A typical Oedipal Dream

A woman in her mid fifties who lives by herself upon her disability income, and depends heavily upon an older man, who is in his late seventies, for transportation, and for bailing her out every now and then with small sums, half way through the session declared that she went to bed with this benefactor of her's.
Though she started treatment less than an year ago, and sees me only once a month, due to successful analysis of a few of her dreams, has shown a good improvement in facing up to the shackles of her agoraphobia, and had actually come to the session driving all by herself for the first time in years.
In the session initially she talked about her boyfriend - who is different from her benefactor - and how she is finding him more and more unappealing because he is a control freak who constantly judges her, finding faults with whatever she does. Their relationship is not that deep. They met only a few months ago, and she feels that he, who was divorced a couple of years ago, is using her as stop gap girlfriend till he finds somebody better. But lacking confidence in herself she has been unable to leave him.
She triumphantly declared that while her benefactor's wife went to Florida,  he invited her to his house to stay overnight and they ended up making love. And though he is much older than her, she declared that the sex was highly satisfactory. When asked if he could perform to her satisfaction, considering he is in his late Seventies, she said sexual satisfaction and dissatisfaction has less to do with how one performs than how one feels about the person one is making love to. Pleasure and unpleasure from sex is all in your head.
Then after talking some other things she suddenly brought up the following dream.

I am setting up a party event at of all places in the White House. Obama and I sneak around and we make love in a corridor. But Michelle was catching on to it. For she looked as if she was wondering as to why Obama would like to hang around so much with a help.

Patient added that she feels no sexual attraction towards Obama, so it is weird that she was making love to him in the dream. Now we know that kings and queens, presidents and celebrities, are used by the dream-work to represent parents. So behind Obama stood her father and behind Michelle her mother. Her Oedipal wishes towards Obama (father substitute) being hindered by the spying Michelle (mother substitute).

Confident that this Oedipal dream was sparked by her making love to her benefactor while his wife was away in Florida, I asked the patient if the dream occurred immediately after the event.

Patient said no. The dream had occurred a few days before that.

But after talking a few other things she went back to the dream and said, "The dream occurred before we made love because I knew that is what is going to happen. The dream occurred on the night when I first heard she was going to Florida, and the thought had flashed through my mind whether it will land up in our making love. I did not give much attention to the thought and actually till that night we made love, I did not think it was going to happen because I respect his wife. But may be unknown to me the wish to make love to him must have been aroused in me when I first heard that we will be alone together and it was that wish which saw its fulfillment, before its actual occurrence, in that dream." 

Mall Phobia and Returning to the Womb Fantasy

A single woman in her mid- thirties, who lives a rather solitary life, and almost never ventures more than 2 miles from her house, brought in the following dream, and, because in it she was driving a car inside a mall, declared it to be weird.

I am driving in a mall. The only detail about the mall I can recall is of there being a bathroom in it. The stores are indistinct and the whole place is painted in a peachy-tan color. Also I don't think there were any people. Just my car. In the dream it did not feel strange driving a car inside a mall. 

