The Psychology behind putting coins in Wishing Wells

In dreams, the presence of an expanse of water - sometimes even the presence of the color blue - signifies the fantasy of rebirth. All living creatures have emerged from the water, and, even, though, for hundreds of millions of years we have been land-based, our intrauterine existence for nine months still occurs in water, where we float in our mother's womb. This long association between water and birth has left an indelible genetic imprint in our mind and the former often - in dreams regularly - symbolizes the latter. Because of this close association, seeing water provokes the wish/fantasy to be born again.
Water also has an amorous draw. Life process is drawn into water reaching its maximum density in the rainforests. In India, the months of monsoon, with its bountiful greenery is celebrated in songs as the time for romance and making love. The songs usually go as to how in the month of Sawan (the month when the monsoon is at its zenith) a kind of fire begins to burn in one's heart. The fire being an allusion to romantic passion. Now we know the antithesis of water is fire. Burning passion of the man can ultimately be doused only by the wetness of woman's genital passage.
In dream interpretation, rescuing someone out of the water, or, it's opposite, getting rescued out of the water by someone, is treated as a "symbol" of wishing a child by that someone. For we are rescued from mortality by being born again through childbirth (by procreating with another person). The other person is rescued from death too. So the act of procreation is symbolized equally well by rescuing somebody or getting rescued out of the water. For it is through birthing that we achieve a modicum of immortality.
The close connection between water and the wish for rebirth is also strongly supported by the fact that religious rituals like baptism in Christianity and similar rituals in other faiths, and as to how conversion into Christianity from other faiths, is celebrated through the ritual of dipping/immersing the person in water.
Now this association between water and impulse to procreate and be born again is not limited to its appearance in dreams and religious rituals but it seems to influence human behavior in many other contexts which at first glance seem to have nothing to do with sex and rebirth.
When a man begins to find others, his rivals, doing better than him in life, to avoid facing the humiliation and narcissistic injury of finding one is not at the top of the pyramid, if of a jealous and phobic disposition, he begins to avoid situations and places like roads, malls grocery stores, churches, where he is likely to meet his rival, preferring to stay around his home, where he  still is the king of his castle. Congregations and public venues, where the combined presence of others makes him realize his inferiority even more acutely, trigger panic attacks. As Freud put it 'behind agoraphobia lies failed ambitions'. The home becomes the mother's womb, where the agoraphobic wants to retreat to avoid facing those who have bested him in life.
The phobia of water appears to have similar roots. Here the overwhelming wish is not to retreat to the home, but jump in the (purifying) water, and be reborn, to do a better job next time, after washing off and getting rid of all the 'baggages' of this life. However since rebirth also means the end of one's current life, the person develops the phobia of water to avoid fulfillment of the wish. As if in the two contrary wishes to die and be born again and to avoid death, the latter wish triumphs through the formation of the phobia.
The phobia of crossing bridge, especially over a river or other expanse of water, arises to avoid the temptation to jump over and submerge oneself in water (to be born again). Higher the bridge greater is the temptation - for it assures certain death. Often temptation to have sex with somebody, which will be dangerous, is shown in dreams as trying to cross a bridge unsuccessfully. Being caught precariously trying to climb up ledges, or climbing up, or coming down the steps, or from the height of a building with great dread of falling down, or slipping, or not being able to hold on to the supporting structures, arises from the same complex.
 One of my patients, a married man, who was tempted to make love to a young girl, but who was of loose morals and black (he was white), he was plagued with a recurrent dream in which he saw himself wanting to jump off a bridge but horrified to do so by the fact that the water below was dirty and dark.
The phobia of crossing bridges also symbolizes fear of intercourse, afraid one will not be able to reach the other side. The two sides symbolizing the two sexes, with the bridge being the penis which bridges the separation between the mates.
It is interesting that in Zoroastrian religion, and Islam, after death the soul supposedly crosses a bridge to reach the afterlife. In Islam, this bridge is conceptualized to be as thin and sharp as a razor blade. Its symbolism appears to be conveying the message that to be reborn one has to traverse through a very sharp and dangerous bridge. The innate fear present in mankind of not being able to perform sex successfully the religious ideologies exploit it by preaching if one does not live a righteous life one will not be able to traverse the bridge from this life to the next.
Now, how all this relate to throwing coins in wishing wells?
To go into that we must first examine the interesting phenomenon which growing up in India I  observed while traveling on trains. Whenever the train crossed a river, especially a holy river, and India being a very ancient civilization with every river having become holy over time, people, especially the devout ones, would take out coins from their pockets and toss into the water.. They believe it brings good luck. Rivers are anthropomorphized as Goddesses and the hope/wish that the goddess would return the favor by giving a million coins back for getting offered one.
Doesn't the ritual/process sound quite like what we do when we throw coins in a wishing well?
The process of being born again by entering into water is replaced by just throwing a valuable part of oneself (the coin, precious metal, money) into the water. But isn't that nothing more than a substitute for having sex with the river goddess?
Wishing wells are not quite rivers but a man-made expanse of water, placed there by some clever entrepreneur. He makes money by giving outlet to this primal impulse of mankind to be aroused into a wish to have intercourse and be born again on seeing water. The greatest wish of mankind: to have intercourse/be born/and thus attain immortality over time has spread to lesser wishes, chief among them being the wish for all kinds of material gain. And thus when we throw a coin in wishing well, it is not just for the satisfaction of that great libidinal wish but also for lesser wishes.
Over time a wishing well garners the same aura of holiness as Indian rivers have done, strengthened by the collective piety and wishes of the believers that putting in the coin there makes one's wish come true. The circulation of stories of some wishes have come true - whether imagined or in reality, for occasional wish does come true -  becomes proof that there does exist some miraculous property in that wishing well.

