CRITICA

Shortly after a Catholic priest recommended I seek psychotherapy, I found myself in the small waiting area at the top of the long narrow staircase, typical of the old classic Victorians, on upper Divisadero in San Francisco. It was the Guild House of the Guild for Psychological Studies. I glanced through a small brochure, resting on a tiny table, listing seminars at the Four Springs retreat center that the Guild operated, just north of Calistoga, north of the Napa Valley wine country. One in particular caught my eye, Mysterium Coniuctionis, (what in the hell is this?) an ‘advanced seminar retreat’, for those who had taken the three-week Basic Records foundational seminar, which investigated and worked with the synoptic gospels of the life of Jesus, from a Jungian psychoanalytic perspective. This was Elizabeth Howes and Sheila Moon’s project, based on the work of Henry Burton Sharman. The former was something to do with Carl Jung’s work with Alchemy, the Medieval, precursor to chemistry. Outwardly this was about the transformation of base metals into gold. Of course, the inner work was that of transforming the human psychic, an integration of opposites, primarily that of the male-female opposites, which Jung termed Animus and Anima, respectively, not to mention the shadow. Jung’s thesis for Individuation, the ultimate goal of any human included dream work, as had his mentor Sigmund Freud, famous for his quote, “Dreams are the Royal Road to the Unconscious.” Though I went on to finish a master’s degree, I was a committed autodidact in the Humanities, and I immediately began to read up on Jung’s life and work as I wanted to know ‘what I was getting into’ and started recording and drawing a few of my dreams. Jung wrote about the initial dream, the unconscious mind’s presentation of the analysand’s issue and its resolution. He also held that dreams were best understood and analyzed over a long period of time, which I found very true. In addition, my analyst at the Guild presented a seminar, “Who is that Dog in my Dreams.” One of my initial dreams was set in the kitchen of a brick home with my mother, as an obscure figure, standing to the left facing away. On the right on the floor was an unopened can of dog food. My dream-ego-self thought that I ought to open the can and feed the dog, though it was not present in the dream. In the months ahead, I had additional dog dreams, each of which depicted an increasing closeness and relationship with various dogs. One last dream depicted a Great Dane dog standing on its hind legs with its front paws on my chest, licking and slobbering on my face. My dream self happily returned the intimacy and playfulness. I reasoned I was and had integrated my inner dog nature, playfulness, spontaneity, and intimacy. I even had a synchronistic event when visiting some friend’s home when their Great Dane quickly came across the room and sat upright, proudly, near me.

I felt quite satisfied about the missing dog that needed to be fed and having integrated my inner dog nature. Nearly thirty years later, on discovering the San Francisco Freudian Society had morphed into the French analyst Jacques Lacan’s Neo-Freudian school, I naively began to read and study Lacan. I was considering one final analysis to go deeper into some childhood traumas from growing up in an alcoholic, dysfunctional, and broken home that I felt had not ever been fully addressed. I then discovered a more specific and perhaps deeper dimension of the dog theme. When I was around ten years old, our family pet dog, a Boxer dog, had suddenly disappeared, ‘gone away’, after innocently snapping at some neighborhood kids who were teasing and trying to ride on his back. On exploring the trauma of suddenly losing our family pet dog, a whole new range and buried feelings emerged. At that time, very stressful for my ten-year-self, the dog, ‘Kappa’, was in fact my best friend and refuge. We spent endless hours playing, wrestling and frolicking on the grass in our backyard. There was no family discussion on his fate, or display of feelings or sorrow, and I see now that my conscious mind had dismissed it all as of no great consequence. Many children suffer worse, I thought, and how could I be hung-up on such childish things? I realize now the reality of the importance of childhood and that the unconscious has its own say on the importance of life’s events, given the specific conditions and timing. What I had dismissed as not so important was in fact a real trauma for that ten-year old kid. I have since framed a small picture of a similar Boxer dog playing and written some journal ‘letters’ to him, expressing my sorrow at losing him and regret I could not save him. I am amazed at the timeless nature of the unconscious. As Penelope Balogh writes in her biography of Freud (Freud, A Biographical Introduction by Penelope Balough, 1971, Charles Scribner’s Sons. New York), Freud wrote:

“…Thus, he found with ever-increasing accuracy that ‘Nothing which we have psychically processed is entirely lost.’”
And
“… Catharsis takes place within a patient when his emotions concerning
some person or some situation are relived and redeployed. Instead of
the feeling being dammed up and finding substituted or distorted
methods of outlet they are able to take the original course which for
some reason forbidden to them the first time.”