When asked for associations to the mall she said she hasn't been inside one in years; they provoke panic attacks.
Another association to malls was her fear of not finding her way out of them; they curve and twist and one gets confused as to which way is to the entrance and exit. Another concern about malls was not finding the car in the parking lot on coming out.
She then expressed her skepticism about the value of the dream. "How could a car have gotten inside the mall?"
As to why the dream showed a bathroom, she could tell nothing. She was not sure if she had used it or not, but remembered that it too was painted inside with the same peachy-tan color so she had at least perceived it from inside.  
She added that it was her car that she was driving because she distinctly recalled its color being red. 
All these associations did not immediately throw light upon the problem and we drifted in to exploring her fears in general. She fears crowds and avoids public places especially where she anticipates running into more than two or three people hanging out together.
She has not driven on highways in 7 years. She drives to work early in the morning when roads are empty, and reaches there 45 minutes before the starting time. Though she does not get paid for putting the extra hours, she likes doing it because that way everything is in order when the doors open for business. This reasoning appeared to be a superficial rationalization (false explanation) for the deeper motive of avoiding rush-hour traffic.
She then expressed anger at customers who come 10 or 15 minutes earlier than 7 and try to make her work before the official opening time just because she is there.   
When asked how far is her workplace from her house she said exact two miles.
She then talked about how her fear of malls does not quite extend to Target [Department Store] and Kroger [Supermarket]. They are large but not quite as big as malls. And in them she knows where everything is, including the entrance doors, and thus can get out quickly if the need arises. And both the stores are within her self-imposed 2-mile-limit. Even at these stores she is in and out, picking only couple of items at a time which she knows beforehand she needs. And she goes there in the mornings, on Sundays, when hardly anyone is in the store and on the roads.
She then talked about her going to the Target to buy incense sticks which she loves, and getting disappointed at not finding them. Her wish to go to the mall perhaps arose from this frustration. For she does not know where she will find those incense sticks now. Target use to carry them but not anymore. She was hoping the incense sticks will be available in some mall because that is where the specialty shops that carry such items exist. 
Now per psychoanalytic theory what one is currently fearful or phobic about is something which was once dearly loved. Our current fears are our former desires. The oedipal love for mother becomes the greatest taboo of mankind. People who once loved getting behind the wheel and enjoyed taking long drives are the ones who usually come down with agoraphobia. The repression targets our strongest suits. The libido tries to find outlet through those functions which we favored the most and were most proficient at. It is the child with great desire to look (hypertrophied scopophilic instinct) that develops eye tics.
So I asked her if she loved going to malls before she came down with her phobias. And she said, "Oh yes, that was my most favorite thing to do. I loved it as a child and I loved it as an adult. But when I moved to this town, away from my old neighborhood, 7 years ago, the fear crept in."
Now I know this patient for some time, and I know too that her agoraphobia was precipitated by two very abusive marriages. She had developed a fear of going out which perhaps had at its root a desire to escape meeting men and getting in to another relationship. Getting involved with men she now had begun to believe invariably turn abusive. So her psyche was thrown into a dilemma. The libidinal wishes implored her to go out and seek men, while the memories of the physical and emotional abuse provoked fear (panic) over fulfilling this desire.  
Knowing how much she seethes with anger towards her ex-husbands, and because of it towards mankind in general, I asked her if the peachy-tan color was not derived from feces. Her fear that she may inadvertently defecate all over the mall to express her anger towards the world. The bathroom was there to lessen the fear that if the impulse to shit upon others becomes overwhelming there is an escape. Encopresis in children, and various forms of colitis in adults, are often expression of undischarged anger. In non-verbal mentally retarded, unhappiness with the way things are is often communicated through smearing the walls with feces.
She did not quite agree with this interpretation, but did confess that whenever she leaves the house she immediately has to worry about going to the bathroom. She wondered if she does not go beyond 2 miles of her house because she fears she may not find a bathroom in time. She added that when she comes to my office the first she thing she does is to go to the bathroom.
But when asked if this worry to find the bathroom is for an urgency to urinate or to defecate she said to urinate.
But it was not clear if she said this because there is greater embarrassment in humans about defecation than urination. Also she may have hidden the real state of affairs because she could sense the hesitancy in my voice when I was trying to search for the right words to convey correctly what I had to say regarding the use of excremental functions as a means to express rage. The patient goes only as far in revealing about herself/himself as the analyst is capable of handling.The analyst has to be completely comfortable with his own body functions before his body language will convey to the patient that he or she can talk about these matters without resorting to distortions and allusions.
She added that the fear of not finding the way out of the mall is similar to her fear of getting lost when driving. She does not trust the GPS. "The voice tells you to turn right or left but only after you have passed the turn."
"Any other association to the peachy-tan?"
"They are the color of your pants." I was wearing khaki pants that day. "And now I know where that color is taken from and why. In Target the employees wear peachy-tan color pants. So the dream was lessening the fear of the mall by showing it also as the Target which does not frighten me as much. And those employees along with tan pants wear red shirts which made the red color of the car noticeable in the dream."
"Was the absence of people in the mall also an attempt to lessen the fear?"
"Yes. I wanted to go to the mall but I am afraid of people. The dream therefore did away with people. And I go there in a car so I can be in and out in a jiffy. The shops were of one color and looked alike for the same purpose. I am scared of malls because it has such a variety of stores and they are on two or three levels. Variety sparks the fear that I will get lost in them and never find my way out while sameness lessens that fear."
"Is going inside and never finding one's way out, derived from the wish to go back to your mother's womb and never leave its security?"
"Sometimes I wish I had never come out of it. For life is so painful and men are so nasty."
So here was the confirmation of the rule that a formerly desired entity is what changes into a phobic object. It was in our mother's womb that we felt most secure and free of all dangers.* Under the spell of phobia it becomes the most dreaded place to seek refuge.
Her fear that she will not find her way out of the mall/womb was a "signal anxiety"/warning that the security of intrauterine existence (death) would be so alluring it would be impossible for you to return back into this stressful world.

* This pull of the intrauterine existence where all our needs were taken care of and where we felt completely safe may lie behind as to why the Las Vegas casinos are huge cavernous entities where all one's needs are taken care of and getting out of which is not an easy affair. The casinos are designed to create the illusion of being in a completely safe place and where fulfillment of every bodily need is immediately guaranteed like it was in the womb, which encourages the gambler to take greater chances with his/her money.
The way IKEA stores are designed, where finding one's way out is so difficult, and where one is tempted to be lost in shopping from one section on to the next, appears to utilize the same human wish to return to the womb.

An incest dream

A man in his late thirties, who still lives with his mother, came to the therapy session and talked about his love for everything old, like classic cars, vintage comic books, turn-of-the-century houses with their turrets and other castle like features, and recalled how as a  young man he took a friend of his to the Boston-Edison Historic area that has some of Detroit's most magnificent mansions, and his friend got mad at him for dreaming of living in such high places, given that they were black and thus not entitled to such uppity lifestyles, and the patient laughed at his friend for being so dumb as to not see that now only bums and prostitutes lived in and around those houses, and they were so run down and abandoned that in all probability they could be purchased for virtually nothing. Then he added that recently houses have been coming a lot in his dreams. On being asked to give an example he narrated the following:

The dream was about this most incredibly beautiful house. It belonged to an older man who is planning to turn it into a church. But I swindle him from doing so by giving him some money.  There is lot of guilt associated with this trickery as if I should not have done that to him. The house is on Detroit river. In fact the river comes right to the house, waves coming over that green grass to the back door and then receding rhythmically. There is a steamer on the river, an old river boat, red in color. What is so remarkable is that I can see every part of it distinctly. It is a showboat with the twin wheels rotating under the water, which I see so clearly. I can't tell you enough as to how vivid the dream was and how much in detail I could see every aspect of it. I think there was a cruise ship too in the dream.  Or maybe the riverboat got replaced by the cruise ship. It had endless number of rooms, the ship was gigantic. Even in the dream I was thinking if it is put alongside a skyscraper no doubt it will be taller than the skyscraper. And there I go again thinking of majestic houses - for skyscraper is in the same category as houses, just a grander version of it. 
Also in the dream I was a seaman, about to go into the water and the river.  I was building a boat to do so or maybe I was already on the boat, or doing something of the sort, something a seaman would do.   

