This essay is among a series of articulate documentation written by the highly esteemed Dr. Bernard Bail, written from the work he has performed with his patients.
He examines the profound psychological impact of parental inadequacy through the lens of a patient's vivid and disturbing dream. The dream, filled with symbolic imagery of neglected and destroyed young animals, serves as a poignant metaphor for the patient's own traumatic childhood experiences. His analysis reveals how the emotional detachment and inability of the mother to nurture her children have deeply scarred the patient's psyche. This essay underscores the long-lasting effects of early parental neglect and the arduous journey towards emotional healing and self-awareness.
After sleeping for thirty minutes, I have the following dream: I walk into a bathroom to find a white blanket stuffed into the toilet. Upon closer inspection, I see that the blanket is moving. I open the blanket. I am startled and revolted to find what appear to be a few newborn mice, a mother mouse, and two tiny kittens, each about three or four inches long. I panic. I know that I can’t care for them. I do not know what to do so I reflexively stomp them all to death. I am horrified by my actions.
I wake from the dream and I cannot get back to sleep for the remainder of the night.
MY ASSOCIATIONS:
I have no immediate associations other than being terrified by the prospect of impending fatherhood. I have a lot of problems. I cannot reliably take care of myself, so the notion of being responsible for the lifelong care of another human is absolutely terrifying to me.
After some discussion, it occurred to me that I recently saw my cat playing with a mouse. I felt terrible for the mouse and for the terror that it must have felt. To the cat it was play, but to the mouse it was a matter of life and death. Indeed, I later found the head and tail of the mouse deposited on my doorstep.
THE ANALYSIS:
I believe that Dr. Bail felt that this dream represented the way that my siblings and I were all figuratively stomped to death by our mother, a woman who was wholly unsuited to the demands of parenthood. It is not entirely clear to me why it is I who has extinguished the lives of the animals, but I expect that it is some aspect of my mother within me that has done the deed.
COMMENTARY:
This dream is an important compilation of what we have found in previous dreams, especially the fact that his mother had shut off her feelings at an embryonic phases of her life. This important fact really unlocks the mystery of his illness, and makes his story understandable. The fact is that his mother had no feelings to give to any of her children. It seems that the patient was the most emotionally sensitive between his brothers and sisters.
There is a long history in which he recounted the number of times his mother did not respond to him or to any child, frequently saying “I don’t want to be here.”: The patient always assumed that meant she wanted to die, and thoughts of suicide would occupy him. Suicide, he thought, would make his mother happy. He would not be a burden to her. What she really meant by this sentence was that she didn’t want to be married to his father, and the current dream indicates that she was overwhelmed by the responsibility of taking care of four children, that she must have, occasionally or frequently, had the thought to kill them all.
We are a composite of many people; our mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, siblings. So it is not strange or mysterious that when he stomps the mice and kittens, he is acting like his mother. So while he does this terrible thing, he’s also himself aghast at what he has done. In reality, he is truly a gentle person.
If the reader will remember at the time of his deep depression, he went to Central America and swam with sharks and hunted mountain lions unarmed. So, we have in this dreams, the solution to his illness, but no emotional illness goes away magically. There will be endless repetitions of this plot, and he will have to be reminded that he is not his mother and that he does have feelings and is responsive to the needs of others.
In due time, you will be seeing that it is he who holds onto the illness; so the therapist has to be alert to these changes in the course of treatment.
All for lack of love.
Copyright © Bernard W. Bail, M.D.
September 2019
Comments