It was six months into his psychoanalysis and Dr Boyle still hadn’t come up with a single dream. This was frustrating because the idea of going to see an analyst had been a professional experiment—a sampling of the occult therapy that science had discredited.
As a psychiatrist working with serious psychotic disorders, Dr Boyle had come to the couch with the standard medical view of Freudianism: that its model of the unconscious mind is a fiction, and babbling to a therapist for months or years is a waste of time and money. But he was determined to give it a fair try. And that should at least mean producing some dreams to discuss.
His analyst wasn’t bothered. She said that dreams might be useful if they forced their way into conscious life, but the real therapeutic work would take place when he allowed his thoughts and feelings to free-associate.
Dr Boyle enjoyed lying down and blethering about himself; and he liked the fact that his analyst stuck to fusty old Freudian rituals like the couch. But he found it hard to agree about the dreams. Everyone has them during periods of rapid eye movement; it was just a matter of recall. If Freud had been even partially correct, those dreams should say something about his unconscious motivations, regardless of whether or not they stuck in his memory. More to the point, Dr Boyle wanted to remember his dreams.
The analyst suggested that perhaps his scientific views were acting as his super-ego, policing his unconscious to prohibit uncomfortable revelations. He smiled at that. Unlike the theorists of psychoanalysis, sleep scientists had done real research into dreams and found no evidence for a system of repressed desire. All those crazy, disconnected images possessed little more meaning than you’d get from randomly flicking through television channels.
Still, Dr Boyle couldn’t afford to be arrogant. There was another reason he had gone into psychoanalysis. He was depressed, and he knew it. His own job routinely involved treating patients with severe clinical depression, as well as others with schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder and other chronic mental illnesses. He tended to view these as neuro-biological disorders which could be partially managed with combinations of anti-depressants, mood-stabilisers and anti-psychotic medication.
What made his own depression perplexing was that it was just a mild one. To put himself on anti-depressants would have been an intellectual cop-out. He was unhappy, not ill. If an explanation for all mental disorders was to be found somewhere on the scale between psycho-babble and bio-babble, the reasons for his despair surely lay at the psychological end. Dr Boyle felt that his problem must be one of meaning.
If a patient had come to him with a similarly mild depression, he would have recommended the scientifically credible psychological treatment—cognitive behaviour therapy. But Dr Boyle guiltily had to admit that he couldn’t bear to consult one of his CBT colleagues. The idea of “cognitively reworking his negative beliefs” seemed shallow. He’d prefer to have an intelligent, cultivated conversation, he told his analyst, even if it was with someone whose methods he thought were based on a fallacy.
“Well, you’d charm many an endangered shrink with that one,” she said, a flicker of amusement crossing her face as he left. Dr Boyle realised that this was the first time in 6 months that he’d seen her smile.
Oddly, that smile seemed to do the trick. Next morning, he woke up having had a vivid dream. He’d been inside a cleaner’s cupboard at the hospital, getting a long blowjob from a woman that he couldn’t recognise, nervous that someone would discover them. What made him still more anxious was the complete lack of sensation he felt. As he tried to wriggle free, Dr Boyle found himself with a different woman, this time having energetic and orgasmic sex. He recognised her immediately. It was one of his colleagues at the hospital, an attractive French psychiatrist whose field was the side-effects of medication.
As he walked in for his 7am session with the analyst, Dr Boyle reddened. He suddenly realised who the woman giving him the blowjob had been. There was no way of getting out of this; he had to tell her. After all, he had waited six months for a dream to talk about.
“Well, that’s not difficult,” the analyst said, without smiling. “With the French psychiatrist, you really feel like you’re getting down to the biology of things, but from me you’re getting the “oral” treatment—and you feel nothing.”
Dr Boyle burst out laughing. Only a psychoanalyst would have the wit to produce a credible interpretation that suggested how her job was both insightful and ineffective.
“Are you implying that analysis isn’t for me?” he asked.
“You’re the one who had the dream,” she replied.