Patient was asked for associations to the house. He said, "It is a white house, a barn house, ranch, very elegant. I walked around it from the back to the front, admiring its beauty. The walls are beautifully carved with round projections that are so pleasing to the eye."

These associations strengthened the impression that the beauty of the house which he could not praise enough was beauty of some woman,  and considering how the dream revolved around old majestic  mansions, the woman whose beauty he was appreciating was no other than his mother as she must have appeared to him when he was very young. But this presumption did not bring us any closer to the essential 'dream-thoughts' that lay behind the 'manifest content'.

Then the patient recalled a detail that puzzled us greatly. The house was not constructed like regular houses are, which are rectangular in shape, but at an angle. When asked to draw to explain how the rooms were not straight but at an angle he drew the following.

The slanted lines which are disjointed in the blog entry because of my inability to draw diagrams using a computer were not broken but continuous in his drawing.  

 \                           \                           \                    \
  \ Dining Room  \  Living Room  \  Kitchen    \
   \                            \                            \                    \   \  Front Door
    \                             \                            \                    \

The association that the patient gave as to why the house was at an angle was rather strange. He said  for years his penis was not straight but bent because he had fallen upon his penis while wrestling in high school. But the problem had recently cleared up and his penis was fine now.

This association was clearly connected with the castration complex and his sense of inferiority about his sexual organ. It is an inferiority complex that no man escapes from, and which impels so many to fall for ads that promise a bigger and better penis with creams, pills and pumps etc. It has its roots in the oedipal phase when one is confronted with the inferiority of one's organ in comparison to the imagined, and thus greatly exaggerated, size of the father's.  This contrasting of one's potency with that of the father's perhaps was responsible for that element of the dream where he is thinking that if he puts the ship next to the skyscraper it will be just taller.

When asked if his penis was really bent, or he just had a feeling that it was so, he admitted that it was more in his head than in reality and there was no objective evidence there was anything wrong with it and none of the women he had had sex with had ever mentioned that there was anything wrong with his penis.

The association threw light on his poor self esteem about his ability to make love, but did not help in coming closer to the basic meaning of the dream. And since there was limited time available to analyze the dream, and also because I was quite familiar with the patients problems and the complexes around which his illness, schizophrenic breakdown occurred,  I took the step of making the following construction: "We know that behind your fascination with these old statuesque houses lies your fascination with your mother. Could it be possible your swindling and buying that beautiful house from the old man so he could not turn it into a church was symbolic of your buying your mother from you father so you could fulfill your aims with her instead of letting him continue to have his will with her." This conjecture was based upon his buying the house to prevent it from becoming a church. Now churches, temples, mansions, statuesque houses are typical symbols of the mother, but that version of the mother which is common property of all men (God's/father's house ), best symbolized by Madonna and thus sexually unapproachable.

The patient first objected to this conjecture  on grounds that the man was Caucasian and his father was Black but then immediately added, "My grandmother was as white as any Caucasian lady and I always put her and my father in the class of Whites."

Then after a few minutes in which he talked about things unrelated to dream he spontaneously  volunteered the following, " I now know why the house is at an angle. My mother was very pretty and thin. And as you know he was a player who had children and relationships with other women besides my mother. So he was in and out of our life. But when he would come to our house I would be afraid that when he would have sex with her, his penis would go right through her body because she is so thin. But then I would tell myself that his penis will be bent and go upwards at an angle and not through her."

He was asked to draw the angle in which his father would have sex per his childhood imagination. He drew a very erect penis, almost vertical, with one testicle, which surprisingly was not dangling below the root of the penis but projecting upwards over it.  

"How did you know about erection and yes about sex itself at that age?"

"I knew about sex and erection as early as when I was 5. Perhaps earlier. I already was having erections then. There were also two boys in the neighborhood, who had access to Playboy and Penthouse, and we would look at those pictures at their house. Also with my cousins, who were slightly older than me, I would sometimes play games in which we would show each other our private parts. I remember how intensely curious I was about their bodies."

"Is your seeing every part of that ship so vividly, a continuation of this sexual curiosity which you were already exhibiting so strongly at that age?"

"That makes sense. I do know that when I first started having sex with women, which was pretty late in comparison to other kids that I grew up with, I would be so curious about their bodies that they will say, 'oh no, you are more interested in examining me than making love. You are supposed to make love to me not examine me like a doctor. "

As for there being so many rooms in that ship, on theoretical grounds, I conjectured that it was an allusion to marriage as well as its contrary: to have sex with endless number of women (symbolized by rooms). It was depiction of his utter fidelity to his mother and always choosing her over all others, and yet it depicted its contrary: a desire to spite her by having liaison with endless number of  women.

But the patient swiftly rejected the latter part of the 'construction' claiming that that is how his father was: a player. But he is just the opposite of his father in this respect. He believes in having children only after marriage, and never having affairs.

Multiple rooms on the ship stood for marriage. It was depiction of marriage by showing all other women that one must give up for the sake of one. The comparison of that ship with a skyscraper also, perhaps, was his comparing other women to his mother and finding them short. It is interesting that he has never been able to make a break with his mother. And though the two are always complaining  about each others shortcomings and continuously squabbling, all attempts by him to live by himself or with other women have failed within no time. The fact that he is her only child, with his father dying when he was just 12, also has contributed to his inability to give up his love for his mother and find an extra-familial object.

