Never, in the world as we know it, has there been the global unrest that we see recently. The media keeps us informed about all aspects of the world. In the Middle East people are rebelling against the dictators or monarchical tribal leadership that no longer serve the needs of the people. In Indonesia and environs there are outbursts of unrest. In the Far East, Japan is struggling with the aftermath of a tsunami and a nuclear plant breakdown. The usually compliant people are restive. How much corruption has contributed to accentuate the disaster of the flood? China alone stands without open rebellion, though the masses in the hinterland are not doing as well as urban dwellers where all the emphasis seems to be on catching up and overcoming the United States. Can it be that it does not know that catching up and overcoming will be easy? To what end? The same rise and fall we are witnessing in this country now will ultimately befall them.

Europe is in jeopardy. Does any monetary system work on the premises upon which they have constructed their monetary system? There are always the economists and the accommodation of big business and the really rich to tout capitalism which is by now a cynical gesture. Since the bailout of the banks by the people of the United States, it is clear that capitalism, so noisily advertised by business, does not work. The juggling goes on and it will continue until someone recognizes that all these failures have a common substrate - smart people with astonishing IQ’s but with no knowledge of their unconscious where everything really important is born and based and must be known to the conscious mind for intelligent action. If this is not so, the planners are going on sheer intellect – really guessing how a plan will work – and one must realize it is only a guess whatever charts are brought to verify any principle. The principles developed by these intelligent people have ultimately to be carried out by people and people who do not know their unconscious are usually immature and troubled. This unknown factor leads to all kinds of unwise actions. Such mistakes made in mass effort in the Euro zone will bring any clever enterprise down especially since not only Europeans are involved in the plan, but the Far East and America are also involved. After all, we know looking back, that bank failure rattled the markets around the world.

It is axiomatic that the makers of policy are the leaders or the people who the leaders have picked to advise them. Then we easily come to those who are considered the money men surrounding these leaders, as Obama surrounded himself with people who have deep Wall Street connections. It is interesting that at this time in America almost all of the members of Congress are millionaires. It is highly unlikely that any economic policy would do harm to the very rich and it is to be expected that any forthcoming policy to balance budgets here or anywhere will fall on the middle class and the poor. Any such policy will be sold as a patriotic duty. I wonder, in these turbulent and knowledgeable times, how long that tune play.

I see the ferment in this world agitation as a good sign. There has to be agitation before structures fall down. However it is not easy to endure the process. In Egypt a revolution prevailed only to find that the people discovered that the old elements wished to hold on to their power. In Syria we find the same as in Bahrain. The shaking will continue. It is now inevitable.

Here in the United States the movement has just begun. Occupy Wall Street is maintaining it’s strength and purpose and it is growing. When more trouble arises and hits more people, which is inevitable, there will be further increases in this movement. When the middle class learns it is to be burdened and further deprived, which I am sure will go along with cries of patriotism, the propaganda that has been fed to the American people will be

more evident and, as the governor of New York recently remarked, “the people have been quiescent for 30 years, passive and dumbed down. They are waking up.”

In this essay I wish to present the dreams of the old man from my essay “Venice Beach”. He has been a bellweather person on the political frontier, as well as my patient Dr. D who is coming to a new understanding of himself. Rather I should say Dr. D’s dream is foreshadowing the change he will be undergoing.

There is to be a change with the nature of the feminine unconscious. Here I would suggest to any interested person to read my essay “A Call To The Feminine Paradigm”.

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I am reporting the dreams of the old man of my essay “Venice Beach”. He has been doing his analytic work. He spends his days mostly alone on the beaches up and down the coast. He likes Venice Beach the most because of the people walking about, the honky-tonk atmosphere, the palm readers, the psychics, the jewelry makers. He likens the scene to town fairs in the Europe of long ago and he feels that the fairs in those days were not dissimilar to what he can view at the beach. He would only have to add when folk of all kinds gathered, with more or less the same composition, to trade in farm commodities and featuring livestock.

Mostly he sits and looks out to sea. He meditates. He lets his mind go freely, at times he dozes off. He does not fight this loss of conscious mind. He is not afraid if he slips away. This is a daily routine. He does not pretend to any yoga practices. By this he means he has no system to teach anyone, no students, no disciples. It is simply what he does.

The old man said.....

