Michael Eigen: Psychoanalytic Mystic Chapter 7 Perchance to Dream

The Psychoanalytic Mystic
Chapter 7

PERCHANCE TO DREAM

Michael Eigen, Ph. D.

Saint Augustine opens the Bible and wherever his eyes fall are words God means for him this moment, this crossroad. These are destiny words. They give Saint Augustine courage and direction. It is time for him to go all the way, to give his life to God. He looks for a sign. Wherever the Bible opens, wherever eyes fall--chance is destiny.

The Hebrew purim means "lots." The Book of Esther tells how lots were cast to see which Jews lived or died. Behind the lots was the evil will of a man called Haman. The good and cunning Mordecai sent his adopted daughter, Esther, to seduce the king, Achashverus, to reverse the decree. Beautiful and wise Esther did the trick, not on her own, but with help of a dream the king had about the help Mordecai once gave him. The dream pricked the conscience of the king, but it didn't hurt that Esther sweetened the prick. The book is about the work of reversal, since Haman hung on his own gallows and many of his followers (perhaps many innocents) were killed. Chai means life, which encompasses lots and reversals.

Alan Watts used to shoot arrows in the air above his head. It was exhilarating for him to see if he would live or die. As chance had it, no arrow pierced him. He had to drink himself to death.

And what of those who play Russian roulette? Who lives, who dies? There are so many roulettes in life--disease, accidents, violence. I think of people I've known from childhood who are no longer here. I'm amazed I'm still here. It feels like borrowed time. I still have my little chance at living. By this time it fells like I've had many, many chances.

Going to School

I'm driving one of my boys to school. We pause at an intersection while a car crosses in front of us and slows down. A teenager sticks his head out the window and pukes. My boy and I were chatting aimlessly, pleasantly. I try to make light of the puking but I'm aware my son has a hard time with vomit. The day changes. He feels queasy.

"Oh, no!" I think. "Shit! Just when things were gong nicely!"

The thought crosses my mind that this chance act is a cosmic message. The cosmos knows my son has a nervous stomach, has struggled with intestinal difficulties for many years. We feared he might develop Crone's disease or colitis or something worse. So far nothing of the sort happened. The fears were magnified dreads of parental minds. He has gotten much better.

The cosmos rubs it in. It finds/creates a weakness and milks it for all its worth, a kind of black humor cosmos. It keeps testing, creating challenges, forcing growth for those who can grow. But what of those who can't take it? Inwardly I'm moaning, "Why the hell did this have to happen now?"

I watch my son out of the corner of my eye. He doesn't complain but I see his face turning yellowish-greenish. He takes a couple of Tums. He hasn't eaten breakfast. I stupidly suggest he have some toast he took along, he oughtn't to got to school on an empty stomach or he won't feel well later. He looks at me as if I were a Martian and reminds me (as if I needed reminding), "I don't fell well now." The wry humor in his voice reassures me and I let go inwardly. He has tuned into the cosmic wink. It is all beyond me. He is moving along his own trajectory with its blessings and curses. I smile back with wry appreciation. Aspects of my life and personality dance in inner vision--no great shakes. His mess isn't any worse than mine. Who can measure? As it turns out, he has a good day. And so do I.

The Pain Machine

My mother is in her mid-eighties and her mental functions are not what they used to be. She has short tem memory problems and easily panics when things do not go right. This means she forgets a lot and panics a lot. She lives alone in the house I grew up in and I wonder how long she can do this. She does not want outside help and does not want to move. All her friends are gone. The neighborhood has changed. The small world she lived in is gone. Yet she stays on in the old house that is so small and fragile now, but which was huge and solid when I was a child.

I get a lot of panic calls. Things are always going wrong. The furnace stops working, circuit breakers shut off, a next door neighbor encroaches on her property. All these things happen and need attention. Last month smoke was coming from the circuit breaker box, and if the electrician delayed a few hours, the house would have burned down.

But she also calls when nothing is wrong or when what is wrong is trivial. She does not just call me. She calls repair men, the electrician, the heating company, helpful neighbors. She generates a support network, although her calls can be maddening. A few weeks ago, panicky about heater and electricity, she called the heating company twenty times in one evening. They finally sent a repair man to adjust her thermostat. She could not adjust it herself. Her eyes can't see the numbers. It was set too high and she was too terrified to turn it down a bit.

