Observers of the political scene have been confused by the steady voting of certain blocs in the country that constantly and happily, it seems, vote on candidates and issues that will ultimately adversely affect all of us. These pundits are bewildered as rightly anyone might be at this behavior.

However, it is not so different from abused children who are brought to court and asked whether they wanted to go home or to a foster home. A very high percentage say home - to the parents who have abused them and will again.

It is not a mystery if one considers a forceful projection of a mother’s unwanted self into the infant, splitting his/her nascent being– a violent and therefore hateful experience for the child (see The Mother’s Signature, 2001, for a discussion of the imprinting process). The child has to split this off and deny its existence or has to advertise its existence. These are individuals who later seek out partners who will duplicate this infantile experience. Later in life these people choose to be badly treated and seem to be truculently happy as if daring anyone to stop them from their pain. No one can.

This knowledge is the answer to the pundit's confusion. This knowledge gives information about what aspect of everyday life, that is political life, that seems obscure, confusing and impenetrable.

A patient in his 50's has had a few marriages, always with cruel women, who have been ringers for his mother, a woman who would bring her children to an older dentist in the city. This dentist did not give anyone anesthesia nor did he numb the teeth for any work he did. Mind you, this is in a large city of many of hundreds of thousands of people with very good medical and dental professionals. When the patient would cry and tremble at the pain in fixing his cavities, his mother shook him and scolded him. Why was he so bad?

The description of the experience with the dentist was his association to a dream he had previously. In the dream he was in Montana in a beautiful field of grass. The sky and weather were perfect and on a knoll was a rather ramshackle house. He immediately thought of the dentist who had caused so much pain and his mother who insisted that he endure it.

I will come back to the Montana dream, for in this analytic session he was talking about a current disturbing dream about his wife from whom he has separated recently. In this dream, she showed him her car that she had wrecked. (This was true for many cars he had given her). He spoke in the dream of his insurance costs per month, which were astronomical. He then offered her his Hummer, which she immediately drove and wrecked. He was beside himself with rage and tried to kick her. She backed away and said, "I am going to call the police and say you threatened my life." He knew he had gone too far and already saw the report, the police coming, being in jail, etc. He was convinced the police believed women without evidence. He began to rage in the session. I stopped him because it was an old canard. I said, "Why did you lend her your car? Indeed, why are you even with her knowing what kind of woman she is?" There were so many previous dreams, all of which documented the reality she had created for herself and for him and all of this an astounding likeness to his unending suffering as an infant and child and to that pained state of infancy that he has lived essentially all of his life. He knew of her emotional instability and her irresponsibility and of her forays into cruelty.

He stopped and thought, "True, we have talked about this many times.” Silence. "Why do I have this dream now?” he asked himself. I echoed his thought. He said, "I was thinking of 1989 when I met my wife." I reminded him even then she was revealing all the qualities she paraded now. Then he said, "I have a great feeling of nostalgia for the old days. I feel guilty about my mother, that I was not good enough, that I have betrayed her.” Then he recalled the Montana dream and its associations to the dentist. I said, "This is why you have the current dream. Your guilt over having your life pain free is too much. Your mother imprinted you with great pain and you eroticized that pain as the only way to stay alive. This is why, as you know, you are constantly wanting to have sex with your wife but it is always to avoid the feeling of pain. You are alive and you have accomplished much in one area of your life, your profession. But the rest is appallingly full of pain and chaos and, when it has stopped being painful for awhile as it has now, you bring back the entire picture of it and a wish to be in chaos and pain as you were with your wife and before with other women and before with your mother who taught you how to have a miserable life which you have had until now. It is as if you are saying beneath your consciousness, 'Oh, my God it is just too quiet, too dull. It is too painful to be in the lap of luxury. Oh, my God. Let me have what I know and what I have lived all my life. Let me have my unhappiness.' That will make you happy. He said, "When you say it like that it sounds absolutely stupid except it's like the way I have lived over 50 years." And there we stopped for the day.

This man became a successful physician, a reversal of the ill, traumatized person he was, and in his unconscious, all the patients were the traumatized parts of himself – all of which he was trying to heal -- a Sisyphusian task at best. Further analysis revealed that the women he married represented all the worthless, self-hating aspects of his mother – that is, his mother projected these unbearable feelings into him. He split off such an intolerable identity and then repeatedly married women who embodied hatred and worthlessness.

I have translated the understanding of an individual trauma into an understanding of a mass phenomenon because most people have been emotionally traumatized in their infancy and can no longer recall it or who was the agent of this abuse - an abuse not consciously perpetrated for the most part but which exists nonetheless and has existed in every person, in every country, in every culture for thousands and thousands of years.

We are burdened by these insults to the mind. They are old in the mass population. They are ever with us and unconsciously impelling us to actions that are detrimental to our lives - and curiously if one is not in an analysis which examines minutely the fabric of one's daily existence - one never knows when the consequences begin to fall. Then it seems that our luck has run out or we are cursed by God. There is always an "or". There is hardly ever a "let me try to think when my bad luck started." Naturally when it comes to an initial trauma of infancy, as indicated with Dr. D, it becomes very clear as to how exactly the seeds for his future life were sown and there is an inevitability to that life, unless one is in analysis. Otherwise one can do nothing about it since one does not know the cause. To do anything about a disaster, one must know the cause, as for example, if we know someone has a bacterial infection we know what antibiotic to administer. All science is based on knowing the origin of things so that we may be more the master of those things, of our lives.

