A dream exhorting the patient to mourn for her father's death

A woman in her mid-thirties, who suffers from severe anxiety and always dreads harm coming to her from unknown quarters, reported this recurring dream, which was going on for couple of weeks, and had started a few months after her father's death. The immediate cause was her going to Detroit's winter bash where young people were skating on the ice rink and feeling envious of their vitality. [She is an envious person by temperament.]
After returning from the rink she dozed off on the couch and the dream occurred for the first time.

My father is there in the apartment. I cannot see him but I can feel his presence as a tremendous pressure. Then I hear voices. The voices tell me that I forgot something.
On asking if the voice is that of her father. She said: No it is not my father's voice. But I know it is my father. The voices are more like a drone. Many people talking as if I am in a restaurant or a public place where you feel the presence of others without interacting with them.

Patient complained that the dream is driving her crazy because she cannot for the world figure out as to what she forgot. She has thought of million things, gone through every drawer in her bedroom and every nook and corner of the basement and racked her brain to no end, but still she cannot figure out as to what she has forgotten.
Then she conjectured that maybe she did not pay her father's money back, and there is guilt over it. "You know I always borrowed money from him but never returned any of it. I feel so bad about that. He was so mad in the end about my ceaseless borrowing he would not talk with me. For that George Washington you see on that dollar bill that was his God. By the end of his life all he lived for was to collect little amount of cash that came his way from all the rickety little businesses he had built around town. Not paying back his money sits on my chest like a brick. I wrote a letter to him as to how sorry I was for doing him that way but never gave it to him. There was some psychological block there.
Or may be I forgot to mention somebody at his funeral, maybe left out saying something about one of his three children [her three siblings] when I spoke there. I was the only one who spoke. I was the only strong one at the funeral. And it surprised everyone because I am the most messed up."

Patient then added that her dreams come true. She once dreamt a friend of her's shooting someone. The next day the friend got shot, and exactly on the same spot on the chest, where he had shot the other person in the dream. She could not explain as to why her prophetic dream did not show him getting shot the way it was going to happen the next day, though accurately telling the method of injury and the site of the wound.
She reported another dream where she saw the death of her father's best friend, Earl, who the next day did die.
Now such premonitory dreams of death is a symptom of obsessive thinking. The obsessional neurotic person believes that his or her thoughts are so powerful that they can magically cause death. And since obsessional neurotic's unconscious is filled with thoughts of causing others harm, usually by death, they are always doing away people in their dreams. And since dreams are nothing but our daily thoughts couched in the special language of dreams, the death of other people is a staple in the dreams of obsessive people. And therefore it is not surprising when someone close to them does die they can immediately recall recently having had a dream of somebody or other dying.
When asked if she also dreamt her father's death before it happened she admitted she did not. But immediately added that just before his death she did see him in a dream standing next to a window looking out of glass pane and then turning to her to assure that everything will be alright.
She claimed that the dream signified that he was going to die and it was his way of telling her that he was looking out of the glass pane at his approaching death and was assuring her that she will be fine with that."
"And I was fine throughout the funeral," the patient claimed. "I did not even cry, not even quivered my lips. In fact I was so strong and in so much control that my family was convinced that I was high on weed. I thought people were talking about me for not feeling any sadness and not crying. But I was like a preacher who is not affected by the death of somebody about whom he has to give eulogy. And my father did not look dead. He looked so good and young."
Now failure to cry or feel emotions at the death of such an important figure as one's father, especially in case of a girl, means that there is lot of undischarged anger or grudge, and the affect of revenge is holding back the tears.
I conjectured that the dream/her father was telling that she forgot to cry over his death. The love for her father was telling her that she should cry for his death while the revenge feelings were blocking out the last part of the command and the dream was allowing the expression of just half of it : You forgot something.
The woman was stunned and said, "I would have never thought of that," which is usually a phrase that declares yes I always knew that to be correct but only in my unconscious for I could never allow myself to think of it consciously. And then went into describing how she was her father's favorite, his little girl, and would sit on his lap as a little child till everything changed with onset of puberty and in the end they were not even on speaking terms.
"And why was that?"
"Because he favored boys over girls. He favored even a strange men, who would approach him for help and would give them start up money for their businesses but would never do that with his girls."
"That must be the reason why whatever money you took from him you did not return and could not make yourself to hand him the letter of apology and could not cry at his funeral."
"Yes," the girl agreed. But cried my heart out at the death of E, my father's best friend, who died two months before my father."
"So the tears for your father came out at the death of his best friend."
"Yes," the girl agreed. "I knew my father would be dying very soon too. Both E and my father were buddies from the earliest childhood, and both were on the brink of death. So you are right, I must have begun to mourn for my father at E's funeral."
"Why you would cry for E, but not your father when both were in the class of fathers for you?"
"Because E was gentle and unlike my father was not always exhorting me to be tough. Toughen it up. Don't let anybody see your weakness. Tighten it up. These were his favorite words and it kind of ruined my girlish nature. I became tough towards everything soft and feminine. In fact I became a tomboy. I have a real bad temper. I can really wallop anybody if they aggravate me beyond a point and that may be the reason I am always fearful because I can never trust myself as to when I will fly off the handle and maul whichever idiot is rubbing me the wrong way. So I guess by not crying at his funeral I was following his command to suck it up and not show any emotions. Giving him his own medicine you could say."
"Why did the voice not come from your father but from a number of people as if you were in a public place?"
" All it means is that not just my father but all my relatives and other people who were at that funeral are telling me to give up my grudge against my father and mourn over the loss of those happy times with him. These people are kind of authority to me just like my father was."

