It is unthinkable that a body of the most learned men in psychoanalysis, schooled in the deepest reaches of the mind (and apparently some philosophers agree), feel that the truth of a person’s life cannot be obtained, nor can truth be found at all. We have gone along the arc from a state of awe to the state of alas.

by Bernard W. Bail, M.D.

In 1973 I visited the gravesites (tumuli) of the Etruscan people near Rome. They resembled the storm shelters that Midwesterners, in the United States, built to shield themselves from tornadoes. In Italy these gravesites are kept locked. Only a guide can open them and lead you down a dark stairwell with his flashlight. There, at a low level, a coin is put in a box and a light appears in a hollowed out small room, revealing paintings on the walls. As we progress, the coin, the light is repeated several times, each time showing more beautiful paintings, the marvels of that period’s everyday life depicted on the walls. One can also see funerary caskets. The ones I saw were of men and women, apparently husbands and wives, close together in death as they were in life. What interested me most was that each person had, what I thought, was the most painful and sad expression on his/her face.

The Etruscans, from historical accounts, were a peaceful people who cultivated their art. They were beginning to be harassed by the Romans, an aggressive military people. Obviously in time Rome absorbed these people, whose pagan gods did not protect them from dissolution and absorption. Could their incredibly sad faces be revealing the hopelessness, the absolute impossibility of finding a solution to their dilemma?

I was recently reminded of the Etruscans and their woeful funerary faces. When I heard Dr. Morris Eagle’s presentation at the plenary session of the American Psychoanalytic Association meeting in San Francisco at the Palace Hotel in June 2011, I was incredulous, so much so that I asked him to send me a copy of that address. I want to quote what he wrote:

Psychoanalysis and the “Enlightenment Vision”: An Overview

I discuss a number of trends in this paper. A central one is the increasing disjunction between psychoanalysis and the “Enlightenment Vision” as expressed in a decreasing emphasis on the therapeutic value of interpretation, insight and self-knowledge. A second and related trend I take up in the shift in emphasis from the intra-psychic to the inter-psychic (Bolognini) or what has been referred to as a move from a one person to a two personpsychology. This shift is also expressed in an increasing emphasis on the therapeutic relationship as the main ingredient in therapeutic reaction, Sullivan’s words, on the inter-personal field. The trend I discuss is increasing skepticism to even the very possibility of discovering truths about the patient. The fourth topic is a reconceptualization of the function of interpretation which constitutes a continuation of the link between psychoanalysis and the “Enlightenment Vision.”

I am not disputing Dr. Eagle’s description of what he sees as the trend of our times. I had trouble believing it, yet I do. It is a confirmation of what I have been saying for years: that psychoanalysis as it has been practiced is dying. It is neither helpful nor useful to those who seek relief for their emotional anguish and pain.

I have said in past essays that the Freudian paradigm had a reason to be, for there was nothing else in the world that could address the distress and turmoil of people’s lives. The genesis of the paradigm was rightfully optimistic. As time went on, however, despite Freud’s implementation and changes to parts of his theory, it was clear the Freudian paradigm was not sufficient. This insufficiency had come about, I believe, by 1950 with the publication of Robert Knight’s work on the “borderline” patient. I understand very well there are many people who are still faithful to the Freudian paradigm and that is, of course, their prerogative.

However, according to Dr. Eagle the tide has passed them by, so much so that there is an open belief that truth cannot be accessed by the Freudian paradigm. The analyst is no longer the person who can bring that intimate and invaluable commodity to the patient.

Instead, a two-party arrangement has developed. The final result, of what I understand is Dr. Eagle’s observation, is that current Freudian practice can be summed up as follows: “The analyst is your friend.” Of course, even in classical analysis the analyst was and is the patient’s friend. In this new two-party arrangement, however, the friend has a heavy responsibility. The patient can no longer expect the truth of his life, truth that is thought to be inaccessible and impossible to derive in any other way, to be revealed through analysis. All the patient can expect is to find a reliable friend in the analyst.

