Rose Dreams of Meat
Soon after Rose’s first appointment with me, she relayed this dream:
Rose and I were sitting side-by-side in a field. We were looking at a shared screen, set up in front of us and blocking an expansive view. In Rose’s left hand she held a fist full of beef jerky. She would later say the soft, greasy, meat grasped in her dreaming hand, is what remained most memorable of her dream. In the dream I held a container, presumably a plastic bag for the cured meat. Behind us sat an ensembled group of faceless people and a dog Rose recognized as her old, and loyal dog Murray, dead six years on. The gathered group chattered loudly amongst themselves. At a certain point Rose turned around and told them, “Shush. We are doing therapy here!” She recalled the crowd moved back in a seated bunch, like a class of grammar school kids sitting crisscrossed applesauce, might shuffle backward on their bottoms. That was when it occurred to Rose that her therapist might like some beef jerky. She told me she opened her hand in the dream and placed the meat between us. I in turn placed the empty container down next to the meat. This is when Murray trotted forward, nipped the bag in his teeth and dragged it back to the crowd. Rose watched Murray rip into the bag for a while before her dream thoughts were interrupted by morning and consciousness thinking…
“Who is Murray?” I wondered.
Rose and I would go on to interpret this dream over and over. The unconscious is not liner we entered it from many different shapes. The meat of her dream was relevant throughout many aspects of her life.
Murray was a terrier. He was also both bookends of her marriage, which was also dead six years at the time of the dream. The anniversary of the end of that marriage, Rose noted, “happens to coincide with my return to therapy.”
“Happens?” I repeated.
Then a quiet moment of reflection claimed the space between myself and Rose.
As she thought of Murray, she later said she found herself floating in a wash of emotions. All kinds of thoughts bubbled up. Murray was the face of both health and sickness. The dog had finally had a stroke that left him paralyzed on Rose’s lawn. It was the house with a backyard she and her ex-husband jokingly said was bought for him, “the million-dollar dog.” That marriage ended just before Murray’s premature death. His ashes she buried beneath an oak tree planted in the front yard of that house. The house would soon also be lost after Murray’s death.
Rose was now in a new relationship with a new house. “Odd,” she finally said to me, “The new owners of my old home contacted me recently. They want to cut down the oak tree in the front yard.” She was not sure why they would do that? It bothered her to think about it all because her new partner had no attachment to the oak tree and there is always considerable expense in moving oak trees.
“I am new to you too.” I replied to Rose. “I imagine getting back into therapy must be expense for you too…on many levels.”
The English psychoanalyst Wilford Bion said there are things for which we cannot know alone, because it takes two minds to think one’s most distressing thoughts. Thoughts here, always refer to the most elemental raw sense-impressions, they are dandelion seeds aloft, fragments of a whole emotional experience. They are the unthought-like thoughts, that stir the thinking process. Bion said these unthoughts-like thoughts proceed thinking, and indeed it is these thought seeds that make thinking necessary. For Bion thinking is the very particular psychological work of striving to understanding and know the truth. In therapy the therapist’s mind becomes the container, or the thinking process, for the client’s most disturbing unthought-like thoughts, which may become contained, in what is termed the container/contained.
In Rose’s dream a trusted ghost from her past ran off with the container.
An interpretation of Murray may be Rose’s unconscious ambivalence in trusting her new therapist...Me.
Of course, there are several other interpretations too. Bion believed:
La résponse est le Malheur de la question.
translated:
The answer is the misfortune of the question.
The point is not to definitively know something. Though we may enter therapy with a deep desire to seek our truth, much of life is unknowable. Therapy allows us to become more tolerant with that discomfort.
In life we are both the container and the contained. In health, the container is concerned with expansion in capacity for doing psychological work. The growth of the contained is reflected in the richness, spice and texture of thoughts derived from ones lived experience in the world. It is not the therapist’s ultimate goal to resolve unconscious conflict with past ghosts. The therapist’s aim is to help the client develop and enlarge the capacity for thinking/feeling experience. In other words, broadening the container for a more satisfying experience.