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.

Women playing with their hair on approaching stoplights

In an Internet site where I banter with my classmates from my medical school, one of them raised the following question.

why women play with their hair when they approach stoplights ?

And he answered it himself, of course as a joke, Unlike men they do not have b---- to scratch.

While he meant it as a joke the fact that he had noticed this phenomena, and had found it humorous enough to quip on it, and then had associated it with - rather had  found equivalency with - touching of genitals, points to the presence of some psychological riddle here. 

First of all we have to decide whether it is a phenomena worthy of psychoanalytic investigation by which I mean that it is a distinct behavior present not just as a quirk in one particular person, which would be a manifestation of his or her individual neurosis, but a universal neurosis, present in all of us, ready to emerge as a defense mechanism if the circumstances demand; a repetitious behavior arising from our phylogenetic past as a response to the experiences of countless generations that have left genetic imprints in all of us, and whose raison d'etre remains shrouded in mystery because the underlying motives and processes of the phenomena have become unconscious due to repression. 

There is little doubt that some women under stress do reach for their hair - usually the frontal locks - and run their fingers through it as if searching for something hidden. On being questioned they dismiss it as just a habit or as simple straightening of hair and may even get irritated as to why one would nitpick over a little extra grooming.  

Now superfluous grooming is a sign of obsessional neurosis. In a subset, the compulsion to clean and groom reaches ridiculous proportions. The patient, especially in the mornings, may literally spend hours in front of the mirror, straightening hair, looking for flaws on the face, clothes and other aspects of one's appearance, as if one has to wipe out every trace of what may be construed as offensive by others, before leaving the house. Trying to put the hair in order seems to be a specially favored aspect of this ritual, as if these individuals are having a-bad-hair-day everyday, and they may accumulate an impressive array of shampoos, gels, conditioners, sprays, and shaving paraphernalia as counter measures against these (unconscious) harmful impulses. 

And here we cannot help but reflect whether patients who suffer from trichotillomania - a malady where the person compulsively pulls out her hair in clumps sometimes to the point of going completely bald - are not taking this fear to an extreme.

Now sometime back on this blog I discussed a case of trichotillomania: "A childhood screen memory of penis envy and its connection with trichotillomania" (April 16 2011). There we saw how the patient, under the sway of penis envy, wanted to pull out anything that reminded her of the difference between the sexes and the underlying motive was to equalize the playing field between the two.

Could it be possible that such apparently purposeless playing with hair under stress is just an embryonic trichotillomania?

We do know that trichotillomania is another manifestation of obsessive-compulsive disorder. To the patient the hair feels as something alien and hostile that one must get rid of. Anything out of place, anything not fitting in with rest of the pattern; littered pieces of papers, dirty linen dropped on the bathroom floor, magazines thrown haphazardly upon the coffee table, hair in the bathtub, they all have to be put in the general scheme or yanked out altogether, so goes the reasoning of the obsessive, and hair become another object in the series.

What surprises us, and fills us with not a little fascinated horror, is that here what the obsessive is finding incongruous is not something external but part of his own self. But a little reflection tells us that  feeling and treating part of oneself as a foreign object is perhaps not all that strange but quite common. We just do not see it that way and therefore it unpleasantly surprises us when somebody brings to our attention as to how we can treat part of our own body as something vile and foreign. In fact picking upon pimples and other flaws of complexion is almost a rite of passage in adolescence; women in throes of post partum depression may consider their own child - which just so recently was part of their body - as incarnate of evil, the devil himself and kill it;  and in psychotics it is not all that rare to actually castrate themselves or enucleate their eyes [where eyes symbolize the penis]. Those suffering from psychogenic pruritis can relentlessly dig their own skin convinced that under it lie bugs or other contaminants, and psychogenic poludipsics are known to gorge themselves with gallons of water in order to wash out the impurities of the environment that has got lodged inside their bodies. Recently a patient of mine, who for years had been digging her skin and her torso and arms were puddles of sores, stopped doing it, when her Remeron (Mirtazapine) was stopped. She was perhaps feeling the side effects of Mitrazapine as something foreign inside her. A mechanism that I will not be surprised is common across the board in causing psychogenic polydipsia in patients on psychotropic medications.  

