Cobra with fangs 

In this post the connection between analysis and spirituality is explored following a dream recounted by Dennis McCort in a session with Dr P. In the dream it is dark, and McCort finds himself stuck below a boardwalk running alongside the ocean. He is walled in by darkness and mounds of sand and looking down on him is a huge cobra with fangs.

The dream clearly links to McCort’s anxiety which include claustrophobia –as well as problems with lifts, tunnels, and bridges. But McCort also wants to discuss the bout of depression that has descended on him out of nowhere. About a year into the analysis, he thought his anxiety was lower, but then the depression came leaving him barely coping with getting to work and managing the daily routine. This had coincided with Dr P being ill and off work – what Dr P calls ‘a perverse synchronicity’. McCort writes:

‘Only my years in Zen meditation made it possible for me to concentrate … when I needed to and so muddle through each day. To this day I thank the Buddha for what Zen taught me about navigating one’s mind through the minefield of one’s own inner chaos.’

Furious with Dr P who thinks that the depression has come ‘right on schedule’, McCort listens sneeringly while the analyst explains of the need to descend before ascending, and wonders what the hell has hit him. Dr P.:

‘A myth has hit you, and now you’re being called upon to enact that myth, to realize it in your own life, for your own sake and in some mysterious way we can’t understand, for the sake of the world. “He descended into hell. The third day he rose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven …” The dialectical principle that there is no resurrection without crucifixion is not just a religious truth; it is a living – and fundamental – psychological truth as well. We must undergo the pain, the self-mortification, of analysis – or something like it – and suffer the death of the old self if we would hope to know the birth of the new.’

McCort connects with this truth, because, as he says, meditation has shown him that the opposites do meet ‘somewhere deep within psychospiritual reality. But to feel as if I’m betting my sanity, my very life, on that truth …’

As they continue McCort then links the depression to an early relationship with a woman who then bore his child but not telling him she was pregnant she married someone else – cutting off all contact. This had at the time triggered depression and obsessive worrying. Dr P speaks of ‘the cobra of dread’ that has stalked McCort:

‘through all the years of this half-repressed emotional trauma, and it will stay right there, poised under the boardwalk of consciousness, until it’s brought up into the light and tamed; we tame it by coming to understand what … psychological ingredients go into its deadly venom …’

And so McCort begins to speak of the effect of his Catholic upbringing and the teaching of the Church and his parents’ views on sex. Whilst the phallic nature of the cobra links to this, Dr P reminds McCort that the psyche is dynamic – not static and so there is always an inner struggle going on to restore the lost wholeness – the symbols are then also about shifts of energy and attempts to unstick where things have got split off, helping the person back up the slippery right-hand side of the ‘U’ to integration.