Psychoanalysis, Intersubjective Writing, and a Postmaterialist Model of Mind

I Woke Up Dead

Dan Gilhooley, Frank Toich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367335335
• eBook ISBN: 9781000586770
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this in-depth and unique collaboration between a patient and his psychoanalyst, Psychoanalysis, Intersubjective Writing, and a Postmaterialist Model of Mind: I Woke Up Dead examines the unconscious mind by analysing the patient's novel written during his treatment as the focus. Using the patient's creative writing and their intersubjective relationship as evidence, Dan Gilhooley and Frank Toich show how psychoanalysis fits within a postmaterialist model of mind.

In this ground-breaking exploration, Gilhooley and Toich together demonstrate how a nonlocal unconscious can reshape the psychoanalytic conception of the mind. Split into four parts, Intersubjective, Quantum, History and Collaboration, Dan introduces three themes in the first: recovery from death, the intersubjective nature of therapeutic work and the role of creative imagination, combining these themes with analysis of Frank's work and short, related stories from his own life. Part II, Quantum, introduces the concept of nonlocality to describe the mind and draws on the appearance of quantum physics in Frank's science fiction, before moving onto Part III, History, which examines the emergence of psychoanalysis out of animal magnetism, looking at rapport, telepathy and love in psychotherapy. Finally, Collaboration discusses their ongoing psychotherapeutic experiment, the role of imagination, dissociation and the cosmic mind in psychological growth. Interweaving creative writing, psychoanalytic theory and real-life stories, the book re-contextualizes the history and future of psychoanalysis.

Due to its multidisciplinary nature, this book will appeal to psychotherapists and psychologists in practice and in training. It would also be a vital resource for academics and students of counseling, consciousness studies, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and psychology.

Part I

Intersubjective

Chapter 1

I woke up dead

Ben and I worked together for several years and developed a close connection. Then he was hurt by something I said. Ben turned hateful and today I felt threatened by his anger. I need better defenses. I’m struggling to regulate his destructiveness. Ben and I are in a bad place.

My next hour is with Frank. “I miss him so much,” he said of Anders, his twenty-three-year-old son who’d died of cancer last year. Frank consulted me four years ago to get help for Anders who was depressed. Frank believed if Anders was less depressed, he could fight his cancer more effectively. Anders didn’t want to speak to a therapist, so I never met him. But Frank stayed to talk about the despair and anger associated with his son’s illness.

Anders had been fighting a cancer first discovered as a lump beneath the surface of his cheek when he was sixteen. He’d had ten surgeries and a nearly continuous stream of chemotherapy. He lost his eye and the facial nerve on the right side of his face. For most of the last year, his face was disfigured by a large tumor. Anders suffered intensely, and so did Frank. During some periods Anders showed improvement, but nothing could stop the cancer which always returned, eventually spread to his brain and killed him.

Frank said he’d always been an angry guy, but Anders’ illness threw him into rages of terrifying proportions. He’d collide with a shopper in a supermarket and shove him into a rack of potato chips. He’d be bumped by someone on the street talking on a cell phone and he’d explode. He’d get into an argument over a cab and nearly end up in a fistfight. He was bitter to be losing his son. While his son’s friends grew into adulthood, Frank watched Anders’ broken body stagger from toilet to bed. When the cancer reached his brain, Anders began to have seizures causing him to sprawl convulsively on the floor. These seizures were proof that Anders’ condition was out of control. In the final months when he was home alone caring for Anders, he dreaded the possibility of a seizure.

During that last year of his son’s life Frank talked often about killing himself. He wanted to buy a gun and blow his brains out. The realization he was losing his son was unbearable. After Anders’ death, Frank’s suicidal wishes intensified. Having endured six years of suffering he wanted to put an end to the pain and join his son in death. Frank picked out a shotgun and studied it online. I told Frank he couldn’t have a gun. He once went into a store and placed his hand on a rifle stock and left quickly out of fear. Another time as he was driving home, he began turning into the parking lot of a gun shop, only to veer back onto the highway. When he told me this he said, “I think Anders and you took control of the steering wheel and pushed me back out onto the highway, away from danger.” Frank knew his son wanted him to stay alive. On the last day of his life Anders made Frank promise he’d recover and grow strong again.

