According to Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winner in Economics, and a few others economists, the bailout was the biggest transfer of wealth from the people to the banks and Wall Street.

There were no outcries in the street about Socialism for the rich. There were no town halls to debate the issue. There were no guns and no threats.

There is a simple answer to the healthcare debate. It would finish the debate. The people have to cry with one voice to Congress, “We want exactly what you have.”

Socialism is Christ in action for "all the people."

The current political climate concerning universal health care is interesting from a psychological point of view. The fundamental question is why has this issue aroused so much anger and aggression. Logic dismisses all of the outlandish claims put forward by spurious grass root groups. It is clear and proven, by some courageous and curious newscasters who are following the process, that the insurance industry, the health industry and the pharmacology industries have hired a large number of hooligans and mercenaries to go to town hall meetings and disrupt them, stop them. They have been quite effective.

The Democrats have once again been caught flat-footed. It is another question why this party does not learn. Of course not all of the Democratic Party is for universal health care.

It is clear that all conceivable and inconceivable lies are being thrown into the public arena. People are confused. The insurance industry and the others mentioned above and their lobbyists are spending millions of dollars to stop the enactment of this long awaited (50 years) legislation.

It is also known that the above interested parties want the status quo to prevail. They are making a "bundle", as indeed Wall Street did a short while ago, especially Goldman Sachs.

It is also known these industries all have and are giving Congressmen money so that in essence there is a conflict of interest as to the loyalty of these lawmakers.

In politics money takes everything off the table. The question is will it do so at this current period of unrest in America. Big money is throwing any lie it can manufacture on the radio and the TV screen. What is not astonishing is that the level of emotional rage on the part of these mercenaries is akin to the rage of the Nazis and Fascists and unsurprisingly that propaganda is also sweeping across the land. It is as if the conditions (not quite) that swept the Nazis into control are being replicated in front of our eyes. People are cowed and so far Congress has not done anything to stop these lies (first amendment rights); that is to lie up to the heavens if one has the money and the agenda to carry them out.

The issue I am addressing is the "lie" and the willingness of people to accept the lie. Of course it is interesting that only one question need be asked. Since the cry is we don't want socialized medicine, with forty million people uninsured, why not? Indeed why is this outcry not seen or heard at the billions of dollars spent for unnecessary wars and for the defense of our country. No one complains as to the deficit these billions will bring to everyone's children.

It is apparent looking at the protestors that they would be likely to benefit by universal health care. The question then is why do the lawmakers accept the best medical care in the world -- from the government. It seems incomprehensible that the protestors do not know this. It seems that logically the protestors might put forward the cry we want the same health care as you in Congress and you in the White House and you in the federal courts enjoy.

Logic is not exactly front row here. Big business, which can sideswipe people's minds with blaring slogans and thugs, yes even female thugs, can scream out the slogans to disrupt and stop town hall meetings.

Of course the Republican Party is using this display of barbarism as a commentary on how people feel about health care and how people are expressing their right to speak. They do not mention this right is expressed with such intimidating voices as to leave the Democratic majority silent, frustrated, even confused.

PART ONE

My interest here is in how this begins and I want to put forward the patient whom I wrote about in various essays on my website; for example: The Mysterious Leap From The Mind to the Body, Apple Sauce, And Now Love, and The Untold Want.

PATIENT HISTORY

The patient is a fifty-year-old woman, divorced, with a twenty-five-year-old son who is independent. She is dark haired and dark eyed, a middling attractive woman. She comes from New York, the youngest of three children: an elder brother followed by a sister and then herself. The brother was an accountant with a leading, worldwide firm, and helped the patient get a job with this same firm. Her major had been in business, and she had also earned an MBA from a good Eastern university. She came to Los Angeles to get away from family and in-laws after her divorce became final some ten years ago; she wanted to make a fresh start. This she has done so well that she is a mid-level manager with ambitions to go higher.

DREAM

I am getting a massage. My older brother comes into the room – or maybe it’s my youngest brother. He says he knows how to work on my kidney issues which is the issue he thinks I have. He starts pushing on my body under the rib cage on the left. I really hurt. The pain is incredible. In fact, it is so intense that the wind is knocked out of me. I can barely croak out, “Stop! You’re hurting me!” Eventually, he does stop and goes out of the room. I am breathless on the table. It takes me a good ten minutes to even recover enough to be able to get up off the table and go out and yell at him. I am furious. I tell him that he will be getting the bill for my chiropractor visits from the injury he has created, and I’ll expect him to pay with no complaints. He is shocked and doesn’t say anything but is really surprised by my anger and tirade. My sister or someone else female is also there. I’m yelling at her, too, until I just can’t yell anymore. I turn and walk away still so angry.

Patient: I was so angry in this dream that I felt like I was shaking. Why did he injure me that way?