An interesting example of the defence of Splitting in a young girl

Freud in the last year of his life wrote a paper on "splitting" declaring it as another ego defense. He never completed the paper - it was published posthumously - because of failing health and because death overtook him. In the few pages that he managed to write, he expressed doubts whether "splitting" is an entirely new concept or something long familiar, and whether he was justified in introducing an unnecessary technical term instead of explaining the clinical phenomena by already known metapsychology. But he opted to incline towards considering it something entirely new and hitherto unexplored way of looking at how the mind - rather ego - deals with instinctual processes which forebode danger from the outside world.
In the paper he states that when we are confronted with something dangerous, something which qualifies as a psychic trauma, and which forces us to abandon our usual means of gratification of an instinctual drive, the mind creates a split. One part of the mind continues to indulge in the gratification, behaving as if the danger does not exist, while the other part takes full cognizance of the threat, abandons the gratification, and creates defenses against the emergence of the instinctual impulse.
This sounds strange. For either the mind can work towards the satisfaction of an instinctual impulse or against its satisfaction. How can it do both? Here the process of splitting comes in. What the mind does is to give outlet to both the trends. It finds compromises that allow satisfaction of the instinctual need while at the same time giving representation to the demands of the dangerous reality.
The example Freud gives is that of the clinical phenomena of fetishism. In a fetishist an object unsuitable for genital sex - such as a shoe, undergarment, lock of hair - draws all his sexual interest. Origin of fetish of course lies in the Oedipal Phase. The little boy at the peak of indulging in infantile masturbation, between the ages of 3 to 5, and imagining that his mother has the same sexual organ which he is manipulating, when faced with the absence of penis in a sibling or a playmate, while in throes of satisfying his sexual curiosity, or in the mother herself by some chance observation, reacts to it with the severest fright. For he immediately associates the spectacle with threats of punishment that he has received in the past for playing with his penis, or for bedwetting at night, or for even indulging in some other naughtiness which he equates with masturbation in his unconscious, and he is seized with fear of losing his own penis by castration.
The fright is followed by the mind's refusal to believe what he is seeing. The defence of denial takes over.
But this disbelief/denial is only partial. One part refuses to believe what he is seeing, for he cannot imagine anybody being deprived of such a prized part of the body - the manual masturbation is vigorously practiced at that age - and he creates the illusion that the girl does have a penis, and it is either too small therefore not visible, and will grow to size later, or that it is hidden inside waiting to be explored and brought out. This illusionary belief is then further elaborated by creating the fetish. Some other part of the woman, usually the last part that was seen with rapt curiosity before being confronted with the sobering vision of the female genitals such as lingerie, underwear, blooming buttocks, hair, legs, high-heeled colorful shoes is elevated to the status of a penis with a reasoning that runs "so what if she does not have a penis, look at her large buttocks or her silky soft lingerie or colorful shoes." Now instead of mother as a whole with the penis, the boy is enamored with the fetish, which is really a substitute for the absent penis in the mother. And as long as he can keep the fetish in sight or even in imagination, he can overcome the fear of castration and continue to indulge in masturbation. Later on as the sexual activity matures from masturbation to genital contact with women, the fetishistic attraction persists in a woman's buttocks, or breasts, or some other alluring trait like her earrings or other adornments or even the light in her eyes.
So by creation of fetish sexual activities can continue on as if no threat of castration exists.
But the threat of castration is not subjected to a total denial and completely warded off with the aid of fetish. A place is found for the fear too. The phylogenetic experiences invariably gives the role of this feared person/castrator to the father, regardless of who made the threat in real life. And this anticipation of castration now emerges, alongside the masturbatory activity, as an exaggerated and intense fear of the father punishing him. The fear requires the whole force of his masculinity to master and the result is emergence of oppositional defiant traits. The fantasies of getting even with the father by attacking and doing away with him, usually devouring him, provokes guilt, which becomes a permanent part of man's character. The fantasy of devouring is probably most preeminent as a means to do away with the father, because the fear of father castrating one, regresses to the oral phase that he will eat me up; just like how Kronos, the father-God sought to swallow Zeus, but Zeus with help of his mother not just avoided getting eaten but castrated his father.
I recently came across this phenomena of splitting in a girl of 26 who would not touch pork because it reminded her of eating another human. Assuming that it was defence of strong reaction formation against her cruel impulses displaced from humans to animals I assumed she was vegetarian. But she proved me wrong by adding that it is only pork she cannot eat, she has no problem with beef and steaks.
"Why just pork?" I asked her.
Because whenever she imagines the part of the pig from where the meat could have come from it grosses her out.
So here was a good example of splitting. Eating meat had become equated with eating human as she herself admitted and analysis showed it to be eating up her father which was being rejected because of guilt. However, the rejection was only partial. A split had been created. The rejection was limited to pork, while she could continue to eat beef.
Now such splitting with food is very common. Children show plenty of it, going in and out of phases, when they will eat certain foods but not others.
In autistic children, who have to struggle with severe hatred of their primary caregivers [for their emotional unavailability during crucial months of their development] this food preference may get extreme. They often eat just very few items and reject almost all other foods.
In adults too one finds such food fetishes, where a person will eat egg white with great relish, but balk at the idea of the slightest yolk getting into his omelet. Similarly people may have fetish for skim milk versus whole milk and some take extraordinary precautions that fish does not get mixed with milk or not a trace of fat enters into their meat.
Quite a few people will never eat everything on their plate, leaving some portions as if they are forbidden to eat the entire content of the plate.
Billion dollar industry of special foods, which attracts the gullible folks into buying gluten free meals, and other fancy foods, by advocating some foods as nothing short of ambrosia full of healing properties while others as literally poison, arises from the same human tendency to split something that is perceived as dangerous. Incorporation of the good parts of some significant person in one's life - phylogenetically the mother - and rejecting their harmful aspects. The simultaneous acceptance and rejection of food is displacement from ambivalent attitude towards that significant person whom one wants to incorporate within oneself but only partially. Eating from the plate partially is taking in of the loved portions of the person while the hated and feared aspect are left on the table untouched.
In bulimia the split is biphasic. Not some food is eaten and other is rejected but the person eats all the food and then throws up, expression the positive and negative attitude towards the food in two steps.
In movies the splitting is often used to contrast the brave aspects of oneself being projected on to the hero while the cowardly parts are projected upon the comedic sidekick who accompanies the hero on his adventurous journey
Psychoanalytic literature is full of articles on "Splitting" as a behavior of "Borderline Disorders" and other such nonsense as if this defense exists only in highly disturbed people who can see other people only as all good and all bad. But these misconception as to what splitting is has arisen because these authors have gone hog wild over trying to exploit Freud's last incomplete writing as something that they can elaborate upon and make a name for themselves out of specializing in it.