Some of her calls are dreamlike, nightmarish. She talks slowly, haltingly, like she walks. She has trouble finding words. Since my mind is much faster, I jump to conclusions, fill in blanks. A recent phone conversation went something like this:

"You know, everyone has one. You have one."

"What mom? What do I have?"

"You know--a machine."

"You mean a furnace?"

"No--a pain-machine."

"A pain machine?"

"A man comes and sets it…at night. You have one. He sets it for me. But he didn't come tonight."

"A man comes every night? A man comes and sets a machine? A man comes and sets a pain machine? Something to make you feel better?"

"You know what I mean…You have one."

She mentions time. I imagine she's talking about a pain machine that's a time machine. I start getting into it and locate my own pain machine in the center of my chest. Then I come to and think, "This is it. She's lost it." I tell my wife and think of places to bring her, and settle on a really good hospital, although it is a very long drive. My wife suggests I call again to check things out and see how she's doing.

Almost as soon as I call she blurts out, "The timer. That' s the name. Timer--for the lights." In an instant it becomes clear. She kept calling the timer a machine. She said time a few times but I didn't know she meant timer. The automatic light timer was thrown off when the electricity was shut off. A man was to reset the timer, but did not show up. She was disturbed that lights were going on and off at wrong times. When I asked about the word "pain," she said it was a pain, she couldn't think of the word "timer" and communicate what she meant.

I felt enormously relieved and so did she. "I was worried, mom. I thought you lost it." "I was worried, too, " she said. We both feared she'd gone over the edge. After this experience, she became stronger and clearer for a week or two.

I filled in my mother's blanks with psychotic vision. A pain machine--that's pretty good. As good as an influencing machine. I really saw it. I think of how I had to slow down when my children were very little. It could take hours to walk a block. They would play with a swinging gate for twenty minutes, wander up and down stoops, walk on walls, be attracted by this or that object or color or movement. If I dropped into their time world it was like being high. The play of chance opened worlds of possibilities.

With my poor mother, it was the opposite. Chance destroyed. Her world was populated with broken machines, invading neighbors, bad weather, threat of violence. Every chance event threatened loss of control, reduced her to helpless panic. Her powers of organization were slipping and what attracted her were symbols of her mental and physical inability to work. Where chance once meant opportunity, it now meant disability and the coming end. Chance once stimulated life and the building of structure. Now it poured vinegar into wounds of breakdown and deterioration. How sweet moments of intactness can be--when things come together for awhile, a breath of air, neither stupor nor panic. All the sweeter, as they become fewer and fewer.

Mousemare

A supervisee chats about a patient who chats a lot about boyfriends and sex. She loves sex and talks about which boyfriend makes her feel better how. Her mother does not care for her men and lifestyle. She fears her daughter will not make much of her life. She's fucking her life away. She, too, fucked her life away, but, at least, has a daughter to show for it. Her father was warmer and nicer but died. She worries, like her mother, about what will become of her. But she is having fun.

Fun, that is, up to a point. She feels the men she dates are beneath her. They are not her equals. Good in bed, not stimulating otherwise. She feels too inadequate to meet men she can talk with. She's afraid of men she can talk with. She is comfortable with sexy men who don't say much.

She tells her therapist how happy she is that her new boyfriend talks with her and that she likes talking with him. He's a bit stuffy in bed, not as good as her usual lovers. He washes himself off too quickly and is hesitant about mucousy things. But he makes up for it by mothering her. He tucks her in, cuddles, cooks for her, buys her presents. She's never felt so well taken care of.

In passing, she mentions a nightmare she had while sleeping with him. In the nightmare mice were all over the place, even in their bed. Did she get bitten? Will she get bitten? Are they growing in size and number? She was terrified.

She made light of her passing panic. She wanted to keep talking about boyfriends and sex. This one was good this way, that one that way. If only she could find one that combined the best of all worlds. She didn't want to break up with the mothering and talking one. He wasn't exactly bad in bed. It's just that he wasn't as into it as she really liked, but…and so on, and on.