Dr. B: Is your brother a masseur in real life?

Patient: No, and I can’t imagine why I would let him touch me as if he were one. It is very intimate to get a massage.

Dr. B: Why did he think you had a kidney problem?

Patient: I think that kidney is the organ that represents “chi” or life force in acupuncture. Maybe I think I need help with my life force right now.

Dr. B: Do you?

Patient: Yes. I’m exhausted from working hard and am emotionally tired, too.

Dr. B: But he presses on your front left side under your ribs. Your kidneys are in the back.

Patient: I know. It makes no sense. What is the organ in that location?

Dr. B: The spleen is there.

Patient: I know liver represents anger but I don’t know what spleen is.

Dr. B: The spleen gives the body blood when there is an injury. It helps to clean the blood.

Patient: Why was my brother pressing on that area and why did it hurt so much? I don’t think he was pressing that hard.

Dr. B: Why is your sister in the dream?

Patient: I don’t know but I am very angry at her too. It might be my sister or just a female of some sort.

Dr. B: Who is the chiropractor?

Patient: I think that might be you. I come here for fixing emotional problems. The chiropractor fixes physical problems. But somehow, you are both fixers.

Dr. B: What really needs fixing?

Patient: My tendency to let the intellect rule my world when the unconscious should be the primary guide for me.

Dr. B: I think this dream is about what happens when wrong interpretations are given in therapy. I think your brother is injuring you by pressing on your spleen, the provider of your blood, which you need to live. When a therapist gives wrong advice to a patient, the therapist does damage by removing blood or life force from the patient. This is the same thing that a Mother does when she injects, unconsciously, her own rejected unconscious material into the fetus. She harms the fetus but the fetus doesn’t know. Patients don’t know that wrong advice from their therapists actually cause them harm.

There is another point to be made as to why your brother presses your spleen in addition to what has been said and that would be the pain you felt and I believe the pain he felt of carrying and suffering the imprint. Consequent to the pain would be the rage that the one he trusted, as we all trust our mothers, hurt him so badly. Therefore, rage like in “venting your spleen.”

Patient: Why is there harm from both my brother and my sister or the female energy?

Dr. B: This represents the passing of unconscious material by both the biological mother and the biological father; both imprint material into the fetus which is harmful. Because this imprinting is accepted unconsciously by the fetus and the child, the person who grows up to become an adult will easily and without resistance accept the same type of harmful material from a therapist who interprets or advises incorrectly. The person feels comfortable with the injection of bad advice because harmful unconscious material being pushed into the patient is the norm for the patient. You are angry in the dream, furious in fact, because you don’t want to permit or tolerate any more intrusion of the unconscious material of others. That is why you will come to me as the chiropractor to fix the problem.

COMMENTARY

It was interesting for me to re-read an article written over 50 years ago by Dr. Edward Glover of the British Psychoanalytic Society. It is called The Therapeutic Effect of Inexact Interpretation. I want to quote from Dr. Glover's conclusion and remember he is talking about this problem in the treatment of patients. He likens an inexact interpretation to “hysterical suggestions of a phobiac order”. He goes on to illustrate the point by using the family physician who

"…is the most original and in a sense daring technician,
who seldom gets credit for being an expert in
suggestion."

"Intuitively he attempts to deal at once with the
patient's superficial anxiety layers and his deepest
guilt layers. He is unwittingly a pure 'hysterical
suggestionist' in the sense that he plumps for
repression and tacitly offers his own repression
(ignorance) as a model; but by his use of drugs
he shows intuitive appreciation of the deeper cores
of guilt which, under other circumstances, give rise
to paranoia. And he plays the role of a "friendly
persecutor". He is in this respect the lineal
descendant of the first magical pharmacologists."

This paper displays a great knowledge of the unconscious and of unconscious fantasy, very popular in the 40's and 50's due to the paper by Susan Isaacs[i],The Nature and Function of Unconscious Phantasy.

A great and beautiful knowledge of the unconscious careening from anxiety to depression to guilt to paranoia in the minds of all people and the minds of patients coming for analysis is explicated here.

Dr. Glover's erudite explanation of and excuse for inexact interpretation is quite understandable. He is honest when he asks where do we as analysts stand at this time? What of our interpretations made last year or five years ago? Were they inexact and did we mislead our patients? He is not pointing a finger at anyone. He is calling attention to the state of psychoanalytic knowledge saying this is where we are now.

Today, some sixty years later, we can appreciate his erudition, his exquisite presentation of the facts and the theories present at the time. Today we are in possession of a lot more information and I can say unequivocally that inexact interpretation is not merely displacements. That is true but it is also true that they damage the mind, a mind that is perpetually asking for the truth. All minds on earth are hungry for that. All minds have been imprinted by the mother's unconscious unwittingly and suffer the consequences thereafter, usually unknowingly.