Now coming back to the analysis of these obsessive patients who are forever trying to get rid of the incongruities in their environment or in themselves. At the deepest level they are fearful of contamination of others by the bad aspects of themselves. Incongruities in the environment is just a reminder of their own unacceptable impulses, and they are forever straightening out the environment to banish from their sight everything that will provoke further activation of their own incongruent/evil/extruding impulses. And these extruding impulses show themselves to be the intimate aspects of themselves that should be hidden from the environment. While immediate examination shows them to be arising from the anal-sadistic phase of sexuality - we recall here that the fear of leaving the house is associated with not being cleaned and groomed enough - at the deepest level they arise from the fear of the destructive power of the phallic impulses. The fear that one's anal-sadistic impulses will show is but a regression from the fear that one's phallic/genital impulses are out of control and will be seen by people/society. 

Why the penis and the impulses originating from it are felt to be destructive? 

Sexual drive is often felt as evil and incongruous with the rest of the self; an anomaly, something gross, physical, material, smelly, crude and not refined or spiritual enough. 

And with good reason. People who are so dignified in every other respect when under the sway of the sexual drive can behave most incongruously. A man huffing and puffing in the act of sex looks ridiculous if not outright animal. There is nothing dignified about one human being mounting and humping another. And the phallus/penis is the most visible manifestation of this drive which turns us into such a coarse being. In women there is further fear of it being a harbinger of cooties - diseases - if not outright pregnancy, which is the beginning of the destruction of one's own body and ultimately death. No wonder people often develop neurosis in order to suppress/escape from this coarse drive. We cannot help but reflect here that in the Hindu Trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva the latter is symbolized by the penis and is attributed the function of both the procreator and its exact opposite the destroyer.

But what exactly is the connection between women playing with their hair on crossroads, trichotillomania and fear of getting touched by the penis, you want to ask me. 

This question cannot be answered directly and instead I will take up two instructive cases. The first one is actually not even a case but someone I worked with 25 years ago. He was a Jewish doctor who stammered quite badly; a malady that I could see had arisen as a mean to control his inordinate ambition which must have begun as an excessively powerful aggressive drive. Coupled with this was his habit of relentlessly twirling and untwirling a lock of hair that he still had upon his balding head. The underlying psychological mechanism behind the obsession was easy to discern. His extreme competitiveness wished nothing less than castration for anyone who even hinted of crossing his path. But living in society and hampered by its rules  and unable to do anything of the sort even with words, for stammering would arise to block the discharge of aggression through speech, he wanted to do it with his bare hands. But the danger involved in laying his hands upon others had deflected the impulse to find discharge upon his own self and in the form of twirling and untwirling his hair - castrating and uncastrating himself, symbolically of course.

The second case is that of a woman who was in early thirties, eager to settle down but unable to do so because of undischarged anger towards men, stemming from growing up in a divorced household where the mother was absent and the girl was dumped with the responsibility of taking care of the father and her brother, both of whom had lorded over her because she was the girl. Her relationships were predictable. After a brief  period or romance, she would lapse into continuous arguments with whoever she was courting.  All her lovers after a few months of honeymoon would metamorphose into her brother behind which lay the image of her father. Her life was a series of her old battles with the new incarnations of her brother and father. 

And her brother gave her fresh justifications to do so. She had a regular job while her brother, older than her, was more or less of a bum. Whenever she talked about him she showed contempt for his inability to hold down a job and this would be followed up with expressions of outrage that he still remains their father's favorite. And she knew that the only reason  this was happening was because he was the boy and she was the girl. "If only I had a penis," in her unconscious she reasoned, "I would have been my father's favorite." 

Now whenever she talked about her brother in this fashion, and additionally whenever she felt I was putting her down through my 'interpretations' of her psychological conflicts, she would get excited and start playing with her hair. And the way she played it looked like as if she was searching for something there. The movement of her fingers through her hair would remind me of how homosexual hair dressers fiddle with their clients' hair fetishistically as if they are searching there for something as well.  Now one of the most common subtype of homosexuality occurs in those who cannot forgo the idea of the lack of penis in their love object. These homosexuals love everything about women and their beauty but cannot tolerate the dread of the missing penis in them. They often turn to feminine looking youthful boys for their love needs. And it is this type of homosexuality that marks the hair dressers who cannot give up the idea of finding the penis in the tresses of the hair while grooming and straightening it out. The facial expression and behavior of this girl was so similar to those homosexual hairdressers, the unconscious motives behind such playing with hair became easy to fathom. "You jerk," she wanted to say, "You are shoving those interpretations down my throat with such surety because being a man, and possessing a penis, you consider yourself naturally superior to me. Now I know that I too have a penis. It is hidden somewhere, deep inside me, perhaps hidden behind these lock of hair of mine. And if only I get hold of it, which will place both of us on a level field, I will teach you a lesson as to who is better between the two of us."

If we take the Jewish doctor who played with the hair to symbolically self-castrate, and this girl's search for the hidden penis which would put her on equal footing with men, then we can extrapolate that perhaps many women when stopped at crossroads experience the situation as stressful and also deal with the anxiety by reaching for the penis that would put them on equal footing with men and make them not feel so vulnerable. 

But why would a woman feel vulnerable on stoplights? 