DREAM

“I was a psychiatrist in my dream, like you, and I was seeing in consultation Donald Trump. I was using my friend’s office at UCLA. My friend is dying of Parkinson’s disease. Nonetheless in the dream I was using his office. I was aware that the office was comfortable, big and sunny. I felt comfortable waiting for Trump to make up his mind. I learned he was not a billionaire, only a millionaire. He acknowledged he was faking a lot of the stuff he was saying in public. The dream ended that way.”

The patient continued to talk about Donald Trump and the fake person he was, exploiting issues that had been put to rest and drumming up the worse elements of American society.

Patient: You know I do follow the politics of the time.

Dr. B: I think, according to what you have said in the past several weeks and what you are now saying, that your friend who is dying is representing the old system. The old system is dying and perhaps that stands for the academic system at UCLA that is dying. It is very comfortable so it will not go away willingly or soon. It is still too comfortable for a lot of people.

Patient: What about Trump?

Dr. B: I have no idea and you know I have no use for him. He is just a blowhard and a foolish man.

Patient: It is incomprehensible why the media makes so much of him.

Dr. B: What you say is true but I think he stands for the mass unconscious, the intellectual primacy that has ruled the world for thousands of years. It has got to come to the realization of it’s falseness and it has got to openly acknowledge that it has come to the end of the road.

The patient continues.....

DREAM

I see an engine floating in the ocean. No one knows what it is for.

We fish it out and decide to decode it even though the “other side” may have had a device on it that was recording our activities.

Patient: This sounds like science fiction. If I did not know better I would say it doesn’t mean anything. I do look at the water a lot. I can tell you about the water, about the waves, about the motion, about the times and the variety of colors of blues, grays, greens and the whitecaps. It is dazzling and hypnotic. I can tell you about the ships I see on the horizon and the small figures surfing. The science fiction boys are not bad. They sometimes have it right, more right than anyone and before anyone. And they do this in their intuitive way. I have a hunch about what you might say.

Dr. B: What’s that?

Patient: You will see this as a sign of God and, if it is in the water, the unconscious, the engine of the unconscious giving us information.

Dr. B: I agree. That is exactly what I would say. And further I think the engine is so designed as to pick up “our activities” and

“remit” those activities in whatever way that is done to the higher entity, the Divine Feminine. Since you were dreaming of a woman last week, a whistle blower called Maryann, I would shorten that to Mary, or Divine Mother, also linked to the Divine Feminine unconscious, which over the millennia has been so battered. It is now revealed as a pathetic, ugly entity that is frightening. All of your narrative gives me the idea that something is afoot in the world not only in your mind but in you. It is as if you were channeling for the mass unconscious for the feminine unconscious.

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The following is dream of Dr. Dombrowski.

In it he is in a city in Canada. He said he had sent away his military uniform that was a copy of Napoleon’s. He was to wear it at a celebration, a ceremony. When he gets it back he realizes it is too small for him. Napoleon was a small man.

He is non-pulsed by the dream. He has always admired Napoleon especially his exploits in war, especially his conquest of Europe. The patient was in this city to see his daughter and his grandchild. His ex-wife lives there too. He is thinking also of stopping with his girlfriend. He finds she is not suitable for him at this time. She is no fun and was no fun on this vacation. He recalled being in Paris with his family visiting the Arc d’Triomphe. and the Champs d’Elysee.

Dr. B: So why is the uniform so small.

Patient: I don’t know.

Dr. B: Obviously you cannot wear this uniform. Is it no longer a time for war? The uniform is too little as war is too little an avenue to solve the problems of our times or your personal problem.

Patient: Maybe I have sent the uniform to be cleaned of all the bad things wars have brought and I am talking not only about world wars but also my personal war in this lifetime.

Dr. B: I like that and I hope so. Remember your attraction to war, to Hitler and what he did early in World War II. He seemed invincible like Napoleon. However, with what we know, is there not a likeness to your father who was another Hitler at home. Remember your wife was against you at a certain point after your divorce and threatened to sue you, which might have lost you your medical license. Moreover she persuaded your daughter to testify against you. This woman is capable of a ruthless war.

Patient: Yeah, but I was nice to her and she was nice to me.

Dr. B: There is now no need for war there or anywhere. The time for this solution has gone except where people are fighting to obtain their freedom and the rights every human being should have. Besides last week we have been talking about your grandmother and what a lifesaver she was for you.