If one were to be more explicit, one could say inexact interpretations are lies and lies hurt the fragile minds of the fetus, a hurt from which it recoils and attempts to protect itself and continues to protect itself throughout life. But lies leave a perceptual apparatus that is confused; what is truth and what is a lie.

It is this confusion that unscrupulous people, whether corporations, governments or people in power, use to their great advantage especially those who feel it is better to have a confused electorate on the grounds that they are controllable and pliable. This is a condition that parents really want as well. They want their children manageable, quiet and contained.

It is this state of confusion that can be rolled into anxiety, depression or paranoia, easily.

The upheaval since the 60's has overturned this possibility and the times are disquieting here in America and in the world for it is clear few people believe their parents or believe their government. This is substantiated by our government which still does not believe in the great cleansing process of transparency and telling the truth.

The people can take any truth anytime.

Can the people in power in government or in power in industries or financial markets, can they take the truth.

If we survey our glimpses into the sorties we have hastily made at random - that is government, oil companies, defense companies especially those with global impact, etc. - all are felt to be representative of "less than good mother" who has consciously sent a powerful blow to the mind of the fetus causing it to turn to defense mechanisms it will use in all the rest of its life, a life more or less full of emotional disturbances and more or less full of physical illness.

The people, all the people, are the fetus.

In many it will cause great difficulties in perception. As I said above, what is good and what is true for me? After all who can argue against a health system that will look after your family and you and give you that peace of mind that all the people of Europe already enjoy.

This early masochism can cause an electorate to vote against its best interest much as a masochistic individual can sabotage his or her best interest.

Today, when quiet and civil discourse is absolutely necessary, voices on the other side are shouting out slogans of deception and lies and they may catch on to a fair sized number of the community of Americans. Here in fetalhood is where it all starts and here is where the attention of all who would treat the mind and emotions of people have to acquaint themselves with the terrain.

When someone in treatment comes to this point, the forces of the patient's unconscious, that is his or her imprint, will fight against his or her liberation. It will fight cunningly and desperately for the status quo. It is only the vigilance of the analyst and the great desire of the patient who is weary of suffering, to pass this Rubicon.

In real life as we see there is no one to point out to a mob that they are wanting something against their deepest interest, aside from those flacks that are there paid to do civil disobedience for mercenary reasons. In reality there is only one request all the people should make of their representatives in Congress:

Give us the same health plan that all of you have.

That would truly be democratic.

PART TWO – PATIENT HISTORY

We have met this patient before in my essays Evolution-The Polarity Question-and Chiefdom and Risk The Ocean. This is Melanie who is in her 30’s, a Harvard graduate and currently teaching at an Ivy League school.

DREAM

I’m underground in a man-made cave directly under the ‘Iolani Palace, the seat of the overthrown Hawaiian monarchy. This is where the last reigning monarch of Hawai’i, Queen Lili’uokalani, was put under house arrest after the coup d’état in 1893. I am wandering through the vast cave, built by the American- and European-born businessman and descendants of American missionaries who orchestrated the overthrow. The heirs of the Hawaiian monarchy are all there in the cave. An older woman shows me a pile of rusty heirlooms. I look closely at them, and realize that they are priceless jewels – the crown jewels of Hawai’i. Then, I realize that the woman showing me the jewels is Bernice Pauahi Bishop, who was the last descendant of the royal line of King Kamehameha I. Kamehameha I conquered the Hawaiian islands and established the kingdom of Hawai’i in 1810. Bernice Pauahi Bishop, the woman showing me the jewels, was his great-granddaughter. She is well-known for her philanthropic legacy, the Bishop Estate, which she instructed to fund “the support and education of orphans, and others in indigent circumstances, giving the preference to Hawaiians of pure or part aboriginal blood.” As I touch the jewels, I realize who she is and who all the people gathered in the cave are – the lost rulers and chiefs of Hawai’i.

The dream shifts, and I am now at the White House, where President Obama is giving a speech on the front lawn. Far to the side, there is a garage, and above the garage sit the Hawaiian royals, the same people who were in the cave. They are far away from the podium and the house. It occurs to me that the garage would have been the stables in the olden days, which is where slaves and servants were sometimes housed. The fact that the Hawaiian nobility are seated in the slaves’ quarters saddens me greatly. When the speech is over, Obama goes over and hugs them.

