The reptiles belong to the vertebrates. They are midway between the fishes and the mammals. The fishes cannot live apart from the water, and the amphibians must spend the first part of their life there. The reptiles were the first to breathe away from the water and live on land.

The age of reptiles refers to the early Mesozoic era in the earth’s history. During this period the reptiles reached their greatest importance. Flying reptile forms lived at this time. The Mesozoic era occurred between 70 and 220 million years ago. During this time the dinosaurs appeared, then became extinct and the flowering plants appeared.

A man dreams that he is standing on a dock; his wife sits – she dangles one leg in the water. He is fascinated by the water, which is dark. It is almost dark. He thinks he sees fish swimming, and then a large shape, which nears, with a huge mouth. It’s a reptile – a crocodile. “Get your leg out of the water” he says to his wife. But she is unmoved by his words and keeps dangling her leg. He is very scared.

I do not want to exhaust all the associations of that particular day. I hope it will be enough to say that his wife is also in analysis and that day has a severe “cold”. She refuses to see a doctor, though she is ill enough to go to bed. Neither does she see her analyst with whom she is having a fight.

I am emphasizing here what the wife does not do so that she may be well or get well. He says that the reptile has not changed its structure for millions of years. He is frightened by that although fascinated by the water and wanting to swim in it. I will stop here, for one of the questions they face, and all of us face, is the fascination and wish to “be a reptile” and - I am speaking metaphorically – to exist unchanging and worse still, if any attempt to change is induced, the crocodile will fight in the ways it knows best; to float unseen, bite with its teeth, lash with its tail. Why does it defend itself with such fury? How has it maintained itself over the millions of years, unchanging, unfeeling as far as we know, remorseless, heedless, incomprehensible, as we no more comprehend where we came from or how?

Someone dreams he is in a swimming pool infested with fish, feces, scum, dark mounds floating around and to his terror, crocodiles and alligators. The water is up to his mouth. He is benumbed. On the diving board is a childhood friend whose name is “Cander”. Cander looks at him. There was in that instant, he said, the terror of imminent extinction and the calmness of eternity.

What is this pool and, if a pool, how does it come to contain the reptiles seen? On the face of it, the situation appears absolutely beyond redemption. There is only the school boy friend “Cander”. Though spelled with an “e”, it must stand for candor with an “o”.

Can the truth, for I thought the name was linked to that, prevail against these terrible odds? Besides, what interpretation does one give in view of the odds of survival?

I have raised here the question specifically and simply, why does man resist the facts and the truth as far as he can see it? Why does he object so violently to being helped, when at that very moment he is a chomp away from destruction?

How are the crocodiles and the alligators made to vanish – or do we want them to?

There is apparently a very rich life within the mind. There is a mind that marks down events. We need the artists to learn the encoded stone, to help us decipher the mysteries in them.

As you know, man came on the scene late, some two million years ago roughly. New findings add a half million every so often. There is nothing written beyond 3000 B.C. If we are to discover anything about man, of his internal nature as well as external, perhaps, as Freud hoped, the dream might provide the key.

How does Man, a recent arrival, come to dream of reptiles? Years later this man, during the course of his associations about the reptiles in the pool dream, is now confronted with making the choice between living and choosing to be not one of many but one among many. He wonders whether he would not be better off being a crocodile which he likened to being unchanging – a least in his lifetime – impervious to his feelings and consequently near Death itself.

A crocodile will always be a crocodile, a lion itself, but man might be man thinking – and therefore in constant flux, which does not provide any security to him. Man can be a reptile, if he stops thinking and all the consequences of that.

In this sense I feel the lure to become a reptile has in it wishes for immortality, but of a specific kind; not through fame due to great work, or even saintliness but through a mere survival and we would be foolish to underestimate that in these times.

The problem then is to choose for life or to choose for any of those styles which give the illusion of life, with noise, and the unkempt face of stone which must be so altered as to give the illusion of speech and of movement.

One of the great stones of these times, indeed all times, has been institutions. Today I can say that psychoanalytic institutions are in this respect no different from all the rest. They prize continuity, they work for security, they speak for the future, as if dead things had a future. They are anti-individual, therefore anti-psychoanalytic. The psychoanalysts’ first and only concern is that the individual enter himself.

Institutions are essentially reptiles and reptiles have no morals; only man, the free thinking man has the chance to endure the idea of living a moral life.

Man within institutions does not have to be moral; all acts are thought and done in the name of and for the good of the institution.

What have the reptiles ever contributed to civilization or to analysis?

But we should be fools to turn our backs on them or to kill them for we still do not know why they are here, anymore than we know why we are here

We are artists and I do not believe that means ‘not scientists.” Being artists means “in our own style.” Institutions cannot and do not want to give us our own style.

No one can give us our freedom, but we can give away whatever vestige of it we have, in which case it behooves us to know that we thereby become a stone and the infinite future transformed immediately into the infinite past.