The universe and all contained is a floating island—unimaginable—and in that great darkness there is no light and no safety except that at least one person, the analyst, is your friend. As I have understood Dr. Eagle, there is no longer the pursuit of that person’s inner truth. One may pursue only that person’s everyday sorrows and problems.

At the annual meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association I do feel a pessimism throughout the body of the meetings, throughout the intermissions; a pessimism that I never felt during the late 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. I feel the discussions of cases do not adequately address the core issues that patients bring as reported by their therapists. What I hear is an enormous amount of theorizing. I hear very little of what one actually said to the patient and what that patient replied and what essentially was that patient’s core problem. With Dr. Eagle’s essay, I understand much better why my questions remain unanswered.

I present the above as a prologue to further discuss the problem of the “internal saboteur.” Here I am presenting the dreams and associations as the patient recalls them. This is the same patient presented in my previous essay titled the “The Internal Saboteur-The Spine of Civilization.”

PATIENT’S DREAMS AND ASSOCIATIONS

I’ve been in analysis with Dr. Bail for over six years. Before that I spent nearly three years with one of his associates and before that there was a trail of various forms of therapy too varied to detail. In the past six years my life has changed profoundly for the better—materially, spiritually, creatively, psychologically. Most importantly, I find myself increasingly able to swim in my feelings and instincts, making choices from a far less mechanistic place.

In short I have experienced a miracle.

I have also experienced something profoundly worrisome, even terrifying. I mocked the term at first, as discussed in a previous essay. I no longer mock it, nor what it names—“the internal saboteur.” I love words, so maybe there’s a better description, but it doesn’t really matter what you name your enemy, you’d better pull yourself together and take it on.

At one point, given the postulate that the “internal saboteur” emerged from the pain of experiences in utero, I imagined approaching this destructive aspect of myself like a terrified infant, perhaps using true Christian values: “turn the other cheek”; “love thine enemy”—it was a baby aspect of myself, after all.

I have learned differently.

One would assume I would be demoralized at this point, even hopeless, to be forced to confront something as brutal and dangerous as a saboteur inside myself after all these years of work with Dr. Bail—all the money, time and emotional toll. But most of the time I feel the opposite, as if approaching a climax of sorts, a meeting of the true enemy after all these years of tilting with windmills, namely other people and other things.

DREAM ONE

I am witness to the hanging of a relatively well-known, ruggedly handsome actor who mostly plays taciturn cowboy types. He also happens to be a distant cousin of mine in real life. We’ll call him Tom Starr. I have been brought in with one or maybe two other people because we are told it will comfort Tom to see people he knows as he is hung, looking into familiar eyes as he falls with the rope around his neck. When we get there, he comes out of his cell. There is a kind of large hearing device on his ear. He seems breezy, almost happy. I see the hanging rope. It's too low. Primitive. A small strip of blue cloth has been wrapped around it. Then we are told to talk about him, remembrances, etc. We do this. It’s weird. At this point my wife comes and says, you don't have to stay the whole time, you have your young nephew to look after.

Then someone asks one of us to talk about Lincoln. I think they mean a business associate of mine in waking life named Lincoln. They mean the city. After offering to speak, I realize my confusion and make a joke about it: "The one thing I know about Lincoln,” I say, “is that I don't know the city, Lincoln."

Again my wife comes. Then a fat blond woman, a politico in my waking life, joins her. ”You don't have to stay here the whole time,” they both tell me. “You don’t have to watch the actual hanging.” I wake up feeling awful.

ASSOCIATIONS

Tom Starr is my internal saboteur. It emerges that this is a very insightful portrait. The saboteur in me is very clever and cold—a hard-assed cowboy —almost icy, as is Tom in real life and in the roles he plays—the silent, deadly type, a worthy adversary. He’s not afraid of being hung and is not hung by the end of the dream. This is not good news. He also has a device on his ear that allows him to hear everything (similar to the portrait in the previous essay where the internal saboteur was seen as having hundreds of eyes in all the walls of a city).