The nightmare gets lost, dismissed, passed by. Her therapist didn't say a word about it. She got involved with the verbal flow, the boyfriend, the family stories, the daily ups and downs. The patient tries to make little of her nightmare, her panic. She tries to make terror into a little, fleeting mousy thing. But terror grows in intensity (size and number), until it has to be noticed. It demands an awakening of sorts.

I was sitting and waiting and letting the chat wash over but felt a rush when the terror of the night passed by. Something in me said, "Hold it. Wait a minute. Run that one again." I opened my mouth and out came the words, "The mousemare. But the mousemare--you said nothing about it!"

My supervisee gave me a funny look, not without interest. "Here she's telling you how comforting her boyfriend is, how soothing," I go on. "She's never been so well cared for. And she wakes up screaming. Terror wakes her. His motherly arms enfold her, and she wakes up in panic."

I suppose we could have chatted about mice as sexual symbol, fear of the very thing she loves. Or perhaps they have to do with her mother's promiscuity, which must have frightened, as well as enticed her, as a child. Or perhaps she feels so tiny in her boyfriend's arms, tiny and afraid of being biting or bitten. Perhaps mice refer to the intensity of the baby self, too much for parents or anyone to handle well. We could say she can't bear the safety of the boyfriend's care, or that she finds it engulfing, suffocating. There are many things we could think or say. But the emotional fact is terror. Whatever we say, it has terror as its nucleus.

And it is precisely this terror she excludes from her chatty sessions and from her lovemaking. She is good at this exclusion, because even her therapist doesn't notice. She runs the terror past her session, whisks it away as soon as it is spoken. It is spoken but not heard.

It is not heard but is transmitted by my supervisee's notes. When my supervisee mentions the mousemare in passing, suddenly I hear nothing else. If the patient sees only sex and comfort, I see only terror. We are both reductionists. The dream is spokesman for excluded terror. My supervisee will learn to be spokesman for the dream.

Chance sexual meetings thrill this patient, but her mousemare tries to give terror a chance. The waves of the dream need to travel a distance before they have an impact. Isn't that, partly, what supervisors are for? Who knows what dwelling with this terror may open? Perhaps the dream is asking to give the unknown a chance.

A Horror Story

My patient, Max, is extraordinary. He has an amazing ability to perceive structural relations in financial systems and develop creative solutions for problems that might otherwise pass unnoticed and be destructive later. He is, also, a mechanical whiz. He can fix anything around a house or a computer. He is a master do-it-yourselfer, but runs into a wall when it comes to fixing himself.

His wife forced him into therapy because he was high strung, rarely home, and rageful. She feared their son would grow up without a father. If left to his own devices, he'd work all the time. To his credit, he found a lovely wife who wanted more than a furious workaholic.

I find Max engaging, endearing, charming, but I like eccentrics, especially brilliant ones. Nevertheless, his self-made-man rap tends to be off putting, especially when it leads to denigrating others, like his wife and co-workers, as weaker. His expectations are severe. He has to be the best and expects others to be the best too (best=strong, independent, supercompetent). It galls him that his wife, who watches more TV, sleeps more, needs down time, accesses a wider range of feelings than he and can dream.

Max is not a therapy type, but he comes to see me when a crisis hits because he now realizes he can be scary and that he scares himself. He makes sounds and gestures in his sleep that scare his wife, but remembers no dream. Then one session, in a recent trip through therapy, he comes in proudly, dangling an enormous dream, the first dream in his adult life.

Max brags about a horror story dream, in which he tells Stephen King that the latter's stories aren't scary. Max analyzes the author's stories and proves they are too hackneyed to be truly frightening. The author, with amused dismay, challenges Max to do better. Max rises to the challenges and creates a story on the spot, that King agrees is really frightening.

The story is about a criminal who finds a way to put doctors and nurses in a new-born baby ward out of play, then steals the babies and sells them to drug and porno rings. As the police close in, he sells the remaining babies as a group to the most evil ring of all.

So proud was Max of besting Stephen King that he couldn't wait to tell the dream. He told a colleague at work who was horrified. Max was so proud of his ability to create something scary, that he didn't realize it might actually affect someone negatively. He expected people to rejoice in his triumph, rather than recoil in horror.