A psychological theory to explain rise of sugar, lipids and triglycerides causing metabolic syndrome in chronically stressed

A long time back, when I was in my late thirties, Single, and somewhat of a hypochondriac -a common affliction in people in mid-life and still without wife and children - one day, feeling out of sorts, slightly nauseous and light-headed, I asked a nurse to check my blood pressure.
And lo and behold, instead of the usual 140/90 it came as 155/98. I could not believe that my body was betraying my mandate to always serve me without a fault, and I was instantly filled with anger, apprehension, vague forebodings, and a desire to go on a rampage.
The nurse told me to calm down and handed me a candy bar. On my expressing surprise - for wouldn't sugar worsen my emerging metabolic syndrome, hastening diabetes alongside the hypertension - she said, "No. Eat the candy. The sugar in it will bring down your blood pressure."
And she was right. In a matter of minutes the blood pressure returned to its baseline - 140/90.
The nurse explained that sugar made me feel good, which brought down the blood pressure. Sugar, according to her, works like a reward and when you eat sugar, or any food, but especially food that is loaded with calories, it makes you feel like an instant winner. Winning and getting rewarded is what life is all about and for eons of evolutionary years the reward was basically one of two things - food or sex. When you eat or finish having sex, you feel like you have reached your goal and are getting rewarded. This sends a signal to your brain to turn off "the strife mode", which brings down your blood pressure. As long as you are in a state of strife your blood pressure remains high, for your body is geared up for "fight or flight". But when you have a feeling that you are getting rewarded, the body relaxes and the blood pressure comes down.
The nurse set me thinking. And I began to notice that when I am stressed, or feeling anxious, or agitated, I do reach - sometimes even without paying attention - for food, and the eating does help the mood. If I receive bad news, or am gearing up for confrontation, for example like having to argue with an insurance company rep. over discharging a patient from hospital prematurely, or doing even such a minor stressful activity like dictating medical charts, I do feel tension, or pressure, or presence of something like a foreign object, in my chest. And eating a cookie, or sipping coffee, or eating hot salty harsh food like jelapeno chips, helps. In fact all the while I am masticating the food, and feeling its passage through the esophagus, I feel virtually no stress and my mind gets distracted away from whatever is bothering me into concentrating upon the pleasure arising from eating and swallowing.
So eating lowers stress and takes away depression and anxiety, at least in me, and perhaps in all those who can use this mode of gratification to block out painful emotions arising from adversities. The pleasure from eating blocks out the perception of pain arising from the stress as if our conscious mind can handle only one affective tone at a time.
People who are couch potatoes, and eat all day long, must suffer from subtle dysphoria, or even overt depression and anxiety, and much of their eating is not for nutritional reasons but to counter their depression, I reasoned.
I wondered too whether people who live stressful life - especially that had its beginnings in childhood, when pleasure from eating is most profound - overeat to handle stress, and thus get overweight, and develop diabetes, and other metabolic problems.
And is it possible that not just the process of eating that lowers the stress but a rise in blood sugar also plays a role in bringing down the stress?
If the latter is true as well such people may be pathologically seeking to keep their blood sugar at high levels to create a continuous source of pleasure. And in an attempt to keep high supply of sugar to their system is it possible that their body turns on genes that lower their basal metabolic rate, and gear up metabolic processes that start storing lipids and fats more than what is good for them, and all in order to have a readily available internal source of energy, in case food becomes scarce in the stressful and dangerous outside world.
How does this constant high level of sugar consumption affects the glycobiology of these people? The purpose of high levels of sugar is of course for it to be readily available not just in the blood but inside the cells, especially in muscle and brain cells, which must function at a higher level of activity in order to deal with stress. For it is with brain that we scan our surroundings for danger and make strategic multi-step planning in our neurons to combat the enemy, and it is with muscles that we fight or flee away from the enemy and keep it taut to prevent any foreign object penetrating through its shield.
This assumption that blood sugar quickly moves into intracellular space when under stress also may explain as to why anxious people, at least in their youth, often show hypoglycemic attacks that go as low as 40 mg/dl. Panic pumps insulin out of the pancreas to move the sugar rapidly into the intracellular space for quick burning to face the danger.
Could this constant moving of blood sugar into intracellular region to prepare the body for flight and fight finally leads to the development of insulin resistance to prevent excessive conversion of intracellular glucose to lipids and triglycerides?
The insulin resistance in diabetics perhaps results from the following sequence of events.

