Analysis is about change and growth. Analysis is about insight into the nature of one’s life from the beginning to the end. It is a means of really growing, really developing one’s personality, of accessing the high self we all contain. It is a means of accessing our Source self by which we sail into regions that humanity’s inventions cannot approach. Even space travel is but a miniature of life on earth, lived in very cramped quarters.

Analysis is a means of seeing the possibilities of the universe. It is a means of evolution, keeping in step with the universe itself.

Resistance is almost always present during analysis. This comes as no surprise since denial is the first and most powerful of all defense mechanisms, brought on initially by the “big bang” unconsciously inflicted on the fetus by the mother at birth. Resistance and denial become ingrained as no one wants to experience the pain of that vulnerable and innocent part of life ever again.

When patients seek help for the very first time it is because the quantity and quality of their emotional pain is unbearable. To be able to tell a trained professional (in my case, a psychoanalyst) what troubles them provides great relief. I listen very carefully, especially the first time I meet and talk with a patient. I also unfailingly give the person an interpretation that makes connections about the content of their complaints. If they present a dream, I make an interpretation of that material and link up the dream content with what the patient has told me of their life and its difficulties.

The patient experiences great relief in this initial encounter (as well as during subsequent sessions). Still, a signal travels to the unconscious warning that this person (me) may be a danger in the future: the work done in my office will likely require the patient to change. However, as long as the patient’s relief continues to silence this signal, all goes well, and resistance is subdued. Patients are very grateful to receive explanations of their dreams and how their dreams—manifestations of the unconscious—have led them to where they find themselves: beleaguered, confused, and depressed.

What the subconscious senses, and warns about, is that interpretations and the understanding of them will necessitate a change in how the patient thinks or behaves or in the commitment he or she has made to the analysis. If the person refuses to make changes necessary for his or her well-being (because resistance has taken root), then nothing happens. Simply understanding one’s dreams is of no use unless understanding is followed by action. Psychoanalysis is a therapy that requires a person to be actively concerned and devoted to his or her own health, to be accountable and responsible for his or her life.

A lot of people have quite the wrong idea about psychoanalysis or even about therapy of a more superficial kind. People expect that going to a therapist and talking will in some magical way alleviate the symptoms of the problem without their having to be involved and without any pain in rectifying what might be, and usually is, a lifetime of making wrong choices which inevitably have led to wrong outcomes. At this juncture, many people leave therapy, frequently seeking out medication to relieve their mental suffering.

However, many patients come to psychoanalysis because they have already consulted their internist or a psychiatrist and received medication. Medication is a subduer of pain and the aim of the doctor is to give enough medication to stop the patient from feeling the pain. If that works, it’s a done deal. When it does not work, the patient has to face the ordeal of discovering what the problem really is and why it is a problem, and realizing it requires action and responsibility on the part of the patient.

In the course of this work, every interpretation changes the patient’s psyche. Often the patient is entranced with a new insight. Soon there are more interpretations and the psyche of the patient begins to realize that a part of him or her is not willing to undertake a new direction. More and more, as old patterns and beliefs are expunged, the patient may feel too uprooted and frightened of this new mental environment and long for the familiar scenes of his or her pathology and life’s pain. Many people live with emotional pain and apparently get used to it or erotize it and feel (or say) they like it. Resistance, at this point, has the upper hand.

As the analysis progresses more deeply, patients may feel that because they have built up a stronger ego, their lives can contain what they had originally come to therapy to divest themselves of. Around this time they feel they can encompass the old pattern with the roots that made them suffer and endure pain; they see their lives shrink and feel their lives were boring and fruitless, and so call forth a depressive state of mind. However, when they try to embrace their old patterns they find them incompatible with the new patterns they have learned.

I think it is noteworthy to point out that in any analysis change comes slowly, and with every inch of ground that is won toward a new world, few marks of progress are in fact contested. The healthier a person is the more slowly the contest is waged. A person allows shreds of their old life to linger, reluctant to say goodbye to an old friend, old in pain and sorrow. I have a great respect for those courageous people who have fought all the way regardless of the backsliding, for the task is a triumph of courage and faith.