Here we run into the psychology of agoraphobia. Agoraphobia - which literally means fear of the marketplace - arises from fear of coming to harm in interacting with others especially in public places. Analysis reveals that behind the fear of interaction lies fear that one would be tempted to exchange one's goods - displacement from exchanging one's sexual goods - and would come out a loser. In the agoraphobic the give and take of life has gone sour. Iron has entered the soul especially in the matter of the most pleasurable of all exchanges - the give and take of sex.

What causes this fear and sourness?


Throughout our existence we are in search for somebody with whom we can exchange our bodily goods. The very process of life depends upon such exchange. In this love exchange, only in the beginning we are generous, and this more so the case in women. In her, if the culture and men has taken advantage of her, and given as to how exploitative cultures are towards women it is invariably the case, she may show increasing ambivalence towards this search for love. She may rather not exchange 'her treasures' with that of a man, or do it in a manner where she gives less and takes more. She may even resort to deception, ruse and tricking. It is these negative impulses behind her love that makes folks lament at the femme fatale and her enigmatic and unfathomable nature.

The woman's inner conviction that she has been shortchanged in life adds a further twist to this search for love.  Her sense of lacking something which she must make good and complete by getting it from a man makes her approach him with poor self esteem and trepidation and leads her to adorn herself with all kinds of jewelery, make-up, and other shiny trinkets that she hopes will be a match for that one jewel that he possesses. Women's endless shopping is also the search for that jewel that would deflect attention from her  great defect/wound  and would make the man believe that he is getting more than what he is giving. The term "turning tricks" for the act of prostitution perhaps arose from this attitude of exchanging and tricking the man into giving what she wants without his getting anything in return. For the prostitute convinces herself that she feels nothing and gives nothing in the sexual exchange and gets the man's money through just tricking him.  

But the attitude of tricking, deceiving, stealing, and in the more spirited one pulling it out as a tuft of hair, provokes the fear of retaliation and subjection to physical harm and other dangers as getting the cooties (venereal diseases) and pregnancy. The  revolt at the thought of playing the passive sexual role and a stranger's dirty organ penetrating one's body adds to the disgust and provokes further withdrawal from the impulse.

No wonder at the stoplights, in a situation to meet somebody - for crossroads are like a marketplace offering choices as to which direction to take and who to choose from amongst all the other stopped passengers - tempted and yet fearing the retaliation for her evil intention, she reaches for her hair and searches for the penis, which she has a conviction she does possess, and it is only a matter of searching. For if she is successful this time in that eternal search, she does not have to bother exchanging her goods with another; for what she so ardently desires she already has.

Dream displaying a woman's complex ambivalence towards men

A woman in her thirties, divorced, living alone, recently having given up an abusive relationship with a Mexican American, who is unemployed, associates with criminal elements, way below her in intellect, upbringing and social class, and who is currently being pursued by a man who belongs to her social and ethnic background, who has a regular job, and towards whom she has been unable to respond because she develops paralyzing fear at the prospect of going to his house dreamt the following.

I must add before I tell the dream that the man who is pursuing her has been going overboard with his wooing. Despite his having met her only recently he texts her all the time and has been cooking candlelight dinners for her, which she invariably gets out of at the last minute on some excuse. The day of the dream she had received yet another text message from him, inviting her for yet another dinner that evening. A couple of hours before the invitation time she fell asleep and dreamt

 that I finally made it to K's house. But I see a woman there sitting with a baby on the edge of his couch. I put on my usual nice act. "You have such a pretty baby." Which is kind of fake of course. And all the while I am wondering if this is K's baby or not. 
Then I walk out to the porch. I fumble through my keys for none of them are quite fitting the lock, opening of which will get me out of there. I feel great anxiety that I will never get out of there.   Then he comes from behind and holds me. I notice in the mirror which is present in front of us the thick and exceedingly blue mascara on my eyes. I notice that he is wearing a white shirt.


The main wish behind the dream was crystal clear even to the patient. "Though I have been blowing him off deep down I want to be with him. It is so sweet of  him to cook me dinners like that, especially since I am too afraid to ask him to my house let alone cook for him. Whenever I have to be with him I get butterflies in my stomach. You know how fearful I am of strangers and of leaving my house. I have this terrible fear that I will get lost on my way to his house out of confusion. Even now the directions to his house are jumbled up in my head. So when he texted me again today, for we had ceased communicating for a while and I had begun to feel that he has moved on to someone else, my hopes for finding happiness with him was rekindled and I felt relaxed and fell asleep in the afternoon and saw myself already at his house."

"Yes, it is dream of impatience. What you are looking forward to, the dream is showing it as  already happening. Interestingly in the dream your fear of him and your agoraphobia are both nullified by the strength of the wish to be with him. In dream you are able to do what you cannot in real life.  Is it the fear of sex which underlies your anxiety of strangers and leaving the familiar surroundings of your house?"

"No. He puts no pressure upon me in that respect. He has never approached me with that intention. He just sees something in me that makes him feel that we will be happy together. He can see my avoidance of him is not a rejection but a mental problem on my part. But I must say there is something about his voice that disturbs me. It  is similar to my father's, and I think he will turn out to be as controlling as my father."

"Why do the woman, who is sitting on the edge of the couch, and that baby come in to the dream?"