Patient: Yeah. (And he began to cry as he often does when he invokes her image and her love for him)

Dr. B: The strange thing is that in the history of civilization it is nearly always men who are remembered. Statues are made in their honor, obelisks are made in their honor. Their exploits are written about. Where are the women in human history? Not much in evidence. Strangely enough the only place where one can find a group of women who have excelled so that their names are memorialized are the women saints of the church.

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The old man continued with his dreams......

DREAM

There was a bomb maker. He had made a new bomb. It was like a section of a wrap (the sandwich). He worked in an office building and after would return the bomb with some change. For example silver dollars or dollar bills. I thought he was really the mastermind in the operation.

Patient: Here, Dr. Bail, I really can’t help you at all.

Dr. B: Well, tell me about a bomb.

Patient: They blow you up.

Dr. B: True, but what if they blow up your mind metaphorically as in the expression “it blows my mind”? Don’t you think the minds of people have to be blown “especially at the top”, to get them to think very differently from how they have been thinking? The bomb has the secret information enfolded in a wrap, like a wrap enfolds the food.

Patient: Ok, I can see that. So let me tell you the dream I had following that one.

DREAM

I was at the doctor’s office getting a check up on my eyes or my hearing. The nurse in the office was young, in her mid-twenties, and very attractive. I felt she was very attracted to me. She touched me while she was carrying out the doctor’s orders. My head began to spin. I thought how could she be attracted in this way to an old man. I must have awakened to stop the whirling in my mind.

Dr. B: (laughing) I know what you mean. Old people don’t get much of that kind of signal anymore but I think your dream is not about the vicissitudes of love. The girl represents how attracted you are to a new way of hearing and seeing the reality in which you are living.

Patient: Thanks. I was worried about where that was going. So, Dr. Bail, let me tell you one more dream. I have to beg your indulgence. I may be stretching you too much.

Dr. B: No, you can tell me the dream. I am here to be stretched.

Patient: OK

DREAM

I am walking with my friend in my childhood neighborhood. My friend says you have been hurt here, physically. Don’t you want to move? I say, “I can’t move until I am sure I don’t have to come back”. And then despite my age I am skating and balancing myself all very carefully and then I am standing on a pole four feet off the ground. I am very balanced until I jump down easily and safely.

Patient: I did move out a long time ago so I am not sure what that means. Obviously it is not a literal thing. I did get hurt physically but all of us as kids got hurt one time or another, but nothing serious. I did skate when I was a kid. I could balance myself perfectly and even played hockey on skates. I don’t think I could do that on skates today. Certainly I could not maintain my balance on a pole but I could in the dream. I did it all slowly and carefully.

Dr. B: The fact that you stand on a four-foot pole means you are in control. You are the master – in tarot terms – of your worldly development. Four likewise is the number of the emperor so you are completely in charge of your environment. I think this dream is really about a spiritual meaning. I think it is on the earth plane that you are talking about and you are saying you do not want to pass in this lifetime until you have completed your karmic debt. To go then, after completion, you would not have to come back. Is that what you are aiming for?

Patient: I guess so. I like that. I like the feeling, sitting, looking seaward, losing myself. What else do I have to do here?

COMMENTARY

The old man’s dreams reveal a personality in change. I think he is unusual in that he was older in coming to this work. Also he really wanted to change. Desire is important.

Most of us, including the patient, are too much in the grip of the law of inertia. We learned this law in high school physics. All physical bodies obey this tenet, “bodies at rest tend to remain at rest”. Psychologically the parallel would be the unconscious maternal imprint by which all of us are stamped. That’s the parallel. It has all the characteristics of the physical law except it can be overcome but not without a great struggle within the psyche. A person undertakes this fight when life in the outside world has become so difficult that it is a necessity.

The imprint is certainly consistent with the adage “let sleeping dogs lie” since the fact is that hitherto the existence of a maternal imprint has been unknown. It indeed has been asleep these many thousands of years. We can and do research earlier peoples. We find the Romans, the Greeks, the ancient Egyptians and the Chinese were much like us. People are the same whatever the color of skin. Genetic research has come to the same conclusion.

People have a tendency to reject, say no, to new invention until they see the value of it for themselves. Physical inventions, for example the computer, the iPhone, the Blackberry, can ultimately sweep the world. The young, who are not yet so indoctrinated, go for it. But addiction to these instruments also eventually creates a stasis. There is no inner inquiry. The focus is to the outside world. The focus now for everyone has to be on the internal world.