PATIENT ASSOCIATIONS

This dream harkens to an earlier dream I had about Obama, in which he is asking me to cut the fat off of his obese body. In the dream, it was a Hawaiian friend of mine, Keli’i (this name contains the word ali’i, which means “chief” in Hawaiian), who is asking me to do this, but through analysis with Dr. Bail, I realized that my dream was drawing an important parallel between President Obama and the Hawaiian chiefs, namely that his power as the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. was being hampered just as the Hawaiian chiefs’ were. The overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy was led by Lorrin A. Thurston, a grandson of American missionaries, who drew support from the American and European business class residing in Hawaii. When Queen Lili’uokalani was deposed on January 17, 1893, she ordered her forces to surrender to avoid bloodshed, stating the following:

“Now to avoid any collision of armed forces, and
perhaps the loss of life, I do this under protest and
impelled by said force yield my authority until such
time as the Government of the United States shall,
upon facts being presented to it, undo the action of its
representatives and reinstate me in the authority which I
claim as the Constitutional Sovereign of the Hawaiian Islands.”

Though President Grover Cleveland wanted to reinstate the monarchy, a congressional committee determined that the U.S. found “no historical, legal, or moral obligation for the U.S. government to provide reparations, assistance, or group rights to Native Hawaiians.” Cleveland’s successor, President William McKinley, signed the Newlands Resolution annexing Hawaii on July 7, 1898. Queen Lili’uokalani’s trust in the moral fiber of the U.S. government was thus betrayed.

In this new dream, the parallel between Obama and the Hawaiian chiefs is drawn more deeply. The Hawaiians were conquered by the Americans and are portrayed as servants or slaves in the dream. Obama joins them above the garage, and hugs them like family. He is thus coded as a slave himself, even though he is the President in name.

This makes me feel that Obama doesn’t really possess the authority of the office of the President, and that, no matter how good his intentions, he will go the way of the businessmen and the American elite. He is a chief inside, under those layers of “fat,” and so he belongs with the deposed monarchs. But if he is a slave, then he has no real power, and so it seems he is a puppet at the podium.

I did a little research on the school that Obama graduated from in Hawaii, which is also my alma mater – Punahou School. The land on which Punahou sits is called Ka Punahou, and it originally belonged to King Kamehameha I. It was passed down to various chiefs and was eventually gifted to Hiram Bingham, the first Christian missionary in Hawai’i. Bingham founded Oahu College (later, Punahou School) in 1842 as a school for the children of Congregational missionaries serving throughout the Pacific. It’s interesting to me that the founder of Kamehameha Schools, Bernice Pauahi Bishop, appears in my dream, showing me the jewels of the monarchy. During analysis, Dr. Bail described these jewels as symbols of moral righteousness, or the mana (spiritual power) that the Hawaiian people valued so highly in their leaders. In fact, the state motto is derived from a proclamation written by King Kamehameha III: “The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness.” It saddens me to see the $9B endowment for the Kamehameha Schools misused by the Trustees of the Bishop Estate (there have been various scandals about how the money is dispersed over the years) and also to observe the conservativism and elitism of Punahou School. The fact that Obama was educated at a school that was founded for and by missionaries, and then attended Columbia and Harvard, further inscribes him in an elitist context that complicates my dream-picture of him as the President who sits with the slaves. Oahu College eventually accepted students outside of the missionary circle, but prevented them from speaking Pidgin English (the patois of Hawaii). They were expected to conform to Standard English, which was just one of many ways that Hawaiians and Asians (brought over from China, Japan, Korea and the Phillipines) to work on the plantations) were slowly colonized.

I’ve been thinking about “colonization.” Hawaii and all of its inhabitants have been colonized by American culture for many generations. Obama’s own background, as diverse and rich as it is, is also an example of a colonized cultural identity. I feel I can speak to this as an Asian-Caucasian from Hawaii with family ties to the mainland. I think my dreams tell me that Obama went to the wrong “school”. He went through a system that required him to conform to an elitist, empire-building ideology, and he came out on top. No matter how good his intentions are, he is a colonized soul who sits with the other disenfranchised chiefs in the slaves’ quarters, while the American elite carries on the governing of the land. The Hawaiian motto is ignored, and the life of the land perishes because it is not ruled with righteousness. Where is our chief?

PART THREE – PATIENT HISTORY

This patient is Frank, a 53 year-old man who is a writer and a director of commercials. I have written about him in a number of essays such as Roundabout and Reflections on the Global Financial Crisis.

Patient: As usual there is much more that happened in this dream than I can remember. There are at first only fragments.

DREAM (7/21)

I am in my childhood hometown, a religious community. There was (in reality) a dormitory where the boys came from around the country for high school to learn about the religion. In the dream I see this building. I feel a huge ache for it, but it is vague and confusing. Then the dream comes into focus. I am in a large swimming pool with many children, maybe a few adults. I suddenly start flipping over and over this thin, blue, plastic rowboat, playing with it. It’s about seven feet long. All the kids love this and want to play with me. My son (now grown, but about five years old in the dream) wants to play too, which we do. He’s on my shoulders and head. I keep flipping the boat, but then for some reason he gets upset and stomps off. Somehow the pool seamlessly becomes land, a tangled garden. I find him, but he’s now very tiny, about two inches tall. He’s very moody, hiding under the leaves in this garden. Suddenly I see two spiders coming at him. (Are they black or light brown? I can’t quite remember, but my concern is that they are deadly poisonous.) Because he is so small they are almost his size. I snatch him up just before he is bitten, telling him he has to be careful. I hesitate telling him the spiders might have killed him. (Would that have happened?) I know they would have at the very least filled him with toxins. As best as I remember I tell him about the toxic part, but not about the possibility of dying, because I’m concerned that it might make him afraid of the world of nature (of which in fact in real life he now somewhat is.)