"The dream is quite real," I said. "It expresses very real feelings in your life. Doesn't it express your feelings about being adopted?"

Max was an adopted child. The dream magnified feelings of being ripped away, stolen, sold into bondage. He was given a home, but at great expense. He was abused and neglected by his adopted mother, and his father was rarely home. When his father was home, he spent his time fixing the house. Max watched him and learned. Most of all he learned the lesson of doing things for himself, since no one helped him. He was on his own and made the most of it.

Max flashed a look that said everything. For the moment, he was gifted with inner vision. It was hard to believe feelings from so long ago created a dream now. But he stared at the horror and hurt of it, if only for instants. He couldn't believe the dream was not only about victory, but about injury--his own. But he saw it with his own eyes and, for the first time, felt some connection to the scary sounds that tore out of him in the night, sounds he never heard himself.

Jouissance

In psychoanalysis, chance, to some extent, means repetition, the banana peel principle of life. When I least expect it and feel in the clear, I’I'll slip on a mishap my personality attracts, if not creates. A bad boss, a disastrous love object, my own shortsighted reactive patterns and sudden bursts of cruelty, a calamity that mirrors my damaged self--the sense that--oh-oh--here it comes again! Pow! Boom! Zap! Ouch!

How did I get myself into this jam again?

What seem to be chance events connect with deep patterns laid down in infancy and early childhood. At the same time, I may seize on chance events to break a pattern. I may do something destructive to escape a suffocating existence, to get a thrill. It is often impossible to distinguish between chance as repetition or breaking through repetition. It is more difficult than ordinarily imagined to tell the difference between old and new.

Desires are repetitious. Whether the play of Eros is capricious or linked to a soul mate, the experience and anatomy of desires have a, b, c's. We can list desires associated with fame, romance, power, and finding out about them for ourselves can be necessary fun. Some of us eventually develop maps of desires and learn a lot about what to expect of them.

There are patients too dead to have desires. Sometimes the appearance of desire means growth in aliveness. There are, also, patients who are frightened by desires. They feel if they could live them out, they would be cured. But there are others who live out all manner of desires, and still are searching. They feel as enchained as liberated by demands of desire. In this regard, it is worth noting that great literature of our past defines characters by their desires, particularly characteristic limits of desires. There are sectors of literature today in which characters are defined less by desire, than by extent of personality collapse or deterioration or lack of development.

Lacan (1977) writes of desire as a defense, a prohibition, a binding: For desire is a defense, a prohibition against going beyond a certain limit in jouissance" (p. 322).

To modify this notion for my own use, if we posit a primary or originary jouissance (bliss/joy/ecstasy/juiciness), systems of desires function as paths or filters for the former. Let me follow my fantasy vision further. Let us call God jouissance, then all God's creating of the cosmos, the heavens, the earth, living beings - all creating is Jouissance. In one of its faces, chance is Jouissance's freedom.

In Biblical stories, unbounded Jouissance is annihilating. Can one see God and live? Dare one get too close to the Unbounded? Aharon's sons are burnt to a crisp, trying to bypass protective limits. Chance, too, is a filter, a sign, an opening. If one tries to bypass chance, and take an express to the Source or Goal, life ends.

Desire is a protective limit, as is the Law. For Lacan (1977) they go (grow) together: "The true function of the Father is to unite (and not set in opposition) a desire and the Law" (p. 321). If there were only originary Jouissance, there would be no place for creatures like us. We work with oppositions and unities of desire and Law, the limiting poles or structures that make us possible. Our identities are brakes and limits enabling living, and openings for the originary creative joy that makes living worth it.

W. R. Bion somewhere wrote, "Life is full of surprises. Most of them bad." But one senses jouissance seeping through the not so hidden background of his rueful remark.

Eigen, M. (1998). Perchance to dream. In, The Psychoanalytic Mystic (pp. 127-134).London, UK::Free Association Books.

Dr Eigen is a psychologist and psychoanalyst. Senior member, faculty and training analyst National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis. Associate Clinical Professor of Psychology and supervisor, the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Member, American Psychological Association.

© Copyright 1998 Michael Eigen This paper is available online at DSPP with the kind permission of Michael Eigen. Do not duplicate without permission. The author may be reached at Mikeigen@aol.com 6/28/99

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