalysis has its own categories that may in the future also be laid aside by further insights into the conditions mentioned there. Let us recall that psychiatry handles these issues with drugs; psychoanalysis handles these issues by talking, with the understood premise that symptoms or complaints presented by the patient have an origin that the patient may or may not know. It is difficult, caught up in the storm of one's emotions, to exactly say when this or that began. And finally, in psychoanalysis we believe that the conscious antecedents have an unconscious nidus, which is entirely unknown to the patient. It is that nidus that has to be cracked and can only be cracked through the interpretation of his/her dreams.

Strangely enough, though we do not overtly think this way, all psychiatric and psychoanalytic conditions are the result of breaking the laws of the universe, especially the law of cause and effect. There seems to be little comprehension that action A will cause consequence B. It must be said that our people in Congress, the leaders of the country, contribute a lot to this entirely mistaken philosophy. They proclaim that no matter what wrongdoing is perpetrated by them, one can do away with the consequences by saying, "Let us not get entangled with the past, let us get on with the future."

Needless to say, or perhaps it is important to say and stress, that is a philosophy of folly because it does not work for anyone in the real world and it does not work for any government in real life. To follow that aberration of thinking is to stir up trouble for all the people sometime in the future when that illusion will collapse; for example right now in the United States and in the world.

The universal piper is going to have his day.

No matter whom the leader or leaders of the world are to think otherwise is to further lead the people like lemmings to the precipice. At some point the lemmings will stop throwing themselves over the cliff and demand an accounting.

The people will have to wake up and the people and the leaders will have to take their medicine - it will be obvious that snake oil is no longer working. So as it is in the greater scale of life, so it is in the smaller scale for us ordinary human beings.

If one has the courage to engage in an analysis that penetrates his/her unconscious, there will emerge, not without fear, consternation and anxiety, the truth of that person's life. That truth will most certainly not only entertain the noble things he/she has done but it will piteously expose the tawdry, the shameful, the petty, the hateful things one has done to others and to oneself. It will eventually expose everything about that person's childhood and his/her relationship with his/her mother from the earliest time forward. It will reveal how that person's character formed and it will eventually depict how we mistake the "other" in our lives for the earliest imagoes of our mothers, fathers and other family members.

This kind of analysis, carried out with sympathy but also with rigor by the analyst, will yield great relief and it will by and large answer or fulfill Freud's dictum that an analysis is done when the patient can work and love. Today this particular phrase is old-fashioned.

I do not wish to mislead anyone because when one is dealing with deep seated pathological states, like obsessive compulsive conditions, border-line states, or states in which people upon deeper examination do not have a center, a core self, the job is not easy. But there is no question that improvement and an easier life is possible and will ensue.

However, when one gets to understand that pathology does not begin at age two or three with the Oedipal or even infantile Oedipal state (Klein), when one sees that pathology begins in the fetal state of life and has everything to do with the mother's emotional life from before and during pregnancy, (see "Mother's Signature) when one realizes that the fetus experiences the greatest pain one can possibly imagine in the fetal state of life and it experiences a fear to wit has no meaning and no explanation, that fear and its attendant distresses will eventually determine the fetus's life in the environment of people. It adds a dimension to the process of living that has hitherto not been known and yet provides the greatest impetus for whom a person really is and what a person will really do in his/her life and his/her relationships with people.

This early disaster, which happens to all of us, causes a splitting of the mind, a splitting of the personality. Later the two want nothing to do with each other as the one without the pain wants to forget the other ever existed. Unfortunately the part of the mind with the deep pain, deep in the psyche, contains the feelings of the person and is ever longing to reunite with the other, which will turn out to be the intellect. It is understandable that the "other" wants nothing to do with a split off self because it does not want to experience that incomprehensible, unbearable pain again.

As an aside to the "civilized world", rape, torture, transgressions of the human spirit and even lesser crime against the Divine human spirit now incarnate, is the realization of this earliest of experiences. It is so terrible that many would rather kill themselves than experience it. And those that are unfortunate to be grown up and experience it again, like people who are victims of genocide, people who are kept in prisons for no reason, people who are "rendered" for no reason, and tortured for no reason, will tell any lie and do whatever they can to avoid future pain.

Therefore, I say again, to those theorists in their bespoke suits, shirts, ties and shaven faces who wish to theorize, that you should have these trials done to yourselves. Then you are entitled to have a discussion.

