Long term readers of these posts may remember that back in February 2019, I wrote about the ideas found in Dennis McCort’s autobiography, the history of his inner life: ‘A Kafkaesque Memoir, Confessions from the Analytic Couch’.  He had sought help for recurring bouts of anxiety and depression that had persisted despite trying different therapies and spiritual practices. Brought up a Catholic: what McCort calls a draconian nightmare particularly with respect to conscience and sexual morality, attending a Jesuit university, he later turned to Zen meditation. Having tried different therapies, McCort was looking for a ‘quick fix’ possibly hypnosis for an increasingly problematic phobic anxiety about driving on the motorway especially when huge lorries were in the next lane.

Approaching sixty, McCort had given up fantasies of personal transformation, reigning himself to taking his ‘neurosis with me to the grave.’  Highly sceptical about psychoanalysis, but impressed by some interpretations given by Dr P (the name given to the analyst) as well as Dr P’s interest in spiritual practices and openness to religion, McCort settles down to a long-term analytic experience, once a week over a 9-year period.  Much of the work is based on dream analysis through which McCort discovers deeper levels of insight and self-realization.

Early in the treatment, he brings a recurring dream from age 5 or 6 when the family was living on a farm. In the dream the child McCort is heading with a young cousin into a wood, but looks back to the home only to see his mother, glaring like Frankenstein at him – a look that fills him with horror. This dream has cast a pall over him most of his life. As the dream is discussed, he begins to unpack the effect of his mother’s depression, plus his father’s long hours working as a clerk in a trucking company (Dr P wastes little time linking this to the phobia about driving on the motorway), and McCort’s resulting symptoms of obsessive behaviours and various debilitating anxieties.

Dr P discusses all the mixed feelings for the young boy leading to an ‘internal tug-of-war’:

‘the dream is fraught with painful contradiction: there stands Mom, the source of any child’s comfort and security, a lethal obstacle to that very comfort and security. Your sense of abandonment must’ve been horrific.’

This leads McCort to suddenly remember how his sister Iris had told him that their mother liked to take her son shopping to a department store with her when he was three and four. When he got distracted, she would hide behind a counter and wait for him to notice she’d gone.

‘Of course, as soon as I did, I’d burst into tears, which would be her cue to pop out, run up to me and take me in her arms. She told Iris she loved the feeling of being needed by me in this raw, brutal way. Naturally, when she revealed this to Iris decades later, she was filled with remorse. I think she sensed clearly how much of my fearfulness of life as an adult – travelling phobias, sticking close to home even in youth – came out of those earliest years of feeling trapped with, and at the same time abandoned by a mother who desperately needed help herself.’

Dr P muses how the chain of pathology and anxiety/depression grows, link by link, generation by generation; whereas the Greeks mythologized this ‘we moderns have internalized the gods in the form of psychoneurosis.’ He also sees how old dreams accrue new meanings as we recall them later in life. In the context of bringing this old dream, he suggests that the unconscious is prompting McCort to leave the ‘old’ false home or at least deconstruct it, before trying to find his true home. A spiritual way of looking at this would be:

‘we’re born enlightened … but inevitably the cloud of forgetfulness and ignorance descends upon us – it’s called “life”- and we spend the rest of our days struggling to get back there, to climb up the greased right-hand side of the “U” of history, our own life-history, and regain paradise.”