When asked as to why the walls of the  house had beautiful projections that were pleasing to the eyes, he could come up with none and rejected my suggestion that it was an allusion to his mother's breast countering it with, "if it was symbolic of any body part it would be testicles and not breasts." When I asked him if he was being sarcastic he said, "No. That is the association that popped up in my mind." I wondered if it was compensation for the lack of penis in a woman by covering the defect with  endless beautiful projections (a phallic mother; testicles through displacement substituting for the penis).

As to why the dream was trying to show him as seaman, patient said - as only a schizophrenic can do, who often seem to have a gift for seeing through dream symbols - that it must allude to semen.

When asked why he said, "Because the water that was coming up to the backyard of the house was shaped as the shaft of a penis, with the advancing tide broad like a penile forehead. And you know what backyard on the street means. So the dream must be my attempting sex with my mother in that fashion. Though it is so strange that the very thought of such a deed during my waking hours would fill me with utter disgust. I have no attraction towards my mother whatsoever."
 

  

Three dreams of an agoraphobic

A woman who suffers from advanced obsessive compulsive disorder, numerous touch phobias, and barely leaves home because she has to dress and undress repeatedly, and do other cleaning rituals, before she can step out, brought in the following three dreams. She prefaced it by saying that when she was young her dreams were pleasant, but as years pass by they have become increasingly frightening, and now they wake her up almost nightly.

1. I have to go to work at the store at 3.  My mother who also works there is pressing upon me to go or at least to tell them that I will be late, but I cannot find my key, or the phone and anyway I am still in my pajamas.

2. I am being chased by bad people. I am running through streets. 

3. My brother comes to my house with his girlfriend, and destroys everything inside.


For the first dream the patient stated that she did work at that store but 30 years ago, when she was 18, for 3 or 4 years and then had come down with her illness and had stopped working altogether.  Her mother had worked there too at that time. What was different in the dream was that the store now was at a different location.  The store where they had actually worked no longer exists.

So the patient who during waking hours is virtually a cripple from her agoraphobia, was attempting recovery at night and seeing herself as cured and working again. Alas only in dreams. For the illness   was at the heels of the cure, and her neurotic fear of leaving the house was finding excuses to not be at work by still being in pajamas, not finding the car key, not finding the phone etc, despite the support she was receiving from her mother to overcome her phobia and show up at work.

From psychoanalytic theory I knew that agoraphobics avoid going in to public places afraid that while not in right mind they may do something [sexually] inappropriate. And I wondered if this expectation will be fulfilled by further associations.

And to my pleasant surprise this was confirmed when the patient had following to say about the second dream on being asked why those bad people were chasing her.


"They wanted to have sex with me. I had landed up I don't know how [the typical dread of agoraphobic that in a state of amnesia, or by some other inadvertence, they may land up in a sexually dangerous situation] in a bar or club or something like that. Those bad people were there. Along with some shady women. They were all like hanging together. And looked as if they were expecting me to join in whatever lewd thing was about to start. I think they belonged to a motorbike club or something like that for they ruled the town and nobody could challenge them. They could do whatever they wanted to. When I took off,  they came after me, trying to find me. I ran in to the trailer home of a middle aged woman. But instead of giving shelter, she said,  why don't you submit yourself to them. It will be so much easier. It will save you all this trouble of running away. All of us in this town do whatever they ask. They are so powerful. In fact I am going to that orgy myself. I have been there many a times."

So being chased and subjected to violence in the manifest content of the dream, which one would simply look upon as running away from ordinary aggression, also had an underlying layer: running away from sexual temptation. The patient agreed to the construction that the middle aged woman was  her mother. And just like in the first dream she had come in to the second dream to help her  overcome her agoraphobia. Here she was trying to help her get over her illness by telling her not to disown her unacceptable sexual impulses and run away from them but to give in to and thus be able to face the world again.

I wondered in my mind how the third dream would fit in with the other two. Was the coming of her  brother into her house was continuation of the bad people chasing her right in to the house to enforce sex upon her? And was his destroying the house another representation of sadomasochistic sex - the house representing herself? But I could not tell any of this to the patient to avoid influencing her associations. Instead I asked her as to what thoughts occur to her in connection with her brother.

To my astonishment the patient said, "My brother is no different that those bad people. Given a chance he would destroy my peace of mind as those bad guys. You know when I was in my twenties, he one day came to my house and forced sex upon me."

"Did he rape you?"

"No, it was not quite rape, for I did not protest. I was so stunned I just went through the motions. You know I grew up in a very chaotic household. There was no order, discipline, or sense of right or wrong in it. My parents did drugs and let us run wild. Anything we did was OK with them. So when my brother came upon me like that I could neither say yes nor no. But when he tried to do it more than a few times I told him to get out of my house and never come back again. In the beginning I felt  sorry for him, because he looked on verge of nervous breakdown, and I thought he will go over the edge if I did not let him have his way with me. But I quickly realized that allowing him to do such a crazy thing as to have sex with his own sister could not be good for him, however disturbed he was. So I put a stop to it."

"Did you stop working at the store after your brother enforced sex upon you. Was that the beginning of your agoraphobia?"

"No. I had phobias and fears even as a child. Even when I was a teenager it would take me forever to leave the house, so afraid I was of the world."

