Every year, I teach a course on psychoanalytic theory and technique to graduate students in clinical psychology. In the first session, I try to engage the students in a lively way by asking them about how we know that there even is such a thing as the unconscious. Now, these are doctoral students trained in the ways of modern scientific psychology. They can be a bit constrained when it comes to imaginative thinking. But because this is an elective course they are not required to take, those who sign up often have some openness and curiosity about the deeper layers of the mind. So they are usually willing to play with the question and often come up with some pretty good answers.
The students’ first response often involves the idea that we know about the unconscious through dreams. I once thought that this was an easy, textbook kind of answer, but I have come to believe that it is actually a more fascinating response than it might seem at first glance. After all, one could say that dreams are meaningless brain activity, a necessary physiological process to clear out the mental junk from the day. But we intuitively know that there is more to dreams than can be measured on an EEG machine. Dreams are personal. Dreams mean something.
Take, for example, the dream of a man in his first week of psychoanalysis. I heard about this case many years ago from one of my professors who used it as an illustration in one of his classes. (Please be advised that clinical material from actual patients is used sparingly throughout this book. Confidentiality and privacy have been protected by changing or omitting identifying information.) The patient was a mental health professional in his forties who had wanted to have an analysis for many years and felt that he really needed some help. But for a variety of reasons—some circumstantial and some of a yet-to-be-discovered psychological nature—he hadn’t been able to bring himself to do it. He was very pleased to have the opportunity to begin therapy with my professor, a well-regarded female Kleinian analyst. The patient had studied Freud and Klein in school, so he felt he had an idea of what the process of analysis would be like and was eager to begin. In the second session, he shared the following dream:
It was late at night and I was in bed; my wife and two children were asleep. I heard some noise in the bathroom, so I got up and went to check it out. I looked out the bathroom window and there was a woman on the roof, trying to break into the house. She was dressed in black with a hood over her face. It was clear that she was going to try to rob the house. I was terrified that she was going to harm my family. I cannot remember ever feeling so angry in my life. I reached through the window and grabbed the woman around the neck. I pulled her in and wrestled her to the floor. I was kicking her so hard that I thought I might actually kill her. But at some point, I realized that she was not fighting back. She was telling me to stop. So I stepped back and pulled the hood off her face. I was shocked because the woman was a friend of mine from high school, a person I had liked but had not been particularly close to. Her name was Melanie.
Freud called dreams “the royal road to the unconscious,” and if there was ever a royal road, this is it. I am hoping that the meaning of the dream is fairly obvious to you. It is a good teaching dream, because the elements are pretty straightforward. Even as students ourselves, when we heard the dream for the first time, my classmates and I were able to grasp some of its meaning.
If we keep the context in mind—that this is the very first dream in the very first week of therapy—would it be too much of a stretch to consider that the man is dreaming about his anxiety in beginning therapy? Can you see that he is letting us know that he is utterly terrified that the therapist (the black-hooded woman) will be a dangerous intruder, robbing him and hurting him in the most intimate and vulnerable of places (in the bathroom, potentially harming his family)? Can you see that his unconscious mind is revealing that he is going to fight against this intrusion with all his might? Perhaps this dream helps us understand why he put off therapy for so long, even though he consciously wished to have it and knew he needed it. Beneath the surface, he is frightened of what will be taken from him and of what will be done to him. He also might be frightened of what might be revealed about him—how aggressive and defensive he can become.
One of the most fascinating aspects about this story is that the patient was totally shocked by this dream and had no idea what it meant. He could not relate to his intense level of fear and aggressiveness, so out of character for him as he consciously knew himself at the time. He didn’t link the dream to his attitudes about his new analyst, even with the marvelous tip-off that the intruder’s name was Melanie. (Remember, the man had studied Klein, he knew that the analyst was Kleinian, and Klein’s first name was Melanie. Dream symbols are often quite funny.) He didn’t put together that he was dreaming about how frightened he was that the analyst would violently intrude into his psychic life and that he would fight against this intrusion to the edge of death. To me, the fact that he didn’t have a clue about the meaning of the dream is another way of seeing this man’s unconscious mind at work. Blind spots hide some of the deepest truths.
My professor told us that this man went on to have a turbulent but profitable analysis. He was open to his unconscious experience, and that proved to be a great help to him—once he got someone else to help him see what he couldn’t see. That’s really the key right there. We need someone to help us see what we cannot see.
The dream reveals one of the basic features of the unconscious mind. It is the receptacle for all of our unwanted, unbearable feelings and attitudes. What we hate about ourselves is buried there. What we fear about others is sent there. Our conflicts, our worries, our vulnerabilities, our hopes, and our terrors are relegated to the unconscious for safekeeping.
The trouble is that they are not really safe there. Our most intense feelings and fantasies need to be addressed. We have to face our fears. Otherwise, they become like Pandora’s Box—all of the dangers are locked away in the unconscious mind, but like in a pressure cooker, they want to burst out. There is an enormous pressure for them to be revealed and expressed.
When we shut off these realities of our psychological life in the unconscious, they tend to leak out into conscious life. We are more aggressive than we intend to be. We are more depressed and withdrawn than we want to be. We soothe some unknown pain through food or sex or drugs or mindless activity. We run away without knowing what we are running from. We fail to succeed even when we try. Something holds us back. Something pushes us forward. It is like gravity—or, in this case, a trapped hurricane. There is a force that acts upon us that we cannot see.
If you remember the story of Pandora’s Box, you know that it held not only the terrifying aspects of life; it also contained hope. So it is with the unconscious. The unconscious is the source of our passions, our creative energies, and our love of life. As I like to say, it is the gas in the engine; it is the juice that makes life worth living. If we rely on the unconscious too much as a dumping ground for unwanted parts of ourselves, we also lose contact with the most desirable, helpful, and hopeful parts of ourselves. In other words, if we use the unconscious to get rid of the bad, we get rid of the good stuff, too. Then we lose our drive to engage in life and to make meaning of our experiences.
Take as another example a set of dreams that a psychologist friend of mine, Lisa, had following her mother’s death. Lisa was just turning forty when she lost her mother to a year-long battle with cancer. She and her mother had a relatively good relationship, having worked through the inevitable disappointments, hurts, and grievances that are part of any mother-daughter relationship. Grateful for all that her mother brought to her life, she grieved the loss of her mother deeply.
One evening over a glass of wine, Lisa told me four dreams that she had had in the weeks following her mother’s death.
In the first dream, she dreamt that her mother had died and was walking down the long tunnel toward the light. Her mother turned to wave good-bye