My wife and the fat politco woman (her mother) do not want me to stay to see the internal saboteur destroyed. They want me to go be with my nephew who (in real life the day before) I had taken to Six Flags Amusement Park with his mother. The mother, my sister-in-law, had been horribly manipulative with her child, lying to him and almost torturing him. I knew better than to intercede during that day, but it was awful to witness essentially the destruction of a child before my eyes. This is what my wife and her mother wanted me to be involved with, rather than in cleaning up the mess of my own life, which would have been to make sure that my internal saboteur had been hung.

I should note that my wife is also involved with analysis and is struggling with many of these similar issues. For both of us the battle to let go of self-destructive behavior has been far more difficult than we would have imagined.

The reference to Lincoln, really Abraham Lincoln, was important given my discussions with Dr. Bail from other dreams. Lincoln was an intellectual and terribly depressed as history has noted. He’s been remembered as a true hero, incredibly articulate, but my dreams have underlined that he actually engaged in a war that didn’t solve the problems we have claimed were solved and killed nearly a million people in the process. Intellectuals so often get us into wars—note Obama in Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan; JFK in Vietnam. And note the strip of blue on the rope, blue for depression—Abraham Lincoln’s depression and mine, which feels as if it’s lifted (in my case) and yet here it is attached to a rope that doesn’t do the job.

So I didn’t succeed in killing my internal saboteur, any more than Lincoln solved the problem of real slavery or (it could be argued) the North/South split. Perhaps he even aggravated both just as my internal saboteur seems to have emerged from our confrontation as far more effective than me. I should also note that I am often muddy and confused and not willing to be tough when it’s needed. Tom Starr has all those qualities I so often lack. He is icy clear, dangerous and capable. It’s almost as if those qualities were stolen from me in utero.

But at least I see this, Dr. Bail pointed out. Seeing is believing. And believing is half the battle. Also at one point over the next few days my wife pointed out that Tom Starr (and the characters he plays) are strong, yes, and dangerous, but they are also a little thick headed, a little dumb.

There is hope, although Dr. Bail later said to never underestimate the internal saboteur.

For almost a week I am unable to remember my dreams. It’s as if I have been shut down, as if my saboteur has won completely. Six days later I have the following dream:

DREAM TWO

I have murdered my college sweetheart, Mary. Did I cut her up? I killed her with my bare hands. It was horrific. How did I dispose of the body? I can’t quite remember. Was it into the ocean? I didn’t completely clean it up. I find powdered cartilage in the seams of my jeans. I go dancing, partly in an effort to cover up what I’ve done. Who would go dancing after a murder like this? I dance increasingly wildly to cover my true feelings. Do I have her blood on me as well? As I dance I say to myself, you think you’re so smart doing this, but you’re not. The authorities are smarter. They’ll track you down. At this point I look over and see that Mary is walking down a flight of elegant stairs, helped by a number of assistants, almost like limping in a Busby Berkeley movie. She’s a bit wounded, it seems, but okay. I watch her without much feeling.

I wake up. It’s the middle of the night. I struggle to remember more around this dream. I can’t. I fall back to sleep demoralized by how little I seem to remember of my dreams. This is a feeling I often have. Just before waking in the morning I have the following dream:

DREAM THREE

I was walking out the door in a suit. The pants were baggy and of a slick material, like from the 1950s. Overhead on a porch on the second floor a guy looked down at me. Was the place a bit like my father’s mother’s humble vacation home near the ocean? Though that didn’t have a porch off its second floor. This was the second day that he’d spotted me, it seems. Was I going to work to earn money? Why else would I wear a suit? I didn’t like the suit, the guy upstairs liked it a lot, though. I thought the pants were too baggy and the whole thing seemed like a fake thing for me to wear.