A revenge dream showing dreamer as a superhero

A patient who comes once every two months, and who rather not come because of his shyness and because he feels he is letting me down if he does not bring up something significant to the table, has discovered that a good way to fill up the 45-minute session is to narrate a dream or two, for he knows how it immediately perks up my attention, declared triumphantly that he has five dreams for me to analyze. But as he began, he apologetically confessed, he can now recall only three, and then proceeded to tell me the following four laconic dreams:

1. I am in a house and suddenly on top of me the glass shatters. It is strange that though there is extensive breaking of glass they don't hurt me at all.

2. Somebody is terminally ill.  I feel real sad for him.

3. A teacher with whom my brother and I went to Europe on a college sponsored group trip and who died not too long after we returned due to breast cancer was alive again. She looked young and had resumed teaching classes.

4. My mom is laying on hilltop on a grassy nice area. And she was young. 

To the first dream patient expressed his puzzlement as to why suddenly the glass will break over his head and why it caused no injury to him. But at my suggestion - based upon psychoanalytic theory and my knowing the patient for over two decades - that shattering of glass could have symbolized loss of virginity and gave the example as to how in Jewish weddings smashing of glass is a standard ritual and most likely an allusion to the rupturing of the hymen and consummation of marriage, the patient said that what I say could be correct for in real life he has never been able to look at any woman as a sexual partner but in dreams he often does so.

After some other things that the session drifted into he returned to the dream and talked about another association that had popped up in his head regarding breaking of glass. His passion for reading Marvel Comics and how in them superheroes like Superman, Incredible Hulk, Batman, Captain America crash through glass walls while in pursuit of supervillains and nothing ever happens to them. The crashed glass never ever even scratches them.


So the patient who in waking life is the very model of meekness, utterly respectful of women, who finds sexual as a violation of a woman's dignity, in his dream had turned into a superhero - the ultimate phallic symbol - boldly going through the glass wall - deflowering a virgin without a thought- and coming out of it unscathed.

In the second dream as to the person who was terminally ill, patient could think only of Professor J, who is director of the theater program at the college where he works, and whose health is rapidly deteriorating because of liver cancer. He had run in to the professor on the day before the dream and feeling sorry had asked if he could do anything for him. The professor had told him, "Pray for me." The meeting had aroused associations in the patient's mind connected with the theater but through the bridge of cancer primarily about a co-worker, M, who gets parts in the plays staged by Professor J. Now this lady had beaten lung cancer. In fact, given that she is in her late seventies and had smoked all her life, it is remarkable that she had survived the cancer. And the patient expressed his admiration for her in that she can still act on stage and recently had done an excellent job of playing a funny alcoholic.

As to why the association to M came in connection with J, besides both having cancer and both connected to the theater, the patient recalled that couple of weeks ago, M had met him and his brother at the church and had joked that she would love to fix them up with suitable matches but alas they were past the age when people date and get married. This putdown, which was at least on surface done to provoke humor, had provoked impulses of revenge, which at that particular time could not emerge in consciousness but which perhaps ran on some such line:"if the bitch had only died of lung cancer how much better the world would have been".  But true to his nature, which due to his religious upbringing forbids him to see or think any evil, what had emerged in his consciousness was seeing her playing the drunkard on stage which the patient did not fail to tell me with a laughter, was incredibly funny.  

The third and the fourth dreams were continuation of this vision of seeing M as a funny lady, alive and well and not dead due to her lung cancer. But there was a slight modification. Instead of M being brought back from dead, it was the person who the patient and his brother had gone to Europe with, and who also had cancer, and had died because of it, who was being being made alive again. The logic of course was that it would have been so much more fair if M the bitch had died of cancer instead of the professor. Whom he not only brought back from dead but also gave her additional presents of being young and back to teaching at the college.  This granting of reprieve from death had also been extended to his mother, who had died a few years ago.

 The mother had been brought into the equation because underneath his great filial piety and love for her, there was an equally strong resentment for her making such strong bonds with her sons that they could not dare venture away from her and find mates for themselves. In fact all their lives they had lived in the same house where they had been born and raised. They were now in their late fifties and even though their mother had died they could not leave the house as if it would have been betrayel of their mother.  In fact his inability to develop courage to have sex with [strange] women owed to this excessive loyalty to his mother and which part of his mind greatly hated. So the dream was showing his mother young and enjoying herself on the grass on top of a hill instead of showing her dead and six feet under.

The motive for the first dream became clear as well. Unlike what K had claimed that he was no longer fit for being fixed up with a girl, he was not past his sell-by-date but a young and vigorous superhero, invincible, devouring a virgin with impunity.

Role of unconscious Oedipal guilt in shaping the structure of two dreams

A patient brought to two dreams which he had dreamt on consecutive nights and had typewritten for the session:

Dream on Saturday, Nov. 22nd

I was driving a car with my friend Al. We were driving down 6 Mile road in a big Cadillac which is strange as I always buy Ford vehicles. We stopped at my house and I noticed All had a large cup of coffee. He tripped and splattered the entire cup of coffee on the big picture window at our house as well as two other smaller windows. I remember there were a total of 3 windows he hit with coffee. In true life I haven't talked to him in a while because of a disagreement we had over the way he was treating his sister. She has multiple sclerosis and he and his wife were her caregivers. He lost patience with her and became rejectful. As a result she was taken away from his care and moved to a nursing home where things are much better. However, since that time last year I haven't talked to him.

Dream on Sunday, Nov. 23rd

In the other dream I was sleeping on my bed when I found myself flying up into the sky where there was stormy weather. As I got near the clouds I spun around really fast like a spinning top and in front of me when I stopped there was a former girlfriend I met in Germany while in the Army name Julie. She said to me, "I've been thinking about you Sargent Hall, we should go back to Austria." (This is where we actually went in 1971 to visit her grandmother.) Then she handed me a rectangular box with 3 metal balls in it. One of them had a black dot in the middle. She then said "which one do you want?"