To return to the matter at hand, we see that true analysis has for its end the unity of the two lovers into one unity. This is the most difficult task that the analyst faces and I must say it is my opinion that the analyst cannot reunite that which has been sundered years ago - inadvertently, unwittingly, unconsciously - by the mother who is either dead or not a player in the real life of the patient who presents.

The dreams presented below begin to portray the struggles for unity and peace and tell us why it is so difficult.

We must have sympathy for these pioneers, these patients, who have to face unbearable pain again but, once faced with much more capability than there was as a fetus, will find the reward of inestimable value. And for those who read this essay we have to keep in mind that the fetus we call upon still feels it is the fetus writhing in pain. No easy task to talk to an entity beyond listening.

CASE ONE: PATIENT HISTORY

The patient is the woman described in various papers on my website: And Now Love, Applesauce and The Untold Want. The last six months have been hard for this patient but she has learned to restrain impulses she knows are harmful to her if she acted upon them. The struggle with these old and immature forces was not easy to master. It would appear, though tempted, she made a choice not to go in that direction.

It is difficult to relay to anyone how much this effort of control, of self denial which is in one's best interest, and how painful and slow these moments of time seem to pass.

She feels, as she states, it has been worth it. "I feel myself to be a different person." And she could say that spontaneously and with some surprise during the session. "I feel happy. I really do"

Here is her dream.

Patient: This is a short dream.

DREAM

A man and a woman are going to Hawaii to a conference. The conference is over and they are returning home. There is a phone message for one of them but I am not clear for which of them and I don’t know how the message will be delivered. Am I one of the people, that is, the man or the woman, or am I the bringer of the message? How do I even know about the message and is this my business anyhow?

Dr. B: What was the message you had to give them?

Patient: I don’t know but I think it has to do with keeping in touch with myself. These last few days have been hectic and I find myself working for hours at a time like four or five in which I am thinking of my work. I am afraid I will lose touch when I work this way. I do not think of the unconscious. I concentrate on my work and then maybe I take a nap. Later in the kitchen I think, “What a good life I have.” That’s now. It just came out.

Dr. B: Apropos of your good life and the good feelings you have, this is quite a difference from four or five years ago. You were so demoralized you couldn’t even think of work. Then it was all about keeping yourself together.

Patient: I know. I thought about that and the first steps I took to plunge in. Now I feel totally different. I really do. Something has come together. I don’t think about boyfriends or dates and it doesn’t bother me. Now it is all about keeping in touch. Tell me, how do you do it? Oh, I know you’ll say it’s not important how you do it. It’s what I have to do.

I think the man and the woman are myself, my masculine and feminine parts. They have gone to Hawaii. I bring them a message. I think they are also the Divine parents.

Dr. B: I have just come back from Hawaii, as you know.

Patient: Oh, my God. I completely forgot that. I love Hawaii. After all I think God lives in Hawaii. I just relax there. I have done so in the past. I guess unconsciously I must have been with you in Hawaii, completely unbeknownst to myself. I never thought about it.

Dr. B: Yes, it is interesting that you completely obliterated my being away for just about a week. Waiting for the analyst to come back is very difficult and perhaps one way in which one does away with a feeling is to obliterate the entire thing or better still is to identify with the analyst unconscious and be there all the time so you never miss him. But I know that when we talk about waiting you are also talking about your heart’s desire and that, too, is something very hard to wait for.

Patient: I know you’ll say I have to wait. Isn’t it all about that? If you really feel you will get your heart’s desire, and I do believe I will, you have to wait and it will come in its own time.

Dr. B: In a way all human beings wait to get back to where they came from for everyone deep inside has that wish to go back from where they came, whether they know it or not. So tell me more about the man and the woman in Hawaii.

Patient: Maybe that’s where they were together as they should be. To me Hawaii seems to be a feminine place, a place for women but I think I feel more together than I have ever felt in my life. Hawaii is heaven.

Dr. B: I think that to be true that long ago it was a very spiritual place where people did not consider their everyday reality as real but considered their other reality, their dream reality, their unconscious, as the one reality.

So in summary you are recognizing the union of man and woman in the sacred isles of Hawaii, the place in which are found the vortices(*) of Source. And you can come - by the dream - to Source's message. There is a process that questions, "Are you the one receiving the message? Am I the one who brings the message? Am I the bringer of the message about Source?" But Source is the ultimate bringer of all messages.

Am I here by recognizing myself as being Source? This is something to learn. You and I must listen carefully for we - and all of humanity - are the bringers of the message and each of us is bringing it by way of a unique messenger according to the personality itself.