Perhaps what this tells us is why so many people are afraid to die. We are so wedded to our bodies and our mortal life we cannot imagine a life without flesh or a life without the faces of those we loved, even those who caused us pain and suffering.

People feel they are entirely mortal and concrete, and do not realize what the unconscious always shows: we are spirit embodied. When the body falls away our spirit is liberated for another adventure far more interesting than travel in space. Now that’s a change nobody has to work toward; inexorably it comes to us all.

PATIENT HISTORY

The patient is a physician and a psychiatrist in her mid-50s whom I had treated some thirty years ago when she was in her 20s. At that time, she came to analysis because she was unhappy and unmarried, having been divorced once.

We undertook an analysis, which was a Freudian one. This was a long time ago, before I had come to my discoveries and new paradigm, the one that I work by currently. It was a time when there was only Freudian psychoanalysis; when one undertook analysis it was taken for granted that it would be the paradigm used.

As time passed by, the patient improved and felt hope within herself. Ultimately she married, certainly a sign that the analytic work was useful for her. Her relationships improved and she made friends.

She was the eldest of five children born to survivors of the concentration camps in World War II. It is important to note that she was the only child for some eight years. This state was broken by the birth of four more children.

We worked along for a number of years and I felt this would be a successful analysis for the patient, especially when she found someone she consented to marry. I had one misgiving since the man she married was not a professional and I thought not her educational equal. The patient is an exceedingly intelligent woman and an intuitive one. However, my misgiving did not diminish her resolve to marry. Like a majority of women, the feeling was this was the last chance to have a baby. I understood this and, though I looked at her dreams with the best understanding I had, looking for her own unconscious doubts about this union, I did not find any. So the question of this intellectual inequality was not my personal business. She was aware of it and from then on it was her responsibility.

The analysis continued and she continued to improve until one day she did not come to her session. There was no phone message, nothing. She had left the analysis, quit without a word to me. In examining the last dream she had I saw that one aspect of it represented a great fear. Looking back, I have only the dimmest memory of that dream. I knew it was complex for the patient. I assumed that we would unravel the meaning of the dream and come to these complex issues gradually so that she would be able to assimilate the trauma the dream seemed to contain. Now that would not happen.

I learned soon after that she had gone for therapy to a social worker who was not trained in psychoanalysis and had not even been analyzed herself. The patient not only had herself in analysis but also her husband and her child.

Eighteen years passed, and I received a phone call from this patient who asked if I would consent to see her again. I said I would. I learned that in the course of her treatment with the social worker, the therapist would viciously attack the patient and proclaim the patient wrong at every twist and turn with regard to her husband or child. The therapist also assumed the role of “real mother” to the child.

The question was, even years ago, why would a physician, a psychiatrist, a professional lend herself to this abuse? In the course of our current work she told me that on first seeing this social worker, on entering her office, she noticed an exit sign in the hallway of the suite. Something inside her said go, but she did not, and spent the next seventeen years undoing the work she and I had done, and suffering enormously all along.

By the time she returned to see me, she was fearful I would not take her back, that I would retaliate for her sudden unannounced withdrawal. She was keenly attentive to my moods, words, and feelings, always looking for any signs of retaliation. She feared it would come. It has now been three years since she came back to treatment and many things have been unraveled. We have gotten to see another, deeper side of the patient that I could never have seen with Oedipal complex as the central issue (the Freudian paradigm that is maintained in every Freudian analysis). Now three years later the patient had two dreams which explained the reason for her sudden withdrawal from the analysis some twenty years ago. They explained a great deal of why her life has been so trying for her and has yielded so little satisfaction and joy. The dreams explained why life has been a hanging-on by her fingertips, emotionally and in reality. It also explained why she took so much abuse from the therapist she spent seventeen years with, and why she exposed her family to this person.

I am writing this essay expressly to present the two dreams the patient had, which will lay it all open.

Dreams

The patient works in a penal institution. In the first dream a fellow worker, who happens to be a psychologist, says to her, “You can’t have any food here.”