• High level of stress and anxiety, due to genetic predisposition and environmental stressors, especially childhood abuse and neglect.

• High sugar consumption to deal with this anxiety by keeping the body's flight or fight mechanism on high alert.

• Excessive insulin secretion to keep moving this sugar into intracellular region.

• Development of insulin resistance to prevent movement of sugar into intracellular region where it is getting converted to way too much lipids and triglycerides.

• Finally development of diabetes where there is high level of sugar in extracellular space while intracellular space is in sugar starvation.

The degeneration of various organs especially the nervous system, which exclusively uses sugar for its energy needs, occurs because of this intracellular sugar starvation.
Couple of additional points are worth taking up here.
Why does anxiety or stress cause lump in the throat, queasiness in the stomach, pressure on the chest?
Per my theory stress should activate the drive to search for food to raise blood sugar, but that does not explain the emergence of these physical symptoms in the upper GI tract.
Now it is not real hunger that primarily causes stress related eating. Eating is indulged in as a quick attempt to raise blood sugar but more so as a means to deny the magnitude of the stress. If one is eating then it gives a false signal to the mind that one is in a state of plenty and therefore there is no need to get too worked up and collapse altogether by overestimating the danger. Its mechanism is similar to addictive behavior. As long as one is indulging in addictive behavior all other realities of the world, including all sense of danger and worries, disappear. There is a psychologically adaptive mechanism in play here.
These physical sensations in throat, chest and stomach - almost like irritants - emerge not as much to invite eating - as an attempt to douse them with food - but because of an entirely different psychologically adaptive mechanism. They arise to give a sensation of there being a foreign body in the upper GI tract which must be got rid off; irritants that must be either doused with food or dug out from one's flesh with a counter-irritant.
From where does this sensation of the presence of a foreign body/irritant arise?
They owe their existence to anxiety -a somatic manifestation of anxiety. They are basically no different than other somatic processes of anxiety like irritation in lower GI tract causing different forms of colitis; irritation in bronchial tree causing allergic respiratory problems like asthma; irritation in the bladder with urinary frequency and in more extreme cases Interstitial cystitis; irritation in the sinus mucosa with secretion of tears and sinus fluids; irritation in the skin causing psychogenic pruritis; irritation in heart causing arrhythmias.
Why does anxiety causes these foci of somatic irritation?
If we turn to current psychiatry to get an answer as to why anxiety causes such somatic disturbances we find nothing. Yes, modern psychiatry does catalogue beautifully all manifestations of anxiety - plagiarized straight from Freud's earliest psychoanalytic writings, never crediting him - but gives no explanation as to why this happens. Actually current psychiatry despite its hoopla about being very biological and molecular based tells us nothing about soma and forget about psyche. All it does is to catalogue symptoms.
Now here I venture into a very far out hypothesis. Somatic anxiety, which is really not so much affect of anxiety but activation of mucosal tracts and surrounding tissues and muscles in various tracts of the body through which the interior of the body communicates with the outside world, is actually a psychological attempt by the mind to fight and do away with the agent that is causing the stress.
Before we evolved into humans anxiety/fear gave us two options: run away or fight. But by turning in to humans these two options have increasingly turned into non-options. In a civilized human society we have to stay our ground and deal with the agent of stress without running or attacking it. Animals also face this quandary, but not in such a regular fashion as humans. And when you have to deal with an enemy without the choice of making him disappear by running away or annihilating it, you are forced to use different strategies.
Creating somatic anxiety is one such strategy. The object [forces] that is causing the stress and from which one cannot run away or attack because of social restraints is as if "internalized" by the mind into one of the body tracts and the battle against it is waged there. It is "fight in displacement" which has psychological as well as biological/evolutionary roots.
