Wisdom from the Couch. Jennifer Kunst
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worry about me. They’ll have English muffins.” Her mother loved English muffins.
A few days later, my friend had a second dream. She was a counselor in a girls’ boarding school. Something was wrong with some of the girls and they needed her help. But it was pitch-black and she couldn’t find her way to get to them. One of the administrators was there—a woman who had the same first name as her mother—but the woman was in such a deep sleep that she couldn’t be woken up to help. Another helpful female figure was there, though. She was awake and alert and talking with Lisa. My friend said to her, “I can’t find my stepping-stones. Where are my stepping-stones?”
And then, a few days later, she had a third dream. She was at work. For some reason, it was going to be her last day. So she went to her office to clean out her desk. Everything had been packed up, but she needed to clean out the drawers. And the main task was to sort through the silverware, as there were mismatched forks and knives and spoons, some of good quality and worth keeping (they’d fit with her set at home) and some to be thrown out.
And then Lisa told me the most recent dream that she had. She and her sister were young children, riding in the backseat of a car. The car was out of control, careening down a winding road. There was no one in the front seat. No one was driving. My friend’s sister turned to her and said, “Hit the brakes!” And Lisa said, “My legs aren’t long enough; I can’t reach them.”
Freud also referred to dreaming as “dream work,” and here we can see my friend’s unconscious mind working very hard to integrate and work through the loss of her mother. Lisa and I poured another glass of wine, grabbed some tissues, and talked for hours about this tender loss and what it would mean for her life.
I will leave most of the dream interpretation up to your own investigation and imagination, but I think it is plain to see some of the broad themes. Lisa was anxious about her mother’s life after death; she was worried for her. And her unconscious mind sent her mother to a place of peace and rest. This is an act of integration with its acceptance of reality and a hope that the unknown will be a good place. This unconscious view of the afterlife—whether or not it is factually true—helps Lisa move on.
Even though, on one level, Lisa knew her mother was gone, the later dreams show that she is still not sure. Acceptance of this reality takes time and more work. In the dreams, Lisa is still looking for her mother. She is missing her. She needs her. She has to visit and revisit the reality that her mother is dead and gone; mother is in a deep sleep. A phase of Lisa’s life (the job) is over; the maternal stepping-stones are missing; the mother who drives the car is no longer there. All of these images stand for Lisa’s mother, and the hole that is left from her death must be mourned and then filled. The dreams point to the future: Lisa must find her own way, take and use the good psychological utensils her mother left her, and get in the driver’s seat of her own life.
Perhaps you can see, then, how the unconscious is not just the source and receptacle of what is unwanted and unbearable. It is also the place where important psychological work is done. It is the place and the way in which we make meaning, make sense, and make peace. The work we do while we dream is deep work, for it helps us recognize what is most precious to us. If we can become more conscious of this unconscious work, we can use its wisdom to guide our lives. Psychoanalysis, of course, is uniquely designed to help us with this work. But good conversations with sensitive friends, as well as meditation, spiritual practices, reading good books, and personal reflection of all kinds, can help us, too.
In the first session with my students, we explore other ways we can see evidence of the unconscious in daily life—repetitive patterns in relationships, Freudian slips, the transmission of psychological difficulties from one generation to the next. If we start to look for the unconscious, we can see it. We just have to pay attention.
Inevitably, the seminar discussion turns to babies. If you have ever had a baby or spent much time with babies, you know from experience that babies come into the world with their own little personalities. We do not come into the world as blank slates. No two babies are the same. From the very beginning, we reach out to the world and engage it in a personally meaningful way. While the outside world has its impact in shaping us, inborn temperament has the first word to say on who we are and who we become. Each human being is as unique as a snowflake. And I suggest that at the heart of each little snowflake-personality is an unconscious inner world.
Consider this scenario. You have a group of newborn babies and each one had a reasonably good start in life. Normal pregnancies and deliveries, no complications, perfect Apgar scores. No fuss, no muss. They are all sleeping quietly in the nursery.
Suddenly, there is a loud noise. Someone has dropped a metal pan—crash, clatter, bang! The babies are all affected by the noise; they are disturbed out of their sleep. Why is it that a third of these healthy babies will gurgle, stretch, and fall right back to sleep? Why will another third wake up, begin to cry, and be comforted with modest effort by mother or caretaker and then fall back to sleep? And why will another third cry bloody murder, be inconsolable, and stay irritable for hours before they cry themselves into an exhausted slumber?
The answer is temperament. Yes, babies have personalities from the moment their little heads pop out into the world. We are preprogrammed to experience life in certain ways. Some of us are more sensitive than others. Some are more resilient. Some are shy, others outgoing. Some are more prone to aggression; others withdraw in the face of conflict and anxiety. Some lean more on intellect, others on emotion. Some hear a loud sound and shrug their shoulders, thinking, “Eh, no big deal.” Others hear the same sound and say, “Oh my God! The world is coming to an end!”
The meaning we make from our experiences—even when we are mere babes—is what I have in mind when I say we each have an unconscious inner world. Even before our brains have developed fully, even before we have words, even before we can put two and two together, we are creating meaning. Take the three types of infants in our nursery scenario above. The quiet baby may have a sense that being in the world is a kind of numbing isolation or, better yet, a kind of ignorant bliss. The comforted baby may have some sense of safety in being held by a loving presence or, alternatively, a sense of self-confidence in being able to handle life’s troubles. The inconsolable baby may suffer her way through life with a constant feeling of nameless dread, alone and threatened in a dangerous world. There is a kind of early, meaning-making process there—the beginnings of an unconscious psychological life.
Melanie Klein believed that our life in infancy has a powerful impact on how we develop into adults. She emphasized that it is not only our experiences that shape us, but the meaning we make of them. And what we take from our experiences has a lot to do with what we bring to them.
Remember Jacob and Esau from the Bible story? Jacob and Esau were the rivalrous twin sons of Isaac and Rebekah, descendants of Abraham in the patriarchal line of Israel. As the story goes, the twins were already fighting with each other in the womb. At the very point of birth, Jacob was grasping the heel of his one-minute-older brother as he slid through the birth canal, already showing signs of the competitiveness that would lead to such radical betrayal many years later. In the end, Jacob would steal his older brother’s birthright, and the countries they would later lead would be at odds with each other for centuries. This is such a great example of what Klein meant when she said that our personalities have a trajectory from the beginning.
Now you may be skeptical, thinking this is just a story. How could a newborn—never mind a fetus—already have a personality? Believe it or not, we now have modern-day evidence to back it up. Alessandra Piontelli, an Italian psychoanalyst, did a fascinating set of studies observing the ultrasounds of twins in utero.4 Studying the twins at several points during the mother’s pregnancy, she found that the way they interacted in the womb—their relational style with one another, if you will—carried forward into how they related after birth and as they grew into more developed children. Our basic personalities are set more than we would like to believe they are.
If you had siblings or you have children, you know what I mean. Even if you look back at photos or videos of yourself as a young child, I’ll