Patient who came to the session on Monday morning handed me the paper on which the dreams were printed out and wanted to know which of the two dreams should he associate to first. I of course told him that is entirely up to him. In all these matters it is the dreamer/patient who takes the lead.

He picked up the first dream and started talking about Al. How Al was a close friend of his. And then elaborated upon his disgust at this friend for the inhumane way he treated his sister and mother, even his wife, and how it shocked him to the point that it ended the friendship. The details of Al's ill treatment of his family members did not lead us too far in to solving the mystery of the dream, so I took up another element of the dream, choosing that particular one because the patient had shown visible pride over it when I had made him verbally repeat the dream in addition to reading what he had written, and which had risen my hopes that associations to that element may be more copious. "Why are you driving Cadillac instead of Ford?"

The patient worked for Ford as the head of its security operations for many years and thus feels great protective loyalty towards the company.

"That is strange. For I would never drive anything but Ford. And the funny part is that it is a vintage open convertible Cadillac."

Riding in an open vintage Cadillac on a busy thoroughfare had to do with satisfaction of the component sexual instinct of exhibitionism. Now the patient shows no trace of flamboyance in his manifest behavior. In his daily life he is a thoroughly modest man. Whatever desire to "show off" exists in him, it is limited to getting appreciation for volunteering in a nursing home and taking care of old folks, and yes he has a passion for rescuing stray animals from alleys. But there it was emerging in his dreams, his cruising down the street in a convertible Cadillac, which shows that the drive to exhibit oneself is a most powerful instinct of humans, and even those who have in their waking lives matured into great modesty can still show it quite openly in their sleep and dreams when their guards are down.

But for our present purposes all I was interested in this exhibitionism of his was to find out as to how it fitted in with the rest of the dream.

The patient did add that on Saturday, the day before the dream, he had gone with his son to Home Depot and had helped him load and carry brand new appliances to his rental house in an open truck. So the day residue of "showing off" the new appliances in an open truck had been exploited by the dream-work to show off himself, and Al, in an open vintage Cadillac.

Also behind the figure of Al was showing off of his son. Al was a composite of his son and Al. At daytime it was him and his son who were riding in an open truck. In the dream it became him and Al in a convertible Cadillac. The Al of the dream was the straw-man behind which his son was hidden. As we will see a few paragraph down Al was also serving as a straw-man for the patient. And the reason why his son was being shown off was because he has a tumor in his brain. The tumor is benign and the size of a small coin but the patient worries about its potential to grow in the future. He has no clear idea as to how serious is his son's overall neurological condition. So along with his own exhibitionism there was the wish to exhibit his son's tumor in the open Cadillac for the world to notice and thus find a cure for it. 

A Cadillac instead of Ford was chosen as an act of defiance towards his father, who he feared would disapprove of his exhibitionism, and because of other ancient Oedipal grudges which resided in his unconscious - Ford Motor Company symbolized to him paternalistic authority.This dream element of disobeying his father was originating from a completely different complex and making inroad into the main dream.

The above deduction however was not made from patient's associations but from my knowledge of him from years of therapy. Patient neither agreed nor disagreed with the above constructions.

Since dreams are always narcissistic and concern themselves exclusively with the wishes of the dreamer, we had to assume that behind Al's figure and his spilling of coffee on the three windows, was dreamer himself and his mental complexes surrounding his own impulses to transgress.  The dream was projecting upon Al his own tendencies to do misdeeds. "It is Al who is guilty of ill treating his sister, mother and wife not me. He is blameworthy not me." This line of reasoning which the dream was showing pictorially - with his own figure completely hidden behind Al's - was there to protect the patient's belief in himself as a good man who does no wrong. When this "construction" was conveyed to the patient, he not only agreed with it but brought some more associations that threw light upon other elements of the dream.

Al's spilling of coffee on the three window panes was connected to his being mean not just to his sister, but to his mother, and his wife, as well. The sister who had multiple sclerosis would be incontinent at times and he would force her to sleep on the floor as a punishment. He punished his mother, who has Alzheimer's, quite severely for having diarrhea on the floor. The brown of the coffee was taken from the brown color of the feces.

But behind these accusations of Al being mean towards his mother, wife and sister, symbolized by the three windows, there appeared to be self-accusations (guilty conscience) about his being mean - or more correctly thoughts of being mean  - towards his own father, sister and mother. The big window was his father who he wanted to insult to give vent to his grudges towards him. He also carried unconscious guilt about having not done enough for his sister, who had died in her early forties due to alcoholism, and towards his mother, who had suffered greatly because of the divorce that took place when patient was 10, and about which he felt somehow responsible. His son's tumor bothered him and his sense of guilt had latched upon it, and he felt he was somehow responsible for that too.

After giving above associations the patient drifted into talking about one of his daughters who is causing him even greater mental pain than his son's illness because of her recent divorce. His son's tumor is quiescent while her daughter's life is in total turmoil. She shows up with her children at their house all the time. The children are reacting to the divorce with great degree of confusion, especially one of the boys who seems to have lost direction in his life, getting into accidents, and who reminds him of how he had felt - confused and directionless - when his parents had gotten divorced.

His daughter whose financial status plummeted with her divorce, and is living hand to mouth, had borrowed  the patient's I-Phone, when her own phone had gone dead, and while in an argument with her ex-husband, the father of her four children, had flung it down the stairs to the basement, sending it flying through the air with such vehemence that its glass surface was smashed to pieces.