The hated stressful object is as if swallowed inside one of the body tracts and the fight against is launched there. It the enemy is felt within the lower GI tract it is as if extruded into oblivion with the force of violent colitis. If it is in the urinary tract it is flushed out repeatedly. If it is in bronchial tree it is subjected to asthmatic choking by clamming up of the muscles. If it is in the skin it is treated as an irritating bug. In the upper GI tract it is treated as if it is a bad piece of food that was taken in by mistake and now either should be placated with sweet food and sent down the tract or burnt alive as with stomach acid using some harsh food or spirit such as particularly hot jalapeno or whiskey or thrown-up as vomit.
Here we are reminded of the phrases: eating someone alive, eating and spitting them out, burning in hell fire [of stomach acid].
The appearance of lump or heaviness in the chest is a recreation of the source of stress [the enemy] inside one's own body - in the GI tract - and then an attempt to destroy it there, because one cannot destroy it in the outside world. Granted it is not a real elimination of the enemy but a make-belief elimination done inside one's body and since it is make-belief, it keeps recurring as long as the external enemy exist, but it does give temporary relief. Preference for hot and spicy food over sugar is like using harsh tools against one's own flesh where the enemy is perceived to be launched.
This creation of enemy within one's system and then treating it as a foreign object and how it provokes secretion of steroids and activates body's immune responses and causes stress-induced autoimmune disorders are interesting fields of enquiry. Secretion of steroids in stress appears to be an attempt on part of the body to block body's immune response against one's own tissues that are being harnessed to play the role of foreign body.
A discussion about stress and rise of blood sugars and lipids cannot be ended without touching upon a puzzling clinical phenomena. Why do psychiatric medications raise blood sugar and worsen lipid profile?
This is an even more far fetched hypothesis but perhaps I am justified in putting it forward. Anti-psychotics and antidepressants at least partially work by raising the levels of carbohydrates and related compounds in the body. This is looked upon as an unwanted side effects of these medications. But perhaps it is more than side effect and may lie central to its therapeutic efficiency. After all the three most efficacious antipsychotics - Clozaril, Zyprexa and Seroquel - they all cause the greatest increase of blood sugar and lipids. In fact there seems to be a high correlation between greater disruption of carbohydrate metabolism and better antipsychotic efficacy. As if antipsychotic medication efficacy is dependent upon how much side effect they cause. A phenomena that was remarked upon by researchers when the first generation antipsychotics came into practice and it was noticed that therapeutic dose is often one that produces extrapyramidal symptoms. As if antipsychotics work by shifting the overactive dopamine activity from higher centers of the brain which do cognitive activities, and where madness lies, to lower centers which regulate autonomic activity including derivation of pleasure from eating and other body functions.
If there is indeed a psychotherapeutic angle to this rise in fat and sugar in body what could be the psychological factors that run parallel to the physical processes?
I speculate that a high storage of lipids and triglycerides and high blood sugar levels gives the patients a false sense of security and makes them stand up to their fears/stressors/enemies. For after all we were most secure on our mother's breast getting suckled by her sugar and fat laden milk. A rising levels of these "goodies" transports us back - even if in a very limited sense - to the days when we enjoyed the security of being one with our mothers through her breast, getting all our nutritional and love needs met without any effort.

Defiance against parents expressed as love for Tosh.O brand of humor

A young girl, barely 21, brought the following dream to the session:

I am in a jail. The jail is run by Tosh.O, who is a comedian. It is so weird for it makes no sense. Why would Tosh.O be running a jail. Jail is weird too. It has a long corridor with jail cells on both sides. There are 2 or 3 people in each cell and Tosh O. is holding them there as some form of punishment. They are kids from my high school, which is so weird. J [patient's boyfriend] is with me. He finagles his way out of the cell in which we are. In fact, our cell is the last one in the hall. He goes after Tosh.O, and possibly gets caught, for there is this loud scream which must be from him and which wakes me up.