I woke up very uncomfortable, very sad.

ASSOCIATIONS

Mary, from Dream #2, is my mother’s imprint. Again this is a profound and precise portrait for me. To this day Mary remains an almost overwhelming sexual influence. In college I nearly destroyed myself when she left me for a rock musician. For a year I mourned her rejection. Years later I met her for lunch after the divorce from my first wife, hoping to reconnect or to at least have the crazed sex I had had with her in our youth, even as sex had never really been “her thing.” For me it had been everything. She was cold, almost dead, over lunch. It was frightening. Interestingly, she raved about her “wonderful” mother. She was also on meds, it emerged over lunch.

But somehow in all this lust and passion, I had killed her, my mother’s imprint, in the dream. Brutally. Only to have her return, a bit bloodied, perhaps, but unbowed. The dream felt like another failure on my part until Dr. Bail pointed out that I had little feeling for her as she came down the stairs. This was very different from the passion I had felt when I had killed her.

The man on the porch was my father (living upstairs in his mother’s small vacation home, a sad commentary on my father). In the dream I am wearing a suit like him (from the 50’s). In the dream I am going to work like he did every day, a miserable man, a drunk in real life, who died prematurely from liver complications and a heart attack. He approves of me doing what he did “in a suit, working for the man.” But I am uncomfortable and in fact have changed my life in these past six years. I now primarily do work (in my waking life) that I want to do on my own time. I work very hard, but most of the time I love it.

Nonetheless I felt a terrible pain, even grief, around this dream. It was a night spent with my parents’ influences over me. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was the truth and much of the news about my responses was good. I have been pulling away.

Five days later I have the following dream:

DREAM FOUR

Someone has written down a dream and a film crew is going to shoot it. It’s about people being framed, judged and then executed. Clearly the “crime” to be used for framing is murder. This dream is set in England and the first thing noted in the dream is how the English seem to be fascinated by themselves. The next thing made clear is that while this is just a movie, the people in the film who are framed will actually be executed for real.

A mother brings her young boy for the audition/execution. They are working class. The boy’s hair is cropped short. He is brought into the docket to be tried (and auditioned). This filming/executions has become huge news. Others have already been tried (auditioned) and executed. The boy will die if he’s “found guilty.” But the mother will be quite famous for what “she’s endured.” She’ll be in the film, on TV and so forth. She’ll be venerated. And she’ll live on.

The moment the cameras roll it is clear that this boy is an absolutely brilliant actor. Every emotion plays across his face immediately. When he opens his mouth there is a streak of blue inside, deep, dark blue. Did he put this here? Has he worked out every detail? He is mesmerizing and clearly doomed because of it. He is trying to cry out the words, “I’m innocent…” He is so brilliant, as he stutters and stammers, that we completely understand what he’s trying to say. There is also something else in his face—grief not only for his nearing execution, but also for what his mother has done to him and for why and for the world to be in such a horrific place that it would allow this to happen. His performance is that great, that emotional.

I woke up in terrible grief myself. For a moment I flashed on the concept of Jesus, his crucifixion, his mother’s veneration, this whole strange, sad and powerful religious story. There were clearly parallels here. Obviously the boy was also me as he is so many other people as well. This dream captured something so deep and emotional about the power of the mother’s imprint, it’s hard not to just let the dream stand on its own without further explanation.

But what I would add is that it seems so striking to me that these powerful stories have emerged out of me with no tending, other than my efforts to remember, which is so often frustratingly feeble. I forget so much more than I remember and yet here is this amazing parable about what mothers do to their children and never even know they’re doing it. It is all unconscious until we work to bring it to the surface, to harvest the truth from deep inside ourselves.

I have suffered horribly from my poor mother’s unconscious confusions and deep rage, her desperate desire “to be seen” and venerated. She suffered as well. My siblings have suffered, my children have suffered from all this inner chaos, need and destructiveness, but I have begun to see clearly the chaos and brutality even as I suffer more openly, cry more openly; try my best to get it down on paper as I’m trying to do here, hoping that others will struggle to remember what exists inside them as well.