PATIENT INTERPRETATION

Dr. Bail pointed out that the blue plastic boat was like an earlier dream I’d had in which a baby in utero was covered with a thin blue blanket. In the dream I had been worried about this baby staying warm. The thin, blue blanket was a way of talking about depression and the lack of love, of warmth. He said that in this latest dream the boat signified the same issues and that because the boat was made of thin plastic it showed how flimsy things were for my son. It showed how I had not been able to help him when he had been young, because I had come from a world of depression myself, even as (in real life) I had tried to make light of it (flipping the boat). But it didn’t work, which is why in the dream he leaves the pool upset. I have been no help. Then he moves into the garden, growing smaller, the size of a fetus. This is my dream letting me know that while in his mother’s (my wife’s) womb, the two spiders which were his mother’s unconscious projections where out to kill him, perhaps even did kill who he might have been, but that in the dream it indicates I am now trying to save him.

Dr Bail then pointed out that the first part of the dream, about the school dormitory, was picking up on my dream from the night before in which I had somehow really faced for the first time that the religion I had grown up in was pretty much insane. The religion had been very specific about heaven and hell, etc – very vivid – but it was quite false from everything I have come to understand and was followed to such a degree by its adherents that it was really a form of insanity. This was a powerful and difficult discovery for me. My pain for the boys in this dormitory was that they were sent away from their families to learn about something that was insane. Of course, what does that say about their families?

For the next two nights it seems that my dreams continued with this theme.

DREAM (7/22)

I am with a very conservative, extended Republican family that is some mix of my hometown and the far west. I am picking up folded cowboy dude clothes worn by the family, hoping and not hoping to be invited for dinner, wondering if I need to go back out by myself on the lonely hillside surrounding their home.

PATIENT INTERPRETATION

The answer to this question is that this family, dressing up in fake cowboy dude gear is, for instance, like George Bush’s family with his “ranch” in Texas or like the religious people I grew up with, etc. They will never appreciate anything about what I believe. Therefore I am wasting my time being with them. I should only be with people who can be helped by what I have been learning from my dreams. I will need to go back out on that hillside and hopefully at some point I will be able to help my son and people like him who have been dealt so much damage but are open to being picked up.

DREAM (7/23)

In this dream I come to understand that the housekeeper under my employ when my son was young used to take him to movies all afternoon - at least two movies a day, maybe more. I didn’t know this. I didn’t really care where he was at the time. Such a waste - I was a terrible father. I felt just awful in the dream. Then there was talk of a pink Volkswagen bus in which whole families traveled and also slept.

PATIENT INTERPRETATION

My association with the VW bus was of a “pink torpedo,” which is a rock ‘n roll reference to the penis. A weapon, Bail noted. Also Volkswagen was a Hitler invention, Fascist. This underlined what I had been coming to understand, that families primarily live in Fascist constructs. Mine did. I basically killed my son’s soul, even before he was born, possibly at conception with my pink torpedo. Then I finished the job by paying very little attention to him growing up, so that in fact he could easily have been in the movies all day long and I would never have known. This realization, this feeling (as opposed to some intellectual understanding) was almost unbearable.

My only consolation is that in the first dream (7/21), I was now trying to save my son although, as Dr. Bail has made clear, it will take great care, maturity and patience for this to succeed.

DREAM (8/11)

There is a film that I’m making. Is it about a pilot? Has he gone from New York to Pennsylvania? It’s pretty unclear. Is it a TV show or a movie? I’m not sure. Are we rewriting it as we go along? There is some talk that the pilot loses part of his memory in a number of scenes, but I say that feels very clichéd, very much like a soap opera. I am beginning to wake up, but then I hear that this pilot has jettisoned all his black passengers, saying they were all temporary. Although I find this to be horrible I have this feeling that there had been some back section of the plane, that he’d had no choice if he were to save the plane, but I am then told, no, that they were pushed out of an open door in the body of the plane by the stewardesses. I wake up even more horrified by this. In fact this, coupled with the previous dream, leaves me feeling dreadful on waking.