Saying his son and I both took control of the steering wheel made me realize Frank identified me with the son who wanted to keep his father alive. Frank was not aware my father had shot himself in the head when I was fifteen. I knew the pain of a boy losing his father, and Frank was experiencing the pain of a father losing his son. I certainly knew suicide inside out. I knew what it was like to keep a gun out of the hands of a killer. As a boy, I’d taken a rifle from my father, unloaded and hidden it when he threatened to kill my mother, sister and me. I wondered about the coincidence of Frank ending up with me as a therapist. He said,

I don’t think I’d kill myself with a gun. In fact, I don’t think I’d kill myself because then I’d never see Anders again. That’s my belief. What worries me is an accident, stepping off a curb into a bus, the sort of thing my unconscious might do before I can see it coming.

Like the altercations he got himself into with strangers. Frank reported an interchange with a junkie in a small shop in Chinatown. Though of European descent, Frank feels a strong affinity with Chinese culture. He suspects he was Chinese in a previous life. Early one Saturday morning, just as the shop was opened by a pair of young Chinese girls who spoke little English, Frank arrived to make a purchase. While he was there a young man came in and asked to use the restroom. In a state of incomprehension, the girls said, “No.” The man persisted. The girls resisted.

Frank intervened, “Listen, they’ve told you ‘no’ several times. The answer is ‘no.’ I think you should leave.”

“What business is it of yours?” the young man responded belligerently.

“I’m making it my business. I think you should get the fuck out of here,” Frank said. The junkie responded in kind. Frank stepped closer to the young man. Standing toe-to-toe, about a foot apart, Frank slowly raised his right arm. Staring into the junkie’s eyes he said dispassionately, “This, my friend, is the right hand of death. If you don’t leave it’s going to cut your fuckin head off.” The junkie stepped back incredulous.

“What are you talking about? What’s going to cut my head off?”

“This hand, and the sword hanging at my side.” The junkie looked at Frank’s torso; obviously there was no sword.

“Sword? What sword? You’re crazy, old man,” the junkie said and walked out.

“That’s right,” Frank said smiling, trailing him out the door, “And if I ever see you in this store again, I’m going to kill you.”

Telling me this story, Frank was pleased his craziness had propelled the man out the door. I thought Frank was trying to provoke someone to kill him. I pointed this out to him. This was another way his unconscious was pushing him toward death. Sometimes Frank wanted someone to put him out of his misery.

I needed to protect Frank. I’d failed to protect my father. I hadn’t seen it coming then. This time I saw it coming. I had a real understanding of what Frank’s suicide would do to his family, and to me. I was surprised to find I had a strong desire to redeem myself. If I could drag Frank away from death’s door, I’d pay for the father I’d lost through inattention. I found myself driven by forty-year-old feelings of guilt I’d forgotten I possessed, and a primitive talion principle of a life-for-a-life. I began to realize I depended on Frank for this opportunity for redemption.

Around this time, it also occurred to me that I was living inside a corpse. It’s not that I felt dead. In fact, just the opposite. I felt energetic and alive. But I began to feel I was moving within this husk, a dead invisible hulk that seemed to envelop me, its material substance (the grainy texture of its walls) just out of sight. It felt like I was inside an organic version of the Nautilus, a small submarine from 1800. It didn’t weigh me down. But it subtly constrained me, keeping me submerged. At first, I thought this corpse fantasy was a representation of my father, and that I was living continuously within his dead body. Then I wondered if this corpse was Anders. Maybe a husk of death enveloped both Frank and me.

I worried a lot about Frank. In the period following Anders’ death he’d often be late or not show for his appointments. This frightened me. When he missed an appointment, I’d call each of his phone numbers and leave a message at one of them. If he hadn’t called back in a few hours, I’d call again. Or, I’d wait until the next day and then I’d call. I felt uncomfortable about making these second calls. On the one hand, Frank was teetering at the edge of life, and I felt I had to “go get him.” But I also believed these second calls revealed an urgent redemptive need to save him. I was ashamed of this shadow peeking out from my past outlining the shape of my own loss and guilt. I tried to avert my eyes from it. I certainly didn’t want Frank to see this painful reflection of me. One morning Frank didn’t show up for his appointment, and I called and left a message on his phone. Not hearing back from him, at three that afternoon I called his cell phone. He answered.

“What happened this morning?” I asked.