Then perhaps slowly, very slowly—because it’s been such a slow, slow process for me—we will begin to change who we are at the very deepest levels, we will defeat our inner saboteurs and we will evolve, as the various species before us have had the courage to evolve.

There’s hope, I believe, even if for now it’s tempered.

COMMENTARY

The important fact in the first dream is what an interesting fellow the captive, Tom Starr, is. He knows (hears) everything going on in the patient’s mind, especially things that the patient does not know (for example in the patient’s unconscious), and ultimately, despite his crimes, he is not hung.

When one undertakes an analysis and the unconscious is revealed, it astonishes the patient how much knowledge, truth, and reliable prophecy it contains.

The reference to Lincoln in the first dream is a reference to the people who are our leaders, however consciously brilliant, who can make decisions that appear absolutely correct—despite their ultimate, perhaps not so benevolent, results. In the case of Lincoln, add a crushing depression at one point in his life that probably remained with him and whose internal forces could have skewed his perception of the world, and we see how fragile our leadership truly is. The fact that our leaders’ fallibility has always been with us should not make us feel secure. Analysis can begin to shake every concept a person has of his/her world as well as the world without, including those who run things supposedly for our benefit.

If we consider the world and the current shape it is in, I feel that the brilliant intellectuals who have run every country do not get very high marks, but this is hardly surprising. It can be stated as a law that no internal saboteur of any person (including our leaders) wants that person to be free of it and its destructiveness. Of course, in making this observation the patient remembers his “slough of despond” and his “trough of despair” and the consequences of the choices he made in that condition.

The point in the second dream seems to be that what he can observe now and is aware of is the unconscious destructiveness of external behavior, the parents to the child (which he also observed in waking life at the amusement park, Six Flags). With the patient’s awareness, he can go backward and “see” the whole structure of that process being carried out.

Again in the second dream, when killing Mary, his college sweetheart, a stand-in for his mother, the patient wonders where he has disposed of her body. The answer is the mother is in the powdered cartilage lying in the seams of his jeans. This tells us that the unconscious “mother” has been pulverized to a powder and is in the very seams of his mind, keeping in mind that a seam is what holds two parts together—the two parts being himself and her. This is a profound revelation, for the work will have to remove every particle of powdered cartilage (which holds the genes together—a metaphor for his ego, for his mind) without undoing the genes. Indeed this is what is done in analysis as each speck of powder is examined and removed, meaning it no longer exerts any valence on the mind.

The last dream is a paradigm of the Jesus–Mary event. It would be a paradigm for all mothers who unwittingly imprint their children with instructions and burdens and the children who need to accept these burdens, these challenges, which will be the fine, invisible patterning of their lives.

This factor, the invisible patterning, is a well-hidden one because analysis is occupied for a long time with the damage and the debris the patient has created in his/her life before entering analysis. Then the debris the patient creates during the beginning of the analysis and his/her dawning awareness must be dealt with. It is when a person comes to a calmer state of being that one can sometimes begin to catch a glimpse of the commission of a destructive action or, more likely, an action via a dream. It is best to catch it red-handed. The reason for the snail’s pace of mankind’s evolution might entail the hidden work of the imprint and its offspring, the internal saboteur.

I could quote further from Dr. Eagle’s paper but his further elaboration still has the fundamental point that I am addressing here in this essay. The profession owes a great deal to a scholar like Dr. Morris Eagle who can stand on the mountain and see the direction our craft is going and can put that before us.

I liken the work to the endless journey in new territory, much like the explorers of the West early in the history of our country, not knowing where the rivers and mountain passes were, whether the natives were friendly or hostile. Except it is even worse for a mind, which is like the universe, mostly dark with observable flashes that we have to observe closely—the dream.