The key is that an external technical invention ultimately becomes a distraction from the real work at hand, which is to start to move the unconscious – “the great within”.

Psychoanalysts know that the task, when it begins, sets in motion powerful defense mechanisms like splitting and repression. To pictorialize splitting in concrete terms, it would be splitting off a piece of an object and then totally ignoring it. It no longer is a part of the original piece - splitting off a part of the mind, which then no longer is felt to be a part of the mind. Psychologically it works. Repression is considered to be a downward force keeping everything at bay. Ultimately we are talking about horses, which imply energy. The more ill a person is, the more energy they expend to keep the “dreaded knowledge at bay”. These people feel enervated. All patients report, as time goes on, being more alive and having more energy as defenses no longer have to be used to keep early infantile traumatic knowledge away.

At bottom the maternal imprint and its guardian, the inner saboteur, do all they can to prevent inroads being made into the psyche and earlier and earlier traumatic events being understood or revealed. This is because the initial shock of the maternal imprint in fetal life is so severe it is split off and shielded. In working to this point the internal saboteur will pull every trick to avoid a final confrontation, a final conclusion. That final conclusion would be its demise.

As we see changes in our world today, people protesting in some way, psychologically the protest is against the parents who raised them. The government, whether it is the President, the Prime Minister, the Dictator, in the psyche is felt to be the powerful parent. People will take a lot of bad stuff from their leader because it reaches into the farthest recesses of survival itself. The fetus knows its survival depends on the mother. In this respect, all leaders are, in the deepest and earliest psyche, the mother.

Children have to forget a lot in the course of growing up since so many mistakes are made unwittingly or unknowingly that traumatize the child. The leaders “get a pass”, even bad ones who have created havoc. After a few years, they are once again revived and even idealized. Look at Stalin and Hitler. It happens in our country as well. I leave it to the reader to think of who it might be we have resurrected.

Since change is hard to come by, we might rightly think that a profound change might be very hard to come by. I think the profoundest change that civilization has to make at this time is the change from the masculine principle to the feminine one. It will be especially difficult since women have been so abused for so long. The feminine unconscious at this time is a very disfigured one.

It will require all women to recognize their qualities and to take possession of them so that men do not dictate to women what should be their natural right, their own voice over their bodies and souls.

In this respect I heard an anecdote from a patient who is a filmmaker. So is her husband. In talking to the woman who was the MC for a recent meeting, she told my patient, “We have to be known by what we do and who we are. Not as somebody’s wife”. Accordingly minutes later the woman introduced my patient’s husband, and did so quite easily, and then introduced my patient as his “wife”.

In this vein, it will only be when people stop voting their unconscious idealized internal imprint that we will stop getting leaders who take advantage of the people in every possible way. Politicians and political pundits know this arc. They do not know why or how it works.

I have explained why.

My commentary has been about why real change is so difficult. In this context I understand that since these ideas are not well known, let alone within the psychoanalytic community, they cannot be put to a test. The profession is struggling with old principles, old knowledge, ageing practitioners and a diminishing flow of new blood and a great disavowal by the general public that psychoanalysis has anything to offer.

There has to be a change because hitherto the only paradigm has been the Freudian paradigm, a masculine one, a paternal one. It is understandable that analysts cling to his teachings as if it were piece of driftwood that allows them to hang on in a menacing ocean. The feminine paradigm contains much more and opens up great realms for discovery, all to effect great changes in oneself and in the world of people.

POSTSCRIPT

I said to the patient, “How do you feel about where you are at this time”.

Patient: Considering where I was when I came, I feel good. It has been a good run and interesting. Maybe because I am old and am not so concerned with the outside world. I am not concerned with the tumultuous passions of my younger self. Love, passion, rejection, pain – it has all gone away. However, I am concerned with the world and the mayhem everywhere. I never thought I would see what I see. I think the world leaders are really at the end of their rope. After all what are people afraid of?

Dr. B: Yes, what are they afraid of?

Patient: Mostly pain, physical pain, like being sick or tortured, or mental pain, as in fear. I have known pain from illness and pain from the fear of dying. It is terrible, beyond description. Yes, there used to be pain that comes with love and rejection, the ups and downs of love, hardly tolerable. I am done with that. I am not bored with my life at all. Best of all I am not afraid, not even of dying.

November 2011