In the second dream, she leaves home with her husband and gets on a tour bus, the kind that rides around the city with tourists pointing out famous places. She knows she has an appointment with me but figures the bus will go past my office. She will have her appointment and figure out a way to get back to her office or home or back in the bus. However, she sees the bus has gone further west than my office. The bus is traveling west on Sunset Boulevard, a famous street in Los Angeles that runs west toward the ocean, and realizes she cannot possibly make her appointment on time. My office is on Wilshire Boulevard, which is a mile south of Sunset. She thinks if she is lucky she might get fifteen minutes, maybe ten, by phone.

My thought on hearing the dream was, “Of course, it is very clear.” But the point was to make sure it was clear to the patient. Her association of the psychologist was to a colleague who worked in a very dangerous section of the prison. She is on friendly terms with this woman. In reality there would be no reason for this woman to say this to her. However, the patient went on to say that the psychologists take advantage of her and dump difficult situations in her lap. They do not want the responsibility for the choices they make for their patients.

For a long time she had been complaining that the head of the prison psychiatric department is a female psychologist and that the she is a very problematic person. She has no respect for the MDs working under her. From here it was not hard to make a link to the social worker “therapist” who tried in every way to destroy the patient’s mind. She, too, had a Ph.D. in social work, and certainly the patient got very little nourishment from that long, abusive experience.

One can see the shadow of the patient’s parents being in a concentration camp with constant thoughts of death hanging over their heads in the fact that she works in a prison and is able to come and go, unlike her parents who were prisoners. She agreed with everything that was said. Concerning the tour bus she could see that the end point was that at best she could have ten to fifteen minutes of a session—not much food there.

Obviously all of this was planned unconsciously. What was further interesting about the situation was that for months on end the patient was coming late to her sessions, fifteen to thirty minutes late, so that there might be time to squeeze in one dream that could be analyzed. Of course the patient knew all of this was a resistance, yet she could not help herself. The reasons were seemingly legitimate for her being late. They would have to be. She could not find her car keys; she could not find her phone. There was no gas in her car. She could not find her office key (she has a private practice).

Interestingly enough she regularly makes it to her job even though it is far away and she has to get up in the morning and drive an hour, possibly two, to make it in time. She must be on time else she will be fired. The job sustains the family.

I told her this is the reason she left treatment twenty years ago. She could not afford to get too much food, too much understanding. It was becoming dangerous. This can be translated into her not having too much joy or happiness or too much of a good life and a good marriage.

The consequence of this understanding runs far and deep, but the biggest consequence is that it cracks open a formidable resistance that has been in operation all her life. Once this is recognized, much of her previous life can be understood. However, it is not the solution to her life. We go to the concept of resistance, as I have written above, and we have to understand from the patient’s point of view it is a protection against unimaginable terror. It is something that keeps all patients safe and, of course, it is something unconscious in them.

Another patient of mine came to a session and remarked, “Everyone needs a slave.” I looked inquiringly at her. “You, too?” “Yeah,” she said, and proceeded to tell me more about the obstacles she was encountering in her life through no fault of her own. I agreed with her exposition. Later I was able to interpret her huge frustration back to her situation with her mother. No matter what she did, even to becoming a slave, she still could not get the love she yearned for. This was the substrate of her entire life.

Mothers are like the sun and children are like the planets circling. On our earth plane we need the sun to live. In human life the fetus and infant is like the planet. It needs the mother’s rays in order to survive and thrive. We have to understand that this sun, the mother, and the rays she puts forward must be the love she gives. Without that love there will be trouble in that infant’s life forever. When there is no love the infant becomes a slave and psychologically never leaves the mother’s side.

This second patient’s dream contained one fragment I wish to talk about, for it connects with the problem of the main patient discussed in this paper. In this second patient’s dream, she was in a prison in the first part of the dream. In the second part she was sitting beside a half-cat/half-girl. This creature, crouched catlike beside the patient, had just been let out of prison and was asking the patient, “Where shall I go?” The patient said, “You can go anywhere you like.” Then the patient said it was not really a cat but a girl crouched down simulating a cat, her body was that sinuous. The associations led to the conclusion that the creature could apparently go anywhere but she was a slave to her mother and, in the unfolding of the patient’s life, it was revealed that she had paid a heavy price for that slavery. Before her analysis she knew she was getting sicker, physically and mentally, and more depressed with no answers as to why it was occurring and, despite her academic achievement and high success in the outside world, she needed an antidepressant to sustain her. Outside the academic world of this second patient, her life was nil.