Now long corridor with multiple cells reminded me of the typical dream of going from one room to another in a house or hotel, and which is a pictorial representation of polygamy, but by reversal symbolizes marriage - since marriage is an institution that protects one from the trials and tribulation of polygamy. And from previous sessions I knew that the girl was struggling with the issue of marriage, not sure if she should make a commitment, despite being with her boyfriend now for over five years. It is unclear why she hesitates committing herself, though we both think it has to do with her great ambivalence towards her father, who she once loved very dearly - during the Oedipal phase - but now cannot criticize enough. The constant criticism of the father is an attempt on her part to free herself from her unconscious bondage to him.
Anyway, I began the analysis by asking her as to who in the world is Tosh. O.
"He is a comedian. Daniel Tosh. I love him. J records his show on the VCR, when I am not there. I also look for his shows on U-tube and Comedy Central. He makes completely off the wall statements. Stupidest things. Gross stuff. Jokes on celebrities, horrible ones, absolutely forbidden statements. I cannot get enough of him."
Now making insulting, gross and forbidden statements towards celebrities, or those who are in high places, has its roots in showing such off-limit defiance towards one's parents - especially father who traditionally has ruled the roost - but out of filial piety they are displaced and expressed against these parent- substitutes.
So her fascination for Tosh.O humor must have arisen from his irreverence towards authorities, I reasoned.
Being somewhat familiar with her problems - for behind her obsessions lie thoughts of harming her parents and simultaneously thoughts of protecting them from her harmful thoughts - I commented to her that perhaps she wants to change places with Tosh.O and poke fun at celebrities [her parents]. That alone explains why she brought Tosh.O in her dream and then declared it was so weird. [Declaration of weirdness about a dream or its elements is always embarrassment over the intensity of the displacement the dream wish has to undergo before the dream can show it getting satisfied.]
She agreed with that interpretation, but only after a slight period of incredulity which broke into an admiring smile, and then brought the following association.
"There is one scene of Tosh O which I found so funny. He shows a woman coming down the steps who is such a klutz that she knocks people down with her arms which are flying all over the place. To punish her Tosh makes her walk down the steps again, but this time with her arms tied, and on a chair, and she has to bounce down each step."
I conjectured that the series of jail-cells in the dream were possibly taken from the series of steps on which the klutzy woman came down. In the TV scene she was knocking people every step of the way and this scene is transformed in the dream to show Tosh O punishing people in that series of jail cells. The steps have been transformed into jail cells. Your classmates from high school were your rivals and, given your competitive nature, you are getting even with them in the dream.
Patient agreed with the correctness of the interpretation and added that it also explains as to why my boyfriend and I are at the end of the long corridor. This allows us to get a good view of all the people in those cells getting punished by Tosh. O.
I wondered if the forbidden insulting things that Tosh. O does to celebrities is something she envies and it is a talent which she would like to steal for herself so she can get even with her parents and he school mates.
The girl agreed with the interpretation.
There is one point which needs explanation. If she wants to steal Tosh O's talent why does not she go after it himself instead of sending her boyfriend.
To steal a man's talent in the unconscious is equated with stealing his manhood. There is too much affect of fear associated with that. So she sends her boyfriend. For woman's ambition traditionally has been fulfilled through the daring of her man.
And though her boyfriend successfully escapes out of the cell and goes after Tosh O. to steal his talents, he gets caught, and since she is identifying with him, she is the one who wakes up with a loud scream. The anxiety/fear trumps the wishfulfilment and wakes her out of her dream.

Green eyes in a dream as a symbol of jealousy

A 17 year old girl who suffers from extensive anxiety and some obsessions, primarily involving numbers, could not bad mouth people enough in a recent session.
She claimed that the whole human race is annoying. She wants to do nothing with anybody. They all irritate her. She claimed she had hardly left home in the last few weeks.
Then she recalled a dream which had no detail other than that her eyes were green in it. The dream picture was so intense that on waking she rushed to the mirror to make sure that her eyes had not really turned green.
She wanted to know what could be the meaning of the green eyes.
I conjectured that green eyed monster refers to jealousy; getting green with envy. Perhaps she is jealous about looking at others.
She stated, "I would have never thought of something like that. It sounds weird but it is right."
When asked why does she think it is right she replied, "I think I don't go out because I am too jealous. I cannot stand anybody being better than me. I get all kinds of evil thoughts towards any girl who is prettier than me. So I cannot go to public places."
So here she brought up spontaneously the origin of her agoraphobia and panic. They were defensive maneuvers to prevent her from going out and getting jealous and start thinking of doing evil things to others.
As for the evil things that she would do to others she did not elaborate but a little later she recalled that it greatly irritated her that a friend had put six cubes of ice in her drink. She claimed 6 was an evil number, it came from the devil and would harm her. She avoids number 6 while she thinks highly of 7 and considers 8 as neutral. She associated that by putting six cubes her friend was jinxing her to die.
So here was the origin of her obsessions.
Burdened by extreme jealousy, which itself arose from desire to be better and prettier than everybody else, she was quickly beseeched with thoughts and impulses to cause the rivals great harm. The fear that acting upon these impulses would cause retaliation by the world was what lay behind her panic attacks, anxiety and agoraphobia. The impulses were also deflected from their primary aim of harming others into playing obsessive number games.
Her friend's putting 6 ice cubes had reminded her of her own obsessions with numbers which was indulged in to prevent her from actually harming others.
Her panic, anxiety and phobia prevented her from noticing as to how jealous she was of others. Instead of noticing she was jealous, all she noticed and complained about herself was that she is weird. And that if she ever really talks about herself people will think she is retarded.
Only in dream her jealousy found full expression - the intensely green eyes. However, one must notice that only symbolically, for the patient though she was disturbed by the dream, she had no clue that it arose from her pathological jealousy.