PATIENT ASSOCIATIONS

I said that I have often felt that pilots in dreams were referring to Dr. Bail, since he was a flyer in WW2. But it didn’t make sense, the murderousness, although I was open to it being about the brutality of the work with Dr. Bail, how painful the truth can be, i.e.: the first dream of the night. Dr Bail asked what the pilot looked like. I said he wore a dark, blue uniform and an elegant cap with a lot of gold ornamentation. Impressive. The pilot was calm. One of the things that most troubled me about this dream was that these black passengers allowed themselves to be pushed out the door. How did they get there so docily? Why did they stand so near the door and not fight back? Also the dream had been clear, these were stewardesses, not the more politically correct flight attendants, which might have included some men. I even felt like these stewardesses were wearing high heels like in the early days of flying, which only accentuated further the lack of fight in the victims.

PATIENT COMMENTARY

When Dr. Bail said that he felt my dream was saying that the pilot was President Obama, that the president is the pilot of our country, my heart sank. I have now had numerous troubling dreams about Barack Obama, even as I joyfully supported him, worked for him and, of course, voted for him. But it has become clear to me that his intellectuality and the intellectuality, even rapacity of those around him, has made it impossible for him to draw from the deeper parts of himself, from his unconscious, from his feminine unconscious. A number of my dreams have had him doomed, even as Dr. Bail, in for instance his last essay, has still held out hope. None of my dreams have raised the possibility of hope and this dream seemed to be the worst yet. Dr. Bail went on to say that Obama had gotten elected promising to free “the slaves,” but that this dream seemed to indicate that he had been jettisoning them instead. Further the dream indicated that Obama had no memory any more, perhaps because of his Ivy League education, his embrace of all things that constitute this culture. Whatever the core reasons it was now being indicated that Obama has turned into a merciless pilot, willing to sacrifice those who can’t protect themselves.

And what of the passengers, so willing to be pushed out the door? Dr. Bail suggested I reread his essay “Master, Slaves and Imprints,” which describes how people, so bombarded with the imprint will with ease be led to the open door of any jet, to be pushed out without the slightest struggle. We ended by discussing the current Health Care controversy - how the citizens of this country are so willing to throw away reasonable healthcare for themselves and their children so that Wall Street, the bankers and the CEOs can be awarded trillions for their mistakes, so that the generals can keep waging hopeless, bloody wars.

DR. BAIL’S COMMENTARY

The account of the sessions above is essentially an accurate reporting of our work. I think the patient, Frank, is a bit too severe with himself and his feelings of failing his son but then do we not all fail our children to a greater or lesser extent and, it should be noted, the real danger was from the spiders, ever a symbol for the mother. If we were holding everyone accountable, as Shakespeare says, to this severity who would escape a whipping.

The boy’s mother was herself emotionally abandoned by her mother and so on back through the generations. Let us not forget that women, in the history of mankind, have not exactly been treated well, in fact badly for the most part, and it is ironic that we say “mankind” – why not “womankind”? Because it is essentially the history of men and their folly and what a shabby history it is.

Perhaps the new age - the one that is beginning to simmer, little bubbles puffing out here and there around the globe - looks toward a brighter more appreciative role for women in this story of evolution. Whereas the primary focus of this series of dreams has to do with parental failure, it once again shows us that dreams are our friends and they do contain answers that all of us need to know.

We have spent one hundred years of falsely believing that dreams and their container, the unconscious, is a fearful place, a dangerous place to be and to be avoided at all costs. That simply is dead wrong. One can forgive Freud that dictum. He was, after all, the first explorer of the terrifying domain of the unknown. We can forgive explorers.

We have to let that idea go as indeed there are hundreds and maybe thousands of ideas we will have to drop as we move toward a more enlightened world society. In that journey the unconscious will have to come forward and show men in their blind devotion to the intellect how wrong that devotion can be and reveal what path we should take. Every person who has taken the step in that direction is sending the message that the unconscious is a place of the most profound knowledge – better and more complete than all the encyclopedias – even more up-to-date than Wikopedia.

Just as Shakespeare wrote, “Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast”, it is contiguous to the unconscious which has the magic, the simplicity, the truth to soothe our fevered anxieties, our disquieting guilt, our fearful paranoia. The unconscious is symbolized by the feminine. In a sense the future will belong to the feminine. But more true it will belong to the fruit of the marriage between the feminine and the masculine, that is between the unconscious and the conscious.

More specifically I wish to point out that the child in the dream runs away and shrinks to the size of two inches. Is this an embryo? How old is an embryo that is two inches? The answer is four to six weeks. This is very important because using Yeatsian symbolism the beast (the two spiders) is slouching toward Bethlehem (the embryo). Bethlehem, the story of the Christ child, is the story of every child. Every child is the blessing. Every child is the purity. And every child so conceived already faces the threat of projections from which he/she cannot protect themselves. I point this out because recent findings by scientists at the University of Maastricht Hospital have proved that fetuses do respond to stimuli and they do have memory.[ii] What this dream leads me to infer is that stimuli from the mother’s unconscious enters much earlier than the thirty weeks postulated by the scientific work at Maastricht. If so I would expect the scientists will develop the method and means to ascertain this speculation that the projections from the mother’s unconscious access the embryo as early as four to six weeks and already determine it’s destiny.