“Oh, hi. Oh, ah, I forgot. I forgot what day it was.”

“Where are you now?”

“Where am I? I don’t know. I’m in a bookstore looking at rows of books. I’ve just been wandering. I don’t know where I am.” He sounded out of breath, in a fog. “I had a presentation at work. I got out at one and never went back. I’ve just been wandering around since then. I don’t know where I am.” It sounded like he was looking around trying to get his bearings. He paused. “Look, I don’t think I can do this. I can’t talk about this. It’s just too painful.”

“I know it’s too painful, but I think talking is the only thing that’s going to get you through this,” I said. But I wondered if he was right. Maybe he was better off not talking.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I guess you’re probably right. It’s just so unbearable. It’s unbearable to talk about.” Frank took a deep breath and then was silent. “Ah, okay, I’ll see you next Friday,” he said, and as an aside before signing off, “Thanks for calling.”

Frank couldn’t bear talking, yet his actions made me feel as isolated, lost, disoriented and frightened as he was. We were completely adrift with no shore in sight. I was angry with Frank for filling me with feelings of desperation, for his part in spilling out this shadow from my past and forcing me to see this humiliating shape of myself. I knew Frank must be angry at me for the same thing, for forcing him to experience feelings of loss and despair in my presence, and to be confronted by this pathetic image of himself.

I was angry Frank wasn’t doing therapy the way I prescribed; not following what I knew in my heart would be a path toward life. He was doing it his way. But his way had me believing there was no path, no way out. Frank filled me with feelings without showing up or saying a word. His method of communication was exquisitely efficient. Perhaps these enactments were a better way for him to do therapy. But I was having a difficult time with it. At some point during his next session when the topic of last week’s absence came up, I said, “Look, this is impossible. I can’t stand this. You come in here and tell me you’re worried about your unconscious pushing you into an oncoming bus. . .”

“And then I don’t show up for my appointment,” Frank completed my sentence with a smile.

“How do you expect me to react?” I said.

Frank responded, “No, you’re right.”

“And you’re smiling about it,” I said with frustration.

“I see what you mean. I think it’s kind of funny. It’s not funny, of course, the position I put you in. It’s not right,” he said.

“That’s right, it’s not right.” It wasn’t right according to me. The pleasure he seemed to take in my discomfort wasn’t right. But to Frank, it seemed just right.

The next week Frank reported a dream he’d had in which he opened the front door of his country home one Saturday morning and found me there having arrived as a weekend guest. Frank pointed out it was the reverse of a well-known movie in which a patient followed his analyst on vacation. In this case, the analyst was following the patient. We laughed about it together. But the image left me feeling humiliated.

“Do you make house calls?” Frank asked. “I could introduce you to my friends as my live-in analyst, always on call.”

“I do seem to be chasing you down with those phone calls.”

“No, that’s good. You’re keeping an eye on me. That’s what I need you to do. I’m so out of it sometimes.” Frank thought of me as someone looking out for him, ever present. I was comforted by the image in the dream of Frank bringing me into his home. But I was embarrassed by that picture of me standing at Frank’s doorstep. I’d become the dependent therapist clinging to his patient. I couldn’t let him go. It was too dangerous to let him go.

Frank’s dream conveyed that he was unconsciously aware of my dependency on him, and I think he was aware of my discomfort and humiliation about it. It also occurred to me that Frank helped create these feelings between us because he felt uncomfortably dependent on me and humiliated to be seen in his desperately weakened state. To be seen by me as incapacitated, not knowing which way to turn, was humiliating. Frank seemed to find relief in knowing that I was uncomfortably dependent on him, and that I felt humiliated and powerless. Frank needed this symmetry. This fundamental sameness was becoming the foundation of our relationship: what psychoanalyst Hyman Spotnitz (1985) called a narcissistic transference, or what Harold Searles (1979) described as a therapeutic symbiosis. Frank and I were clinging to each other, uncomfortable in our mutual dependency, pulled together by a magnetism of loss.

A couple of weeks later I had a dream in which I woke up dead. In fact, those words, “I woke up dead,” echoed in my mind announcing the beginning of the dream. I hovered above my body lying motionless in bed. I circled it, checking for signs of life. Was I breathing? I reached out to lift my hand, to prod myself in order to rouse me. My body lay there unresponsive under a white sheet. I concluded I really was dead. For being dead, I felt fine, literally care-free. I seemed to move about effortlessly. It was easy being dead, and I was surprised that I wasn’t a bit upset about my death. I guessed it must have happened in my sleep.