Analysis of a dream dreamt entirely in red color

A young Irish-American man, inheriting all the complex mental make up of that most unique ethnic group, and suffused with all the pathos, fears, guilt, self-destructiveness, and lust for life, which Irish seem to have more than others, said the following about a dream he had:

It was a most weird dream. But the funny part is that I could have pulled out of the dream or continued with it. It was so crazy that I knew all along it must be dream and all through it I struggled with whether to get out or to continue with it and to see as to what happens in the end. I could have even directed the dream to whichever way I wanted.
In the dream I am in an abandoned school building. It could be Detroit. I am the only white man amongst a bunch of black guys. It is like a gangbang. It is like Civil War. It is like a great chaos occurring in Third World. We are running around with rocket launchers and guns. Could be over drugs. It is a real fight. There are helicopters following us.
But the most puzzling part is that the whole dream is bathed in red. Everything happens in red color and red hue. All through the dream I am aware that I am doing something wrong.

He woke up in the morning feeling guilty, fearful and all shaken from the intensity of violence in the dream and went to his wife and assured her that he will never leave her, and to have faith in him for he will never do anything wrong despite the fact that they desperately need money to survive, and he will find a way out of their financial difficulties by honest means.
This assurance of his good intentions to his wife gave the clue that he was doing just the opposite in dreams and woke up with guilt towards his wife.
The patient confirmed that he is getting very few hours at work - for business is slow - and it is tearing him apart to watch his wife and son do without many of the things that money buys. In fact on the dream-day [the day before the dream] he struggled all day long with the temptation to go back and start buying and selling drugs that he had given up two years ago. "Throughout the day I could not make up my mind whether to get into the drug scene or to keep out of it. "I know I have a choice over which way I go."
So the struggle through the day whether to enter or not to enter drug dealing had found expression in the dream to stay in the dream or get out of it and to have a choice over its direction.
The drug dealing involved competition with other young people, especially young black kids, for it is in downtown Detroit that he bought drugs which he sold in the suburbs.
My construction that his use of the word gangbang implied his taking help of other young vigorous men to improve his potency was decidedly rejected by the dreamer. Gangbang, he said, arose from the fact that if he reentered the drug scene, he will have to contend with drug gangs.
But just the thought of struggling and fighting with downtown black drug dealers would not have had the motive power to construct a dream. There has to be deeper source to it.
Here the theoretical knowledge that dreams or rather nightmares of great fight, everybody fighting with everybody, with an apocalypse like atmosphere, is really a depiction of rivalry with the father transferred on to an all-out-knockdown fight with siblings.
The great Indian epic "Mahabharath" and even Homer's Iliad is at bottom nothing but artistic festooning/embeliisment of such a great war between rival brothers [over some female]. So the dream was taking up this phylogenetic memory of the fight between band of brothers in our primordial past, and giving it expression, clothed in the realities of the present. Granted there was no "Helen of Troy" or "Draupadi of Mahabharath" for whom the bunch of black dudes and our patient were fighting, but then the dream was very vague, and this element of a girl in the background as the price over which the fight was occurring could have got censored out from representation in the manifest content of the dream.
Why the fight takes place in an abandoned school.
Now emergence of going back to school in dreams is often a wish to return to roots, learn better, and come back to fight the present obstacles with new knowledge. The patient often regretted not having paid enough attention in school to have become a professional despite having as good a brain as his wife's relatives who were all professionals. So he was going back to school and learning new fighting skills by combating his rivals/siblings.
Why the helicopters?
This he associated with police following the fighters and the fighters signaling to each other as to how to evade them. So this was the work of conscience/superego which was keeping a watch over him to not go back to his old habits of doing and dealing with drugs. The impulse to do drugs and make money by selling drugs and the superego's objection to it were getting representation simultaneously. Also, it was the same agency that make him wake up feeling fearful and guilty and compelled him to assure his wife that he will not leave her and the family and return to his old habits.
Why the entire dream occurs bathed in red color?
For this the patient brought in an unconvincing association that his wife's cousin had given him, who reads a lot of psychology. He immediately added that the explanation was false. Then after a lapse of a minute, in which he brought up something unrelated, he came up with the following association spontaneously.
It is weird how when I stop at an intersection if the light is red and I see police car next to me or anywhere in the vicinity I feel that the cop will see that I am doing something wrong and I immediately start fiddling with the radio or start doing something else to allay suspicions of wrongdoing.
Is the red of the dream taken from red light of the intersection? I asked him.
"I would have never thought of that, " the patient replied. "But yes, on the night before the dream it so happened that I was stopped at a set of light and I did notice how the whole cross-section was bathed in red. And there was a police car flashing its blue and red light, adding to the frightening ambiance. And now I can see that the red in the dream was taken from that particular experience."
So the warning that he should not return to drug dealing, beyond seeing it in dream, was not only being emphasized in his feeling throughout the dream that what he was doing was wrong, but was also finding visual representation with the whole dream turning red.
Red color was used in the dream to express the warning: what you are dreaming is forbidden. I wonder if that color is used to express the concept of "Off limit" in other contexts as well.