COMMENTARY

Again the patient, Frank, has faithfully transcribed the dreams and our discussion concerning the meaning of these dreams. In view of the meaning, I think it important to state that the external stimulus to this series of dreams is the national debate over health care in this country.

Seldom have so many lies been put forward by the opposition, that is the Republicans, who are quite willing to say they want health care reform but say no to every suggestion.

From the outset they were so strident in their opposition that President Obama took the single payer, government sponsored option off the table. They openly made it clear to their constituents, and whoever else might listen, that the government was evil and government control would be a disaster. All this while they have not mentioned that Social Security, Medicare and the Veterans Administration is that kind of system. They do not mention that they get the best health care in the country paid for by the government and that they are the recipients of socialized medicine. They have no scruples about this deception and the people are so confused they cannot think to ask. The people are misled into different possibilities that the government will enslave them or create death panels to kill them. These congressional Republicans and senatorial Republicans seem quite willing to suggest these lies so as to terrorize their constituents into clamoring for the status quo. Meanwhile these "masters" deprecate and vilify the national health care system in European countries all of which rank much higher in every way than the one currently in America. These lawmakers are certainly the descendents of Goebbels who preached the big lie and repeated it endlessly until the downfall of the Nazi regime, at which point he killed his family and then himself.

This kind of lying seems to these people to be free of consequences, but there is no such thing in the world as stimuli without ensuing reactions; no such thing as cause without effect.

Something quite not nice is being stored up and someone, maybe a lot of people, will be the unwilling victim of the lies sown at these times.

It is strange that there is apathy in the Democratic Party and there is even a staunchly conservative group that opposes health care reform. Even more ominous is an ambivalence on the part of President Obama.

No one asks how many members of Congress are recipients of money from the insurance companies, the health care industry or the pharmaceutical industry. No one has said or written that all of these people who are the recipients are deeply in conflict and in no way able to discuss or legislate an honest health care bill without bias. Each one should, for their consciences sake, recuse himself. If they do not, there will be consequences in their own individual unconscious and in their lives. This is universal law. Again there is no cause without an effect. Dishonesty is a powerful cause and it will effect and reflect.

Of course it is interesting to an analyst watching this and hearing the lies and knowing how ill lies make people. The analyst is seeing lies instatu nascendi and knows people will be ill and money will have to be spent on physical and emotional illness which will redound paid for by the government to that particular family.

These facts the patient knows and it torments him to see and hear all that is going on as it repeats the lies and deception in his own family causing anxiety, fear, paranoia and depression in him and in all of his siblings. The results of this upbringing he sees in his brothers and sisters today. Each in his/her own way is barely coping yet pretending, the way so many people pretend, artificially with forced gaiety, with unease, with frightened looks. And then there are the dreams of his sibling's children and the one dream about his niece, albeit young, even before she has endured life's travail, already contemplating suicide.

However, this time he has this dream about the pilot, who I said was President Obama, on a flight to jettison the blacks so willingly, like lemmings go to their death.

Personally I know about jumping out of an airplane. It is a frightening experience even with a parachute on your back. I cannot find the words to describe how it would feel to step from a plane without a parachute. There is no word yet in any language to describe that horrific feeling. Yet they go like lemmings, and here I would say these are the "slaves" I have talked about in my essay, Masters, Slaves and the Imprint. Most startling is the fact that it is President Obama who is piloting this plane.

Slavery is not genetic. It is imprinted and a man-made thing.

Finally what is further of interest is that the patient, Frank, has, over the last seven months, had dreams of President Obama. His unconscious has penetrated to the core of the President's being. No one can hide from someone's unconscious probing. The truth of that probing will come out. What is so fearsome is that the L.A. Times on August 17th printed an article with the headlines:

White House Takes the Public Option Off The Table

The poor, the sick, the uninsured will be jettisoned as in the dream. I have not ever known when the unconscious is wrong. Yet in fairness to everyone, since the matter of health care is not closed, we have to defer our final discussion as to whether President Obama, who is the leader, the pilot of the country, will take care of the slaves as he promised.

We do not have to worry about the masters. They always know how to take care of themselves.

PART FOUR - PATIENT HISTORY

The patient is a 60 year old woman who is now primarily a housewife but spends a lot of time taking care of her husband and her mother who lives in another city. She was formerly in the commercial TV business.

Patient: I had a small dream.

DREAM

I met Ben, a neighbor, who was carrying an animal, a cross between a pig and a possum. He cuddled it saying it was so cute. I was carrying a head of broccoli. I see that the middle is spoiled.