The associations were somewhat indistinct but the conjuring of the woman and child was another obstacle in her path to K. The dream had blocked out the affect of fear and anxiety and had placed her in his house, but the inhibitions had now created the obstacle in a new form. 'He is still not available to me because perhaps he now belongs to some other woman and even has a child with her.' However, "the wish" was asserting itself too and was creating the doubt that may be the woman has no claim over him and the boy is not his. Her fake praise of the child was to placate the woman in case she really was his girl friend and may view her as there to steal K away from her.

When this interpretation was made the patient agreed with it but added,  "That woman may be my rival but she is also myself. For she looks fat and wears glasses. And you know how in last few months I have gained so much weight. I should be wearing glasses, which I don't. But if I were to put on my glasses I would look like that fat lady."

So the woman and the child were representing not only rivals for her wish for K but also showing her wish for being living with K and having a child by him as already fulfilled.

She could up with no association as to why the the porch comes in the dream. Neither she has porch nor K. She could think of nobody from the past or present who had a porch like that.

"From where is the blue eye mascara taken from? Why such an emphasis upon it when you were telling the dream?" She had expressed quite a bit of astonishment about the intense blue mascara while narrating the dream.

"Yes, it was some blue colored mascara. It came right across my eyes." She took her hands over her eyes and made a motion across as if to show that the mascara was plastered from one end to the other like an eye mask. "Only a drag queen would lay the mascara as thick as that. It was so blue. Unbelievably blue."

But she could give no associations to that blue. And neither could she give any association to the white shirt. However, when I told her that white usually represents death and the white shirt -like white shroud - could be representing the fear of his dying, she immediately recalled that quite a few people, including her father, had died recently. Life recently has been preoccupation with death.

And as if to confirm the correctness of the interpretation she added that she now knows where the blue color came from. Her new phone when it receives instant messages shows the other party's message in blue while her own messages are in white. That morning when she saw his message it was in the background of that blue, and it had instantly filled her with the anticipatory joy of  meeting him, even before she read what was in the text.

And then she remembered, "Oh my God, that blue represents not just the joy of meeting him but his blue eyes as well. He has the brightest blue eyes. They look like the ocean. And they are plastered over my eyes, because I want them to be part of me."

"Is that the reason the association came that that mascara is making you look like a drag queen? If you  steal part of him, and add upon yourself, then you would be kind of drag queen."

"Perhaps that is the reason I am avoiding him. For I am afraid that I will kill him while stealing his blue eyes from him. And now I know too where that porch is taken from. It is from the house of that Mexican American ex-boyfriend of mine whom I finally told to get lost. He has a porch identical to the one in the dream."

"So you are running away from the blue eyed boy back to the Mexican, who is less threatening to you because he has far less intellect and social standing and there is nothing about him that would provoke your jealousy, and the impulse to kill him and steal his valuables."

"Yes, for I never have to worry stealing from that damn African-Mexican. It is just the other way round with him. It is him who is bumming from me all the time. He borrows and we both know I will never see a cent of it. I am attracted to these losers instead of finding the right guy and getting on with my life. I just cannot escape these wrong guys."

"And why is that?"

"Because I am to competitive. I am a volcano ready to erupt. If I want something I must have it. I could easily kill that man for his blue eyes. That is the reason I choose guys who are so broke and not just money wise but in their intelligence as well. For that way I will not be tempted to steal nothing from them. Even with them I debase myself and grovel at their feet so as to not let them know that I can kill them if they get too smart with me. But there is limit to my feeling inferior. If they push my button too far and won't back off, I can get really violent. I'll eat shit but I won't be choking over it."

Haunted by the supernatural - A shy girl's dream

A young woman who just turned 31, still single, reported the following dream:


A supernatural force is chasing me and another boy and a little two and a half year old baby. The older two of us are like protecting the younger one. We run to hide on a bed and cover ourselves with a white comforter. But the force emerges from behind us as two cocoon like figures shrouded in white sheet and quivering from top to bottom - she made motions of quivering with her hands to give expression to how those wavering figures appeared. One of them looks just like me. Both have brown hair. At that point I become evil myself. My eyes pop out of their socket. The white of the eyes become cone like and the pupils turn into points of a pen. I begin to write with those coney eyes on a big white thing, may be a big piece of paper. The writing is dripping with blood.


Isn't the dream crazy? she exclaimed and then added that the force remains in the background, camouflaged, and only steps out ever so briefly, but without actually harming us. Throughout the dream we are hiding from it. At one point instead of the boy a girl is accompanying me.


"It all made sense while dreaming but now it sounds so weird. I forget most of the finer details. If only I could remember all of it it would make such a fantastic movie."


"Who was the boy with you with whom you were taking care of the baby?"


"Actually he was pretty insignificant in the dream. His presence does not matter."


"Even if he appears insignificant to you, the fact that the dream chose to give it a representation means something significant lies behind it."


"That is not true about my dreams. All kinds of insignificant and inconsequential people appear in them. For example the other night a coworker of mine who I have no feelings for and couldn't care less about - don't mistake me he is not bad looking or anything like that -  was my husband in my dream and we had a child together who I was taking care of. Now there could be no reason for the dream to show this man as my husband. And then he and I having a child?! Having children is farthest thing on my mind. So my dreams can be full of insignificance."