It's a dream that describes a state that you reach in the dream and that you can feel in reality and, therefore, is possible for all men and women.

Note: (*) It is one of the places on earth where these vibrations are felt to be sacred and prized. The most well-known is, of course, Jerusalem. There are others, such as Sedona, and any one can look up other places that are so considered.

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CASE TWO: PATIENT HISTORY

This is the older patient I presented in the essay Venice Beach, the man who came because he feared death and thought this work might ease his way.

Patient: I had an unusual dream about which I don’t seem to have any associations. In fact I have no idea why I dreamed this dream. Before I tell you the dream, I want to say it brought my youth back to me when I had the passions I experienced and that I witnessed in the dream. I am beyond all that now so here is the dream and then I will say what I can about it. I am sure you will tell me some unusual things like you do and I will be astonished as I frequently am after we are through.

DREAM

There were two couples. The man of one was a famous artist. The wife of the other man was the lover of the artist for many years. This was their first meeting in years. It was electric. They became lovers again to the anguish of their mates. This goes on for many scenes; passion unleashed and satisfied. They seem unable to be parted whatever the consequences.

Now there is a baronial setting. The son of this same woman and her husband is in his bed. When the parents come in, the son leaves the bed. He is a teenager. The parents climb into the bed but there is no sex. Instead a rich, fat, ugly woman comes in, maybe the owner of this elegant house. She sits down at a makeup table next to the bed. She makes up using a wax as a foundation. The couple watch. In the hallway there is a noise. The artist has arrived and is looking for his beloved. There is a servant standing in the hallway who waves the artist on to another wing of the house, purposely misleading the artist. In the last scene the two couples are in a car, which the artist drives. They drive to a country club. The artist does not park in the space for cars. He parks on the lawn. He is going beyond the margin. Looking up at the hill above the club, there are suspicious looking men on the ridge of the hill. The artist, one feels, is in a bad mood and looking for trouble.

Patient: I suppose everyone has had these tempestuous affairs. I had my share, even with my wife, but then we settled down into the business of living, of discovering each other's personalities, our families, our selfishness. We made our adjustments but we never doubted that she was enough for me and I was sufficient for her. Throughout we were deeply in love so I understand the man in the dream,

Dr. Bail: But you were him.

Patient: I understand but I couldn't do as that fellow did. My wife would not tolerate any of those shenanigans nor would I tolerate it from her. Of course, there are great artists like Picasso who, though married, had affairs. His wives seemed to tolerate it, at least for a while. But this is on this plain of existence, this is in this world and I know the dream has a lot of symbolic meaning that I trust you will tell me.

Dr. Bail: Yes, all of that is correct so let me try to explain.

Patient: I don’t have very much to say about any part of this dream. Certainly there were times in my life when I felt that kind of passion with one or two women and I felt it with my wife. I suppose it is a feeling young people have. I don’t know that when one is young it’s a matter of love. For me when I met my wife it turned out to be sex, love, ecstasy, but real love. Where this dream comes from or why, I have no idea.

Dr. B: Well, we have been talking about the split between your conscious mind and your unconscious mind all along and I have made reference a number of times of the great importance of bringing the unconscious into the picture. It contains all of your important information. So I think if we look at it from that point of view, I can say that the two couples are two states of consciousness - a cognitive and an unconscious. These were once united but there was a separation of the first lovers. They moved away to find others yet they come together again as in your dream. It seems your dream is a recognition of how the inner mind and the outer mind perform throughout a lifetime separating from their truer selves but having to find the interconnection again. And yet when that unbearable pain comes, it is the giving away that is so difficult, the giving away of the old patterning, tears and false beliefs.

So, what about the woman going back to her husband and finding their son, who leaves when they come, and then they get into that bed but they do not have sex?

Patient: Well, according to what you say this couple isn’t obviously the blessed couple, the true conscious and unconscious in union.

Dr. B: What about the fat, ugly woman who comes in to make up with wax?

Patient: Well, I have been here talking to you long enough to get the idea that she must be the culture we live in which is heavily waxed. That is, we don’t get a true picture of how things really are.

(He laughed)

Dr. B: I do agree with you. And the son?

Patient: When you say the son it makes me think of Jesus Christ who’s is always called the Son. So I think it must be Christ but I think it must be the Son who, obviously at his age, wouldn’t stay in bed with his mother and father.

Dr. B: And so he shouldn’t. Who is the person who waves the artist on in the hallway of the big house?