The Enlightenment Vision has been a pillar of Western civilization beginning with the Socratic ideal to “know thyself.” To hear it is no longer even a viable option is disturbing. However, I can understand the conclusion. I personally have been confronted with that wall where the analytic road ended. The experience came to me in both of my analyses. The despair that engulfs one is so deep that I can understand at that point, in parallel views, men leaving home to forage the world for the “wise man” reported as apocryphally living on a mountaintop. Desperation of that quality one can see in the movie Lost Horizon with Ronald Coleman where it described the entrance to Shangri-La. If not found, I can well imagine spending one’s life in painful sadness, the look I saw upon those Etruscan statues.

It seems to me that reports like Dr. Eagle’s should be made frequently and I would suggest a panel be set up to explore these findings. If what Dr. Eagle suggests is true, it is my opinion that psychoanalysis does not have much of a future. Friendship is fine, but the truth is imperative to the needs of mankind.

Personally I do not agree with the statements in this wonderful paper, for my work has always been to pursue the truth. The reason is simple. It is the truth of one’s life that cures. In the end it is that alone. When I read that the truth is unknowable, the sentence that comes to mind is “God is unknowable.” That has long been said. One has to add “directly” to that sentence. But the evidence of His/Her existence is everywhere. I am not surprised that scientists believe in the Divine, for scientific discoveries, which lay bare a beauty and symmetry, can stir such powerful emotions that one is overcome by tears of acknowledgement and “existence” beyond our capacity to imagine. But, as I have written elsewhere, if we are made in God’s image we, too, have a piece of Divine mind, which must and can be accessed if the method is correct. The correct paradigm in every science is a necessity. The paradigm that I have proposed can give us many examples of Divine presence in our minds and lives. There have been such examples in my essays. I have given a brief summary of this work in the paper called “A Proposal.”

There is one more thing to say here (not for want of things to say about the findings of Dr. Eagle), and that is about the mayhem in the world, the corruption at the highest levels in the world capitals, the loss of honor and the loss of shame as a deterrent, as standards to serve by. The open declaration of war by the rich on the poor, and the attempt of the rich to impoverish the middle class and to enlarge the domain of the poor, which reversion is a manifestation of a master/slave mentality. Are we witnessing a great retrogressive movement in the world, which at the same time is a revolutionary one, as we see the Middle East kindling revolution? And finally, is the psychoanalytic profession reflecting such great social disturbances?

The barbarians of old subdued large masses of people and were rewarded by becoming emperors or kings at the cost of pillage, murder, and rape. If one believes in reincarnation, could we consider that the rich and powerful are reincarnations of those barbarians who have found another way to subdue masses of mankind and pillage without killing but nonetheless reducing great masses to servitude?

Finally, if God exists, a proposition I believe is correct, it is unlikely that His/Her purpose is to do away with us. It may be in His/Her purpose to put things right again. It seems to me we must not lose sight of the truth. It is one’s eternal bastion of the Divine mind, which can only emanate love, and love, as the poet says, is Beauty and Truth.

If the politics of our time teaches us anything it is that loss of truth as a fundamental law leads to “anything goes” which then leads to cynicism, corruption, and loss of the rule of law. Our Supreme Court has already failed the test of true probity—the litmus test of being identified as the highest moral standard.

According to these psychoanalysts only people who own a compass, a T-square, and a slide rule can obtain the truth; the only truth is that which can be measured.

Not so.

Here is a truth that cannot be measured. Our government’s elected officials, from the President down, reflect the unconscious fears of the mass unconscious. They reflect the immaturity of the collective unconscious. All legislation enacted that takes away from the collective agrees with this unconscious fear that they, the people, deserve little or nothing. They are as infants accepting scraps. A mature collective would know and ensure that the government is working for them. That government would be, if anything, afraid of offending the mature wishes of the mass unconscious.

In other words, it reflects the unconscious of the individual and like the individual’s internal saboteur there is a collective internal saboteur.

July 2011