"Well if the dream censor objects to our motives and emotions which are trying to make their way to fulfillment in the dream towards a significant person then the dream-work will try to fool the censor by substituting an insignificant person for the former. There may be guilt associated with seeing the significant person as your husband and father of your child so you have substituted this insignificant person for him because in real life you have no feelings for him. The dream censor (conscience which never fully sleeps even while dreaming) will be clueless as to what is going on with such a deception and will allow the dream to proceed as something innocent and will not wake you up.


"Who could be such a significant person who I cannot even dream of being my husband and the father of my child?"


"Girls often have fantasies of getting a child by their father, and there is always guilt associated with such fantasies.  Recall how one of your earliest memories is of your father driving away after your parents got divorced. And you told me how when you were three or four you were like your father's shadow. On your weekend visits you went everywhere with him and could not bear to be separated."


I was also familiar with some other facts about the girl which gave me reason to make the above construction. She once had a dream as a little child where she had sneaked in to her father's bedroom and could see what he was dreaming. He was dreaming of a  bustling city that was hovering above his bed. A kind of floating city where all the daily activities and concerns of mankind were taking place. The dream was interpreted as her wish to make her and his dreams to co-mingle and make a dream world/city/life of their's together. Her father never married after he divorced her mother, and growing up at times she felt sorry for him and wanted so much for him to have a family life of his own


"The boy who was with me had brown hair," the girl recalled.


The psychoanalytic commentary had brought out a fragment of the dream out of amnesia/repression and  now she could add that detail.


"What pictures or memories come to the mind when you think of the brown hair?"


"All my brothers have brown hair. Just like me. Mine is a little lighter. My mother's hair was brown too but darker than me,  like my brothers'."


"Is that boy then your brother?"


"Yes, he is."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because the little kid whom we were saving was my brother too. At one point in the dream he said, "Don't leave me, for I will die."  So it was me, and the brother next to me, who were saving the youngest one from some disaster. The dream was end of the world kind of dream. Like you see in those apocalyptic movies where everything is destroyed and only a handful of people are left who band together and watch out for each other. We were such a leftover group, my two brothers and myself,  trying to survive, running away from the supernatural force which was following us."

Knowing her I knew the greatest disaster of her life had been the sudden death of her mother when she was still quite young. I asked her, "Is the dream a replay of the disaster of your mother's death."

"Could be.  Her death was in a sense like end of the world for us children. And though we still had our step-father, it felt as if we were small, weak and helpless against the big world. And while growing my mother had at times told me that if something happens to her I must take care of my brothers. I always felt responsible for them. When she died, in many respects, I took her role with them."

"How old was the little kid you two were taking care of?

"Two and a half years."

"How old was your youngest brother when your mother died?

"Two and a half years."

"Who are the two figures whom you ran for refuge but who paradoxically change into the supernatural entity itself and rise out of the bed.?"

It was easy to see that they had to be familiar figure to whom they were running to to escape from the disaster only to find that they had inadvertently ran into what they were running away from.
 

"I don't know. They rose from the back and as if they were part of the comforter, like blended into the comforter. One of the figures looked like me. She had brown hair similar to mine."

"Was she your mother?"

"I don't know about that. But my mother had brown hair and blue eyes like I have. She was very pretty, my mother, and I am vain too like her." She gave a shy smile. "And now a memory comes up, so here is your associations which you are asking of me. Someone my mother dated in high school I ran into him when I was visiting my hometown, and he gasped with astonishment at the resemblance and said that it is so spooky how you look just like your mother. Everybody was crazy about my mother because she was so pretty."

"So at least one of the two figures following you is your mother. But why would she be evil towards you? Is it possible that her premature death has generated guilt in you especially since because of it you had to take her role? Also by mothering her other children, you symbolically replaced her with your step-father. You have told me that you are very attached to your step-father as well, similar to the way you were attached to  your father. And you are afraid that she has turned evil because she had to abdicate her role to you. Maybe somewhere in your unconscious thoughts you must think she will come back from the afterlife to punish you for displacing her."

"I think those entities about to emerge out of the woodwork are there more to keep an eye on me to make sure that I am doing the job right by my brothers than to punish me. Actually the entities were not evil. They were like in the background and followed us but never quite harmed us. So I should not have said they were evil. But there got to be guilt in me about her death. For just before dying she had developed severe blood pressure due to a problem in the artery that went to her kidney. My stepfather's family is very well off, so they went to Mayo Clinic for evaluation. The doctors there told her that if she does not get operated immediately she will die in 2 weeks. She had the operation and nevertheless died in two weeks.  As if she was destined to die on that day no matter what. I feel guilty because like I knew that that was going to happen to her that day.

"And now I am deathly afraid that I am going to die too and at the same age as my mother did and from the same condition."

"What condition?"

"A heart condition. It is genetic. Our heart suddenly stops."  Here she made the same wavy motions with her hand that she had made to give expression to the quivering ghosts who had risen out of the bed.  

"How do you know it is genetic?"