Stuttering and destructive impulses in an Autistic patient

A man in his late forties, who lives in a supervised setting because he carries the label of Developmentally Disabled, suffers from crippling stuttering. He rarely completes a sentence of any length without such severe stuttering that the listener quickly loses interest in relating with him.
In a therapy session, after the Thanksgiving holiday, noticing that he was stuttering more than usual, I paid closer attention to his chopped speech. And what I heard took me by surprise. He was hurling violent abuses against his mother, to whose house he had gone for the big dinner.
They ran - with stuttering obscuring one's ability to understand them clearly - something like this: "I will blow my mother with a pistol. I will knock her to the ground....bash her teeth."
Curious - for they were Tourettian in their intensity and explosiveness - I inquired what his mother did that has him so enraged. All he could say was that she was a bitch throughout the dinner. Then he went into a tirade about how she was cruel to him when he was growing up, would not let him speak his mind, and would hit him with the back of her hand right on his mouth for the slightest mistake, when he was so little.
"I want to tell her suck my you-know-what," and this piece was delivered without any stutter. And then, as if horrified at his own boldness, he immediately retreated into an apologetic mode. "It will hurt her feelings. So I cannot say that to her, you know that Dr. Kelwala. You know that Dr. Kelwala. I should get a pistol and blow myself."
After expressing remorse in which he thought the most deserving punishment for expressing defiance towards his mother would be to blow his head off or be jailed for life, he returned to the previous hostile mood, as if the aggressive impulse had to go back and forth against his mother and himself.
"I want to call her, "You fat broad. You bitch. And other bad names. But it will hurt her feelings, you know that Dr. Kelwala. You know that. So I cannot do that."
Then returning to the remorse mode he said that he should be punished because he is not thankful for all he got in his life. "There are people who are homeless. There are people who have nothing to eat. They are much worse than me."
Now I constructed in my mind that his stuttering has to do with sadistic sexual impulses and [premature and excessively strong] counter measures that got displaced on to his speech centers.
What was the ground for such a construction?
The fact that he made the statement:
"I want to tell her suck my you-know-what," followed by immediate guilt and wishing to be locked up in jail and blowing off his brain with a pistol. So here was a sadistic incestuous thought and guilt and countermeasures and punishment for it. Theoretically, the sadistic sexual impulse must have arose in the Oedipal period and the fear associated with such an incestuous thought had brought on the inhibition. Then the struggle over that impulse had got displaced on to expressing such a thought through speech and countermeasures to prevent the expression had resulted in stuttering.
But in the normal Oedipal Complex the anger would have targeted the father more than the mother. So I asked him did he have any such angry thoughts towards his father.
To my astonishment he said, "Yes, I always wanted to hit my father on the jaw. Or give him a bloody nose. Get a gun and shoot him in the stomach."
And he claimed that his father was as mean as his mother, and worse, for though he did not hit him directly, he never intervened and stopped his mother from hitting.
So the aggression from the Oedipal period had found outlet towards father as well. However, because of the fear of retaliation he had redirected it mostly upon his own self. The sexual current had regressed from the genital phase to sado-masochistic phase perhaps because the mother was too hostile for him to approach her without contemplating first knocking her down to the ground, bashing her teeth or outright shooting her, so she would not castrate him for his attempt.
His sexuality had mostly withdrawn on to himself and only a very small portion of it flowed to others, and here too through the center of speech with the impediment of stuttering blocking its passage.
Now could we place all of the blame for his stuttering on his paretn's cruelty towards him.
Well, something prevents us from doing so. And this something was confirmed in that very session.
I got a phone call from my son to which I had to attend to for a few minutes.
My autistic patient threw a fit at my focus shifting from him to the phone. Within 30 seconds he started ranting, "You are ignoring me. I am being ignored." He started sighing and muttered "shit" and threw up his hands in despair.
So behind the stuttering, more than his mother's hitting him on the mouth, was his inability to postpone gratification. The man wanted attention, right now and could share the person from whom he wanted attention with nobody. In fact his acute discomfort was so excessive and motor movements accompanying it so wild, almost bordering on violent, and the speech associated with the protest so aggressive that one had to wonder whether the primary pathology lay in this inborn aggression and the parents were provoked to mete out harsher punishments to contain the explosive behavior.
One also had to consider whether his autism itself was not a withdrawal from the world to prevent acting out upon others such an inordinate response to frustration.