So to sum up, if Dr. D did not know the origin of his illness, he was doomed to repeat it as he has on three prior occasions with unsuitable women. These women were cut from the same mold as this cruel mother. In addition, she married a man, his father, who was hugely successful but equally and uniformly sadistic, crude, a bore, an alcoholic, an abuser of his wife and of his children. Knowing this, one can predict that none of the children stood a good chance of surviving their lives without addiction - whether alcohol or drugs - or without violent behavior that might get them killed or maimed. This prediction would turn out to be true.

An important element in this equation is the capacity to forget. Sometimes to forget might be fatal to us. If we do not remember, we tend to repeat the mistakes already a fact. If we cannot remember what is now in our unconscious, we are destined to repeat that trauma in someway, hardly ever the same way. In addition to this internal dynamic, the external world is full of forgetfulness as well as the ways and means for us to forget.

If a country is beset by disasters of the leader's making, the administration of that leader will do what it can to distract the population. It tries not to call attention to its implication in any misstep or in any adventure that it undertook which turned out badly. This is not too hard to accomplish for the ruling party in any country already has a population used to being abused and used to forgetting the origin of that abuse. The ruling party's interest is always in obscuring it's responsibility when things go badly. This is in the nature of mankind - being that leaders themselves are so often the victim of abusive parents. I am speaking not only of physical abuse, for most abuse is of an emotional nature.

Our leaders are as liable as any of us to go astray, as astray as Dr. D. Further, leaders often surround themselves with similar companions. This intensifies the forces which can propel bad judgments which are, of course, rationalized. Human beings are, after all a clever species. We can rationalize anything. The problem is that rationalization is a lie and sooner or later the whole thing falls apart. If there is no one able to speak the truth, a lie may go on longer. But ultimately it will fall apart and then everything falls apart. One can examine civilization to see this and verify it again and again. What is astounding is that our current leaders do not seem to read history. The conclusion must be that they are so intoxicated with their power that they truly believe they can do what they want.

We call this arrogance and/or omnipotence and every arrogance will have a fall. It is as inevitable as the sun rising tomorrow. This is known as the law of karma - every action has a consequence, and an action based on a false perception, even though rationalized, will have a fall. It is only a question of time. This is a law of the universe. The Bible says it simply and eloquently, "As ye sow, so shall ye reap". There is no escape in this life on earth from that truth.

It is a stunning fact that no government on earth acknowledges the existence of the unconscious in human affairs yet that instrument determines the fate of every individual on earth. Because no government acknowledges the profound effect of the unconscious, so goes every other institution - newspapers, TV, broadcast radio, publishing companies, etc. Yet this force of the unconscious rules our lives and determines our fate.

One can only see that all human activity is the result of what I call "intellectual consciousness." It is the result of an intellect devoid of a base, a ballast to anchor it in psychic reality, which is the only true reality and the one that can check what we as a people - a government, a congress, a president - says, plans, promulgates and acts. Our unconscious has an answer to all of the above. It speaks with profound knowledge because it contains the knowledge of all mankind, of all ages of man. The unconscious can lend credence and belief to an action or a thought or it can say, "Do not go there because if you do it will be at your peril."

Anyone in an analysis - even the most devoted skeptic - will eventually concede, if he is open minded, that he does not rule his universe. Forces quite beyond his consciousness do.

We have gone for so many thousands of years without the recognition, exploration and acceptance of the unconscious that one can only say that the intellect has failed in its lofty intention to bring peace to the world, enough food and shelter to mankind, a peaceful pursuit by each man or woman of his or her life, security, and most of all happiness. Is it not time we accept what we have for so long tried to exclude from our consciousness - that we are not masters of our destiny by intellect alone, just as we are not masters of the natural forces that crackle like earthquakes, that crash like the ocean, that twist and twirl around like tornadoes and hurricanes. If we misuse the environment, there will be a reckoning for all of mankind, led to this folly by the rationalizations of a few interested not in the welfare of mankind but of profit and power for themselves.

We must explore the unconscious as we have explored the physical universe. Admittedly, it is much easier to explore the physical universe for it is an external thing and easily sold by its obvious allure. In knowing the unconscious lies man's salvation, his destiny, his peace, his true mastery of himself, his true realization, his true connection with all things living and all things supposedly dead, like mountains, with every existing entity in this world and all other worlds we know so little about and worlds we have yet to discover. It is in this discovery that we will become free to know the one and only true reality.

It is in this search that we find our moral compass. Would any of us dare step onto an airplane or a ship without a compass? Yet we are so prideful that we live our lives without the instrument that the one source has given us all - a moral compass - that lies in our unconscious. The world has been hurling on the wings of a single dimensionality without the sobriety and the calming weight of unconscious knowledge.

Oh, Icarus, we have forgotten your message and Minerva, though we named you Goddess of Wisdom, we have yet to enter the holiness of your temple. To a greater or lesser degree we are all Dr. Dombrowski. Let us pray!

October 9, 2005
(WB2005)