"Because my grandfather, her father, died from the same heart condition, at the same age, and without warning."

"Is the other figure who rises up from the bed is he your grandfather?"

"I don't know. The figure was of an older man. Could have been my grandfather. Never saw him alive though. Just a picture of his. He died before I was born. Died at the  age of 41 too, just like my mother. And yes in that picture his hair was dark brown like that of the dream figure." 

"Is the disaster you are running away from is it the fate of your mother and grandfather? Your own death?"

This conjecture could be more boldly advanced because the white shroud, the white comforter they were all per psychoanalytic theory allusion to death.

"That is deep, but you are right. The fear that their fate awaits me is always present  in the back of my mind as a disaster about to happen.  That is the reason I avoid doctors. I don't leave home unless absolutely necessary. As if I am safer in my home from the down worlders. I have coined that term to give pictorial expression to my fear of ghosts, ghouls and other entities from the world of shadows. Another term that I have coined." 

"Why did you turn evil at the end?"

"That is a good question. There is a dark side to me. It never finds expression nowadays, but once upon a time I was mean little girl who could be spiteful and vicious. I wouldn't like to know me the way I was in high school. I am nothing like that anymore. In fact just the opposite." 

"Is it possible that this mean part of you that you have successfully conquered during the day still manages to come out in the night in your dreams? And this mean streak in you found an outlet in anger towards your mother for dying prematurely and burdening you with the responsibility of taking care of your brothers and your step-father? She left you, an only girl amidst three brothers and the step-father. That may explain why your mother and grandfather are haunting you. For if you are angry towards your mother then you may harbor fears that she will come to punish you. And the dream is giving a pictorial representation of this fear of them."


"Why would I be angry towards my mother for dying early. She had no choice over it."


"But that is not how the unconscious thinks. The child part of your unconscious mind may not reason rationally and still hold a grudge against your mother for abandoning you when you were ill prepared to take up all those responsibilities."


"I guess at times when I was young I did feel anger towards your mother. And perhaps you are right in that I no longer feel angry but sad. I am strange with my emotions. I feel them not quite the same way that they should be felt. They change in me. Often I feel opposite of what I should feel. When I am missing somebody like when I broke up with my boyfriend instead of missing him and getting sad I got angry and mean towards him. With my mom perhaps it happened the other way instead of feeling angry I felt sad and fearful. 


"But now a dream comes to my mind. The other night I saw in dream this girl who I was trying to punch. But however hard I tried to hit her it did not count. For before my fist could make contact they lost power. As if I was hitting a punching doll and the impact had no effect. It was like nothing could happen to her."


"Who was this girl?"


"This girl was my old best friend. We had a fall out and we have not been friends for 10 years. We were like sisters."


"How long ago your mother died?


"10 years."


"So could young fall out with her was a reaction to your mother leaving you? Since your mother left you, you left your best friend as a retaliation."


"That is so interesting. Because the reason I broke up with her was because she did not come to my mother's funeral. She betrayed my mother."


"Just like you felt your mother betrayed you."


"Perhaps. But she definitely betrayed my mother. For her graduation my mother gave her 500 dollars. No one gives that kind of money for somebody who is not even their daughter, and she went on to a spring break with her boyfriend instead of coming to her funeral."


This could not be communicated and confirmed with the girl, but it looked that behind the rage and desire to punch her best friend for betraying her mother lay her own guilt of betraying her mother. In one of the sessions she stated that she feels guilty all the time; feels God will not forgive her; even after going to church and confessing to God and being reassured that God forgives all sin she could never feel pure or at least not for too long,; and that when she was a little child just telling a lie to my Mom made her feel as bad as murdering somebody.  This was an unmistakable allusion to her repressed death wishes towards her mother. 


And in her dream she could not punch her girlfriend with any force for she too harbored the same wish in her unconscious. To betray her mother and to replace her in the household.  It was like the female version of "Hamlet". Hamlet could not kill his uncle for killing his father and sleeping with his mother because he harbored the exact same wishes. 


But there appeared to be another wish behind punching her friend. It was giving vent to her anger at her mother for dying prematurely. The friend was substituting for her mother. 


"Why do I not connect and hit her when I want to hit her as hard as I can?" she asked.


"If she represents your mother then the opposite impulse arising from filial piety prevents you from doing the unthinkable."


"Yes, I do have two contrary impulses. For in the dream when I turned evil it was just part of me that turned that way. While another part of me just continued to be the onlooker.  The good part of me, the onlooker, was horrified at the emergence of  those coney bloody eyes. And all the while I was turning evil I was determined to run away from the bad guys and not become like them. There are two sides of me a  weaker scared side which joins the good guys and an evil one which sides with the bad."

I could not confirm it with the girl, for we ran out of time, but to me the coney bloody eyes derived their prominent representation from her especially strong scoptophilic instinct. The need to look at everything with great curiosity. The instinct which reaches its zenith during the sado-masochistic phase of  infantile sexuality. The popping out of her eyes was representation of her eyes popping out with jealousy over the privileges that her brothers enjoyed which being a girl she was denied growing up. 