ASSOCIATIONS

Ben is an older man who sells dog things. He likes to engage people and talk always of himself. I saw him the other day and said hello. I thought in the dream the animal was strange and I remember that pigs remind me of Arianna Huffington's book, "Pigs at the Trough", exposing Wall Street and their shenanigans which brought our financial system down. After all possums are large rodents. Who wants to cradle and cuddle that? Oh, yes, Ben is a Republican and talks against Obama. My husband talks to Ben sometimes. Ben exasperates him so he is reduced to saying to Ben, "You are just full of shit". In other words there is just no talking to Ben at all.

Dr. B: What about the broccoli?

Patient: First let me talk about the health care debate. I simply do not understand the Democrats. They seem to have blown the whole issue. There is so much confusion and I don't understand Obama and what he is saying, what he is taking off the table and then putting it back. Everyone is confused. All together I am very distressed about all that is going on and why are the Democrats paying any attention to the Republicans who agree to cooperate but do not do so. So why bother.

Dr. B: The broccoli?

Patient: Well, it was rotten in the center and I should have and would have thrown it away. You know broccoli is very good for you and very green and very healthy. But green also means new and inexperienced.

Dr. B: In view of what you have been saying, the broccoli stands for President Obama and what your dream is saying is that he is

rotten inside, that he has no guts and, being weak, is consequently indecisive and can be led about by his nose.

Patient: Well, that makes sense. It is the only thing that makes sense and why this has gone so completely array.

Dr. B: I think this is close to what you told me about your friend, the one who told you her dream:

'Your friend was in bed and chained by her arms to the
bedpost and by her feet to the lower bedpost. A man
appeared who began to unchain her. She cried out, "
Please, don't touch me. It is so painful. Leave me alone"
and the man did.'

And the point of that dream, you remember, was that this was a person who wanted to be enslaved, who could not tolerate what it would take to be free. It seems that President Obama, and I hate to say this, would appear to be wearing the aplomb and credential of a great university but inside is the slave that did not get unshackled despite his education. Of course, it would not since Harvard can only give an external education and make him a lawyer. This would only pump up his ego. It would not have to do with his unconscious and also with what is, inside him, still enslaved.

I think this explains why he has befriended and made deals with the Wall Street crowd and has given away all of his health care cards about health care change before he had to do so. So, well, I agree with you it is sad.

Patient: I guess Ben represents the Republican Party. They are rats and pigs wallowing in what they have. It is all so wrong. All of Congress has socialized medicine, like the VA, single payer. How terrible. They talk against what they have to their people and confuse these people. They simply do not want to give the people what they have and actually get these people to vote for their continued slavery. It is shameless and immoral. So why won't the Democratic Party say something.

Dr. B: Indeed, why? Has anyone said let all who have received money from these industries recuse themselves? Is shameless now a badge of honor? Is conscience no longer believed in? Is decency no longer cared about?

Patient: I guess not, but both parties are just bad, bad. Just corrupt. We need a really independent, honest party that really works for the people.

COMMENTARY

I have already commented about many of the issues raised here. Stunning is the fact that three people have come to the startling truth about President Obama. It says something about the unconscious mind that it is able to reveal a truth one could never get to in reality, whatever and however many questions would be asked and answered.

In all these sessions the unconscious comes to it quickly, sharply and sickeningly.

CONCLUSION

It seems to me that a discipline like psychoanalysis that can penetrate the nest of lies so easily and can predict the truth is something that all of mankind would rejoice in having. But then on second thought there may be many powerful people and powerful interests that do not want us to have the truth unveiled at any cost and might do violence to the person unveiling that truth.

Yet when all is done it seems our own society, in such turmoil as are so many throughout the world, can ill afford to look away from this bright light that can lead the way to better solutions and to better times in the future. No more lies. No more people's minds being dashed to smithereens with lies causing confusion, anxiety, and worse.

This proposition is no longer up to be contested. It is a fact, like a scientific fact. It sits there implacable and confident in its factness like E-MC squared.

And that is a fact.

My commentary runs throughout this quartet of essays. The patient in Part Two has written beautifully the content of our session and has rounded out the hour with a disheartening piece of history and a disheartening revelation about President Obama.

It is in the last essay of this quartet that the essential slave core of President Obama is revealed and makes clear what has puzzled everyone for a number of months.

The history of Hawaii resembles that of the American Indian and the American empire grows to be more like Rome.

In Babylonia the writing was on the wall of the palace. Now with these essays the writing is on the wall in the Oval office.

[i] R.D.Hinshelwood, A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought, 1952, Pgs 67-121

[ii] Dr. Jan Nijhuis, Maastricht University Medical Center, Fetuses Have Memory Study, Child Development Journal, July/August 2009