I put forward this example to state that the primary patient in this paper is similarly afflicted by an unknown imprint which has not given her what she has wanted in life. It has taken years of punishment and unhappiness for her to finally come to see the problem, which she feared even approaching until now. It was as if someplace inside she came to the conclusion that she had been an indentured slave for a long enough time and, by her dream that I recounted earlier, was indicating that she was ready to begin the journey to freedom.

I have described the nature of a person’s resistance and the fact that for that person, really for each of us, it is a matter of survival to fortify the particular resistances we use. My experience is that resistance becomes the greatest when the person approaches dealing with the imprint (which comes from the mother’s unconscious mind) more directly. I have had a few patients go quite a distance with me and then when this last bridge had to be crossed they left the analysis.

The sicker a person is the more there will be an identification of the analyst with the mother, the mother who is really responsible for the nature of the patient’s life. In the patient’s mind the analyst becomes that mother. It is what we call a psychotic identification and a psychotic transfer that the patient is in. In this transference the analyst becomes a dangerous person who has to be avoided. The sicker the patient is, having left analysis, the more the analyst will be slandered, certainly bad-mouthed. If it were possible the analyst would be destroyed. All the gains that such patients have made are slowly erased. All experiences leading up to this conclusion have to be denied. This kind of identification by the patient is difficult to break through even though reality recognizes that the analyst did not give the patient the trauma that he or she fears. However, the early infant self of the individual sees no demarcation and flees a mighty danger to their survival, really a false survival for they are condemned to be enslaved by their imprint.

This is why psychoanalysis is not simply a situation of two people talking (unless they are talking superficially). It becomes a matter of life or death. How much higher can the stakes be?

In the context of the dreams above, to modify Freud's well-known phrase "the royal road to the unconscious", I think it is correct to say that dreams are the royal road to Divine mind. It is by way of the dream, if interpreted correctly, that one knows which path to walk when one is in a dilemma and that information, so given, is the truest of any information given to man.

From my experience I know that when an individual turns away from this knowledge their lives become an unending series of problems, frustrations and anxieties. This condition will exist until the individual does what was originally intended or until extreme dysfunction prevails and all the consequences of taking the wrong path are corrected.

As psychoanalysts we have contracted to take on someone else's life as much as any physician in the physical sphere.

It has long been my opinion that Divine mind created psychoanalysis and led to Freud's glorious insight. It's as if Source said to man, "Here, you can always keep in touch with me".

The above explanation and description of infantile mental life has relevance in the political scene as well. It has long been known that fear reduces people, and politicians have used fear to cow the masses. It has long been a mystery to the pundits who follow politics why great masses of people vote against their own best interests. The answer lies in this infantile situation. When threats to survival are presented to the masses, it immediately induces fear and reduces the mass unconscious to this infantile state. The mass unconscious then behaves like the infant who sees the powerful politician as the powerful mother who will maintain its survival. It will deny the negative aspects of these politicians just as it has to deny the negatives of the mother. Psychologically, the masses can do nothing less. At this point in their thinking, they give up their power to the leaders who supposedly have the answers and, once these leaders have the power, will reflect those fears back to the masses. They will give the masses something to really be afraid about.

It is therefore imperative for each person to take responsibility for their own unconscious and the power contained therein. They have to come to see that the leaders who seem so knowledgeable are themselves in the dark about their own fears and have no real answers for the people.

Only arduous work and something like the revelations of these two dreams can provide relief. However, it has to be understood that there is still much work to be done to uncover where and from whom this command comes and to further analyze the implications that have been in every crevice of the patient’s life. It must also be understood that we as therapists must respect the patient’s resistance, since for them it is the only barrier to what they feel is abject terror and perhaps annihilation.

I view the dream, extending in time from thirty years ago when the patient came to me for her first consultation to the present, as the long hello. With this session behind us I trust we will get better acquainted and hopefully get to know each other well.

October 2010