She confirmed the conjecture that that part of the dream had something to do with envy "for you have to realize I grew up in UP, they are Neanderthals there when it comes to treating girls versus boys. And everybody else, my three siblings, my father and step-father, they were all big outdoorsy guys. And here I was not even allowed to mow the grass. Not allowed to shoot. Even snowmobiling, they let me do it just once. Yes, I did think that way that life was more cool if you were a boy. I am not gay or anything like that. I love men. I guess having that kind of jealousy has nothing to do with sexual orientation."


"Is it possible that behind the jealousy lay some impulses to violently hurt your brothers to get even for your mother making you a girl while she made all other siblings of yours as boys."


"I don't think so. But who knows what lies in my subconscious. For once upon a time I could be superviolent if provoked." 


"Is your current excessive shyness a reaction to his superviolent streak, keeping it buried by your building a wall of shyness and avoidance around you?"


"Perhaps. For you know how much I fear people."


"Is the blood dripping from your coney eyes a muted expression of this hidden violent impulses towards your brothers?"


"I don't think so. It could be. Though for me writing in blood symbolizes doing something that is carved in stone. Something whose fate is sealed in blood. It is final, like blood brothers; like blood oath."


And both of us wondered if writing with blood on that white paper in the dream was an attempt on her part to undo the fate she feels is written in stone. A fate that will strike her with cardiac arrest as it did her mother  for having once harbored evil impulses towards the latter and which in her unconscious she believes had a  role in causing her mother's death. For the girl does suffer from obsessive compulsive problems and does read and write all the time, perhaps to change the course of her life from its beginning. 

Death wishes underlying Generalized Anxiety, Obsessions and Agoraphobia

An 18 year old girl, who suffers from sever anxieties, to the point that she cannot even leave her house, and has developed extensive obsessions to bind/nullify the overwhelming affect of fear, had the following dream which disturbed her to no extent. "What happens in the dream, let me make it clear, I absolutely don't feel that way."

My mom, dad and my sister are in it. We are in my grandmother's backyard. Somebody got rid of my mom and dad. I didn't do it myself. In fact I did not do it. Some crazy person got rid of my parents for some reason. The backyard has no grass, just dark dried up dirt. There are ropes around their neck. Little pieces of rope. I think I am untying them. They are looking straight at me. I was kneeling over my dad. He is like totally silent. He could looked right through me. It was the creepiest feeling. Everybody was so calm. Even I was so calm. That is what so creepy about it. How could I be so calm about what had happened to them. I can remember it all so perfectly. I was on phone with my grandmother who said, what did you do and I said I didn't do nothing. But she said you will have to live with that for the rest of your life.


Since the patient mentioned her sister I asked her where was the sister in the dream.

She was inside the house. She was on the second floor watching through the middle window. I was standing under the tree. She then tells me Mom and Dad hung themselves. I did not see that. I just saw the small pieces of rope lying around.  But the way she told me is like I almost did it and I am covering it. She looked really disappointed with me and walked away in disbelief. I notice that I was still in my night clothes and I must have just walked down the stairs. I felt so horrible till I realized that wait a minute your mother is already dead and your dad is in jail so I could not be responsible for their death. And my sister is not alive either. I woke up in panic my heart pounding. I don't want to have a dream like that in a million year. I wouldn't even hurt a soul. I want to see  my mother come home so badly. And my sister too. Just the opposite of what is in the dream.

At this point the patient began to cry and declared that she does not want to have another dream for life. "I don't want to even remember this dream ever again."

The central theme of the dream could be analyzed without associations. It was clearly fulfillment of death wishes towards her family perhaps connected with some early childhood sexual activity which she was afraid to practice unless there was nobody watching her which involved doing away with her parents and their watchful eyes. That activity had to do with masturbation was supported by the fact that the only association she brought to the dream was that it was sparked by watching the play "Wizard of Oz" the night before. Dorothy had walked the dog on the stage with a thin white rope. The same thin rope had reappeared in the dream and had been used to hang her parents. Viewing the dog being walked with the rope had  sparked the memories of touching herself. The dog substituting for the clitoris. Though this construction was not conveyed to the patient who would have anyway rejected it. But there was little doubt from analysis done in previous sessions that her obsessions were two step in nature: doing away with the parents and undoing the effects of such horrible thoughts. Her mother and sisters untimely death, and her father being sent away to jail, all of which happened in the last two years, has not helped matters and has made her obsessions worse. Her obsessions are now mainly seeking of forgiveness through symbolic motor rituals for all the misfortunes that has befallen her family and which in her unconscious she takes responsibility for.

The reason I report this dream here is because this girl who suffers from crippling anxiety, agoraphobia and obsessions, her symptoms have their roots in these childhood death wishes towards her parents, which she is terribly horrified and guilty of, and it is the anticipation of retaliation arising from the guilt which keeps her constantly anxious.

The fear of harm coming from her evil thoughts turning into reality has made it very difficult for her to leave home. She anticipates meeting the same fate as her mother and sister - most strangely her brother died as well during the same period - and thus sees the world as nothing but a menacing and dangerous place. She has begun to do what another of my patient put it, "Every morning on waking up I quiver in my boots because of my catastrophizing the world."