Since patient's daughter's hurling of the phone through the air happened on the day before the second dream, we wondered if his own flying up into the sky towards stormy weather and then getting spun around like a top in the dream was not his identification with his I-Phone which was being ruthlessly thrown down the staircase. Patient laughed at it and said that sounds about right. For he often views his children's trials and tribulations as bad weather in which he is involuntary thrown in to, and which he often wishes he could just escape.

Further associations revealed that the escape which he was wishing for was being fulfilled through going all the way back - spinning back through time - when he was Sargent in the Army and stationed in Germany and redo his life from that time onwards. At that time he had dated a German girl named Julie, whom he was about to marry. But just before taking the final step he had come home for Christmas, and had run in to his future wife, which had changed everything, for she appeared to him the more right person to spend the rest of his life with. However, few years later Julie married another American man, came to the States, located him, and though she lives in an another State, every now and then calls him, keeping the friendship alive and always still addresses him as Sargent Hall; that particular way of addressing him being the reminder of a time when things were so idyllic between them.

While a devoted family man, who would never think of abandoning his family, he, in his dreams,  often redoes his life with Julie. But only in dreams now. And only when the troubles of his children and grandchildren become too overwhelming for him to handle, provoking the wish for freedom from all his current ties and obligations. And it was only when the daughter smashed his phone did he feel justified in dreaming about how life would have been so different if he had married the other woman.

"Why is she asking you to go back to Austria?"

"Because that's where her grandmother lived. We took a train from Germany to Austria to visit her and that was the most romantic train journey anyone can imagine, with the countryside so beautiful - Austria and the surrounding region is breathtaking - and her grandmother was so nice and gracious. No wonder I want to repeat that experience in my dreams."

The time ran out to analyze as to where the three metal balls in the rectangular box were taken from, but the patient did associate that the one with the black dot perhaps signified his son, the black dot being his tumor, and that Julie was tempting him to choose between her and his family.



 

Psychological underpinnings of Racing Thoughts in a woman with Bipolar Disorder

When a patient reports racing thoughts the psychiatrist immediately thinks of Bipolar Disorder, especially of mania, and generally writes a prescription for Lithium, Depakote or Lamictal, the traditional mood stabilizers, or recently, being a captive audience of the pharmaceutical industry, brand name antipsychotics like Seroquel, Abilify and Latuda.

However, racing thoughts are a reaction to anxiety and have only an indirect relationship with mania. Anxiety itself is the organism's preparation for running away from danger. And when a person cannot run with his feet he runs with his thoughts. It is the perception of this frantic mental running that he reports as racing thoughts, or more colorfully with phrases like "my mind is running million miles a minute" or "my mind is all over the place" - by which he means he is putting out fire at every front from where the lurking danger may strike him.

Recently I could analyze to some extent the mental processes underlying racing thoughts in a Bipolar patient who was rapidly losing her euthymic state. The analysis threw some light on the underpinnings of racing thoughts.

The patient, who is in her late forties, cut her clonazepam dosage - a benzodiazepine - to half. This self-attempt to wean herself off the psychotropics triggered a partial relapse, the first manifestation of which was racing thoughts. She at once raised back her clonazepam but by then the cat was out of the bag.  Her morbid thoughts were no longer amenable to the benzodiazepines and demanded a running of their full course before going in to quiescence. 

When I inquired of the patient if her racing thoughts were the beginning of her mania she said,"No. They are the beginning of my depression. In mania I have this tremendous energy and I can actually control my anxiety by doing something like obsessively cleaning the house, washing walls, doing jigsaw puzzles etc. But the racing thoughts are not quite the mania itself.  In fact in all my three states I have a slight different reaction to anxiety. When I am in my normal state I still do the same obsessive activities as when I am in mania, but it is not accompanied by the agitation and nervousness that characterizes my mania. It is in depression that I have true racing thoughts and frank anxiety. I have no energy to do the obsessive rituals that control my anxiety. You know the purpose of my obsessions is to do something constructive that will ward off the impending doom. I can do that easily when I am euthymic, with some difficulty when I am manic, but I am completely paralyzed and cannot do my motor rituals when I am depressed. It is then that the racing thoughts start. As if recurrent thoughts replace the motor rituals. They are an attempt to run away from the disaster that is about to happen. When I am depressed I have no energy left to physically deal with the wolf on the door. I can only run and run and that too only in my thoughts."

Her statement about the racing thoughts made me wonder if we should not treat them more as a symptom of depression than mania, or, rather, as a symptom of both the phases of Bipolar Disorder.

"Can you tell me the content of your racing thoughts? That may give a clue as to their purpose."

But what she brought up as the substrate of her racing thoughts could hardly be seen as something that would cause anxiety. They were about a Stuart family and their son John. He was her first  boyfriend. As to why she was thinking about them was hard to tell. The scenes that she was playing in her mind were exact replaying of things that had happened to her in their company. Some of it  boring routine stuff, some of it tender, romantic and intimate moments with John. But she was repeating these memories obsessively through the night, especially in the morning hours, when she would wake up around 3 or 4, in great anxiety, her mind racing out of control."

"Why of all people you chose the Stuarts to think about obsessively?"

"You know when I left my home I was a minor. I had to live with strangers. Stuarts were one such family. They were nice to me. In fact they were the only ones who did things for me without any expectation of reciprocation. And then John and I became lovers. That was my first love. It was such a relief after the icky feelings I had developed towards sex because of the sexual abuse that I was subjected to by my father, which, as you know, is the reason I ran away from home at the age of 15."