I woke from the dream and sat up, swinging my legs over the side of the bed. I thought, “I really am dead in the mind of Ben.” Weeks earlier, in a fit of anger, Ben had dramatically ended treatment. “Why do I have such difficulty accepting the reality of my death in his mind?” I wondered. “I’m dead in this case. Get it, I’m dead. It’s the part I play,” I told myself as I got up.

But Ben’s leaving wasn’t a painless death like I experienced in my dream. In Ben’s case I felt dismal. His leaving felt like a life sentence as a failure. “That’s part of the transference,” I thought as I trudged downstairs to make some coffee.

Later that day I discussed the dream in analysis and struggled with the emotional injury of losing Ben. At the end of the week during his session Frank again described his despair at the loss of his son. “He’s in my thoughts all the time,” he said weeping. Near the end of the session Frank said, “I had a strange dream this week. I dreamt I woke up dead.”

I came to life. Frank explained this was a turning point, a signal from his dead son Anders who, having achieved angelic status, was now guiding Frank’s mourning. Frank said, “I think it means a kind of transition, a moving on. I think Anders is showing me the way.” His dream was about life after death. Frank felt his son had transcended the cycle of mortal pain and had moved on to heaven. Anders’ role now, Frank said, was to help him recover from his son’s death.

“When did you have this dream?” I asked.

“It was the beginning of the week, Monday or Tuesday,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

“Monday night, I dreamt that I woke up dead,” I told him. Frank glanced over at me out of the corner of his eye.

“Really?” he said.

“Really,” I responded. “I’ve never had a dream like that.” Frank looked at me with disbelief, perhaps suspicion. I thought he didn’t really believe me. Or, he didn’t know what to make of this.

“I suppose that’s possible, that you’re just connected up with all this,” he said. “It makes sense.”

It didn’t make any sense to me. How could I have had such a parallel dream? Where did it come from? Why now? But by concluding, “It makes sense,” Frank appeared to arrest further exploration. We didn’t say another word about it. The revelation about my dream seemed to upset him. It interrupted and confused him. So, I never described my dream to him, and he never discussed his dream with me. Instead, Frank focused on the meaning his dream had for him, how it was a message from his son.

Frank was right. This dream was a turning point. Frank began writing a story about life after death that begins with the protagonist, Nigel, announcing, “I woke up dead,” the very phrase that heralded the beginning of my dream. The story, which he entitled “So long,” is a dreamlike noir detective tale set in a timeless space between life and death, in which Nigel tries to find the path to eternal life. Every week Frank wrote more of the story and read segments to me. The story was a relief from the painful realities of mourning. Each week a portion of the session would be spent with the story. Frank would describe the plot unfolding. He literally was making it up as we went along. I was surprised by his lively and inventive ideas.

Frank’s protagonist, Nigel, is in pursuit of Dr. Mekes. Nigel hopes Mekes can clarify an arcane question about the Egyptian Book of the dead. Mekes works as an assistant to a Chinese magician named Ching Ling Foo who is really God. Together Mekes and Foo create the holographic experiences we each call life. Nigel believes they hold the key to eternal life. Nigel never meets Mekes, but deals repeatedly with Mekes’ associates Khu, Ba, Ka, and Ren, each a name for a different part of the human soul in Egyptian mythology.

Mekes appears to be modeled after the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras who traveled to Egypt and the Near East, studied the Egyptian Book of the dead, and appropriated Egyptian religious beliefs on the transmigration of the soul (Huffman, 2014). Part philosopher, scientist and shaman, Pythagoras dedicated his life to the service of the divine, making frequent trips into the land of the dead. Recalling Frank’s educational grounding in mathematics, he seemed to be placing Western culture’s original mathematician at the center of his story.

As Frank read portions of his story to me each week there were curious surprises. For example, one of the main characters was a German architect named Max who went progressively mad contemplating one of Zeno’s paradoxes. Max’s growing realization that no two lines could ever converge meant the architectural...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Praise
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Intersubjective
• Part II Quantum
• Part III History
• Part IV Collaboration
• Index