Patient: (Shrugged his shoulders) I don’t know but whoever he was didn’t want the artist to meet with the woman with whom he was so greatly in love. The man didn’t want that ecstatic union to happen.

COMMENTARY

You realize you have in the inner mind part of that sub level dealing with all of the crises of life. It will separate from the cognitive state and will reunite with the cognitive state very often producing more pain. Yet when that sub level can reach into greater depth, into the greater union with the higher consciousness, the information that can pass through and flow to the cognitive state can be very healing. This comes about when one is passing through an awareness of what we call in Fairbairn's term "the saboteur" (Fairbairn, 1952) of the unconscious based on fear.

When the higher self has worked with a cognitive mind and the unconscious mind to create a healing, then the cognitive aspect can reach in and reach to the higher self and therefore bring forth a healing.

In the dream the partners are the cognitive self and that sub level self of the inner consciousness, which is holding the fears. In contrast the lovers, their repeated sex and ecstasy, their union, is the cognitive which has come to the deeper inner self and has made the connection with the Source self (higher consciousness). Why are the two other aspects of partnering abashed? We have been watching it many times as patients are trying to decipher in the outer world whether it is worthwhile to chance healthiness.

A word about the son. The son is not only about the higher consciousness, leaving the bed, representing the child. The child must leave the parents bed and here note the parents are not full of sexuality, of ecstasy. We are looking at the cognitive and the unconsciousness that is holding the pain of the person’s life.

In the dream the artist is frantically looking for his beloved and is misled by the servant who directs him to another part of the house. This servant is what we call the saboteur. He believes more in his pain than in his glory. For this reason, as the human being is growing, the cognitive and the unconscious mind go to work perceiving that what is their life is that which is all good. When any part of the saboteur levels are in danger of being put down or laid to rest, there is an inner fear of the unconscious ego being annihilated. The saboteur comes to work so that the inner fear is not annihilated.

The saboteur comes into existence when it walks into other’s emotions; when one is a child in the womb of the mother and excited about life, your being impressed by the mother’s fears, impressed by the mother’s discordances but you do not know why you have fears. You just have them. So that part of the mind becomes what we call the saboteur, being afraid to experience any fear and steers clear of any likelihood of that happening; simply staying clear of the unknown.

The gatekeeper who misdirects the lover is afraid since he does not know what it means to be in joyful union. He has only known pain so he attempts to take the mind and direct it to something familiar. It is the fetal infant who has experienced fear and never wants to go near that possibility again, even though he doesn’t know why. He doesn’t know that the fear he is experiencing is his mother’s fear.

The son leaves the bed. This represents consciousness that is now evolving to a higher position. The mother and the father are really locked in. They are asleep in their old knowledge. The child must go beyond that knowledge, beyond that old patterning to discover the strength of itself. From parent to child, the child then advances, and should advance, beyond the knowledge of the parents. This is a generational event hopefully.

When the artist parks on the lawn, breaking the law, there are two ways to see the law: first, human laws that say you must – you should – you have to and second, the creative aspect that must break the law (man-made) to get to the deeper recesses of the unconscious.

The ominous figures on the ridge are the signs of potential painfulness, which may lie on the future road. This is the unconscious saying there may be a problem – breaking the law. These figures are not coming to cause problems but the unconscious is not sure.

The man and the woman in the bed are stuck – he in his intellect – and too stuck in referencing what is outside of himself. This is true of the woman of like problem who is also stuck in her intellect and, to repeat, there is the fat, ugly woman with the wax on her face representing mankind with its false face. Ultimately the wax will have to come off. It seems we are in a time when that is exactly what is happening. The wax is coming off our civilization as the age-old rules are breaking down. The age-old panaceas do not work and despite optimistic comments by leaders everywhere, the deep recesses of the unconscious do not believe these reassurances. There is a great fear sweeping through mankind.

In the end it is really about the struggle of the person within herself/himself, a part of the person that must come together for integration. From that union everything else comes and one is a step away from where one has to be, that is with a possibility of reaching one's higher self.

The horrors we see in everyday life would not be possible nor the lies, the deceits, or the great unhappiness one sees in people's faces and feels from people's hearts.

May 2009

Bibliography

Fairbairn, W.R.D. (1952). An Object-Relations Theory of the Personality, New York: Basic Books.

Soliloquy on Passion, Sex, Love and its Negative

Soliloquy on Passion, Sex, Love
and its Negative