"But why would you think about the Stuarts 30 years later? They are not in your life anymore.  John got married, divorced and now lives on the West Coast. There is no trace of the rest of the Stuarts, at least here in Michigan. You are not going to run in to them. You met John a few years ago and he aroused no passion in you. You were completely indifferent to him romantically. You have no expectation or desire to get back with him. Why would your mind race on and on about the Stuarts? And if the memories of the Stuarts is pleasant why do they leave you so exhausted in the morning?"

Patient then confessed that behind the thoughts of Stuarts, and her love-making with John, there were also thoughts about her father, that were simultaneously running in the background, though so faint, they were barely perceptible.  And yes they were connected with the sexual abuse. So the racing thoughts of her sexual relationship with John, and her pleasant memories of the Stuart family, were running in the foreground to cover up and replace the memories of the sexual abuse that was flooding the unconscious. She was running away from the memories of the sexual abuse, just like she had actually run away from the real abuse when she was 15.

"But why would you want to run away from the memories of the sexual abuse?"

"Wouldn't you?" the patient was incredulous. And then she realized I was not condoning it but wanted to know as to what were the underlying psychological processes that had made the abuse so distasteful to her, and if it was distasteful why it kept coming back to her mind every night.

 She went on,"A father is not suppose to do things like that to his daughter. Even then I knew it was wrong. I felt sorry for him, because our mother had left when we were very young, and he had to look after four children, and he was lonely and short with us, but that is no excuse for him to have done what he did to me."

So the pleasant memories of Stuarts were obsessively appearing in her mind to block out the unpleasant memories of the sexual abuse. So the racing thoughts do not emerge out of the blue when a person becomes depressed or manic, but have their own raison d'etre, and there is some psychological advantage to be derived from them. The depression and mania and the obsessions are a defense against the trauma. In this patient they were the preferred mode of dealing with adversities.

And the racing thoughts are better looked upon not so much as illness but as an attempt to prevent worsening of the psychopathology. In this case of her slipping into outright depression.

But why were the memories of the sexual abuse causing her to run away from them? Even if they were unpleasant  - or rather one part of it was unpleasant because it was something that should not happen between father and daughter -  there had to be some missing link that would account for why she had to run away from these memories. And if running away, and its mental counterpart racing thoughts, are due to fear/anxiety, what it is that she is fearing when she thinks of the sexual abuse?

Here the clue was provided by a series of dreams that had been analyzed over the years.

Whenever she would get into depression she would have anxiety dreams. It would be instructive to examine a couple of them.

She dreamt that she was destroying the top floor of her house with a bulldozer. There was awful din made by the bulldozer. After destroying it she just walked away. The dream was sparked by the garbage truck that was going back and forth next to her house. But it was reminiscent of her father telling her to keep awfully quiet during the furtive sexual activity lest her grandmother who lived in the lower flat would get woken up. They lived on the top floor and in the dream she was destroying it to erase the memory of the sexual abuse, and destroying her father at the same time as a revenge for doing what he did to her.

Another dream was of cutting grass. There were black snakes in the grass which were getting chopped off. This was again revenge fantasy of castrating the father for using his penis to violate her.

So the emergence of memories of sexual abuse were there to take revenge upon the perpetrator. And it was connected with intense fear that her father would retaliate if she attempted to kill or castrate him. And that is what she was running away from.

When she would wake up from these dreams she would be very shaky and spend all morning and early part of the afternoon till about 2 pm doing obsessive activities to control the fear. These obsessive activities were symbolic acts of repentance for wishing evil for the father. They were undoing of all the aggressive thoughts and actions she had dreamt in the night for being subjected to all the sexual things her father did to her. When all the penance had been done, which was by mid afternoon, she was free of obsessions, anxiety and racing thoughts.

There was an interesting diurnal variation to her racing thoughts. They would start when she would wake up at 3 or 4 in the morning, reach their peak by 7 or 8 am, and quit by the afternoon. She would feel somewhat OK for a few hours and then would go to bed by 7 or 8 pm. Analysis showed that once she started feeling good the thoughts of abuse, hidden behind which was wish for sexual satisfaction, would start emerging. But since these thoughts were intimately connected with shame, feelings of being take advantage of and of being wrong in eyes of others (morally reprehensible), they would provoke more unpleasure than pleasure and they would be accompanied by thoughts of revenge. And it is to escape this unpleasure that the patient would take to bed and sleep. However, they would continue on in sleep become too powerful by midnight and unable to be handled by dreaming of pleasant things like her relationship with Stuart family by 3 or 4 am. It was then that she would wake up with racing thoughts.

I cannot resist taking a swipe at all those drug company touts who come as experts and give CME and drug company sponsored lectures to us private practitioners, flaunting their professorships and other ivory tower badges of honor. Their psychiatry is limited to giving drugs and whenever I have asked them what they do in terms of psychotherapy they, one and all, as if they all get handed out a pamphlet in their annual neuropsychopharmacology conference how to deal if they ever get cornered with this question, reply with, " Well, I recommend my patients to take a walk. So you see I am not averse to mental factors having a role in mental illnesses."  With this declaration they seem to believe that they have discharged all their obligation to study and teach psychology's role in causing and sustaining mental illnesses. And well one cannot fault them either for there is some truth in that walking away from one's problems does give temporary relief. Running away from true understanding of the patient through zonking them with drugs or telling them to take a walk is the alpha and omega of their practice.