A Passionate Psychoanalyst: Poems and Dreams

By Joseph Abrahams M.D.

Ascertaining the genre of this volume has been difficult. It is much more than memoire, book of poetry, case study, dream journal, and travelogue. It is all that, plus their integration into a creative product.

It begins before the authors birth, when enterprising Grandfather Joseph Abrahams came to America, soon to meet a mysterious death. The extended family to follow prospered, and his grandson Joseph likewise pursued the American dream, first in Texas, then New England, New York, and during the war years, much of America. In the course of a career in psychoanalysis, he ventured into study of his own inner world for understanding of his life drives. There analysis of his dreams have been central, then a bent for poetry. The result is this volume, centering about a protracted rendezvous with death, surfacing with an epic poem, entitled, A Passionate Psychoanalyst.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 13, 2007
• ISBN: 9781469109374

Joseph Abrahams M.D.

Joseph Abrahams is a psychoanalyst, just ninety, who has been a follower of Freud’s way in the study of the human soul since early adolescence. Freud’s plumbing the human condition through painstaking work with troubled humans made sense to him. Analyzing their dreams to get to their core motivations made even more sense. But even earlier Abrahams found himself doing poetry, and interested in ballet and opera. Those interests went underground, in favor of science. Medicine was a compromise. Then, like Freud, he found psychiatry, and the realization that such study would have to begin with himself. Also like Freud he pursued his studies wherever they led. This volume is a preliminary report of the passionate search, based on his dreams and poems. A more formal exposition will come as An Extended Practice of Psychoanalysis. He is also hatching an opera on Virginia Woolf’s extraordinary life. He currently lives in San Luis Obispo, California with his wife, Elisabeth, a collaborator in his writing of books that stem from his career as a psychoanalyst: Turning Lives Around: Wartime Treatment of Military Prisoners, Politics from the Grassroots: A Guide to Creative Politics: The Messianic Imperative: Scourge or Savior?.

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Copyright © 2007 by Joseph Abrahams, M.D.

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Contents

Introduction

Part I

PROLOGUE

Part II

THREE GENERATIONS OF PASSION

Part III

EPILOG

Acknowledgements

Introduction

After settling on the title, I again looked up the definition of passion. Somehow, I had gotten away from its underlying meaning, to suffer. And that is what this volume is about. It is about what happened to the cockroaches I whacked in my first poem, done at age 8 ½, and how I felt in the first dream at age 52, about my residence in a coffin. It is a chronicle of what I did about that suffering and the apparent vitality that hid it from view.

The book began as a stand-alone collection of dreams and poems. Gradually, the story of a life emerged, then a running commentary, informed by my own brand of psychoanalysis. An alternate title, Soul Talk, spoke to its essence—my very soul, as I dismissed my forbears, immediate and distant, and laid claim to it.

It seems to me that, in the midst of developing my character, I was always asking why, how, and what for. I seemed endowed with great strength and eloquence, but was also unaccountably mute and beset with a sense of tragedy. I was drawn to Freud, the great questioner into the soul of man. But efforts to penetrate to my inner life yielded little of depth until my fifty-second year and a dream of being dead in a coffin.

What was I doing dead? A series of subsequent dreams provided partial answers. I had to decide whether to risk death and rot, or undergo again the resurrection I had learned was at the base of my character. I chose to chance death and found that I was still alive. I embarked on discerning and claiming my essential self, my very soul, both while dreaming and awake.

This self did surface, and in my broadened awareness, I became conscious of my father within me, as much a part of my character as my own nose. This was followed by an agony of separation from my mother, and next a period of great grieving, especially for my failed marriage. All this, while I led a successful life as a psychoanalyst, pioneered in family therapy and in the treatment of the severe disorders.

Then in 1996, as I climbed Monte Judea in the Algarve, Portugal, my poetic capacity also surfaced. I was searching there for evidence of the existence of ancient Jews while arguing vigorously about meanings with a fascist-minded friend. His weltanschauung was of a piece with that of the Nazis who had destroyed my European family. In the midst of the argument, I found I was waking from a nightmare. Up to then, though my dreams had had a poetic cast, my scientific mind had kept poesy at bay.

I had intended to include my dreams and their patterning in a scientific presentation. Then the poems came forth, especially the one entitled A Passionate Psychoanalyst. Dreams and poems seemed of a piece, giving voice to my soul’s aspiration, descent, and entrance to a new reality.

The tides of life that pulled and split me apart now propel me toward reconciliation. And my inherently based research of my afflictions has led to ways of engaging with others more overtly crippled, in the adventure that is psychoanalysis. I see the underlying ubiquity of psychic death that I hold led Freud to posit a death instinct. I daily note in myself and others the transference from the past that hampers the capacity to live fully in the present. I regret his shift from use of the German word seele, or soul, for the more scientifically sounding ego or self. The term soul is deeper, at the core of the human condition, and encompasses the spirituality that is tentatively finding its place in modern scientific discourse.

In this volume are masses of data from my unconscious, aimed directly at the unconscious of the reader. I risk alienation, but in that state, we may find the joy of mutual recognition. May we then experience the greeting of the Epilog Shalom!—To Wholeness!

Part I

PROLOGUE

It was in 1925, when I was 8 ½ years old, that an inner voice formed the words of the first poem of this volume. It was a long drink of a poem, on the Life and Loves of a Cockroach, ending with its death at my hands. Only a fragment remains.

Whack!

And the cockroach fell to the floor

Whack!

And he was a mass of gore

All his struggles were in vain

He was never to rise again

I had been a student of nature from as far back as I can remember, holding to a mind of my own, combined with a precocious career as hygienist for my family of origin. I had studied the life cycle of flies, from egg to larva to hatched adults, in the course of clearing my mother’s kitchen of them in New Haven, and study of the garbage can below the porch! Now I studied the cockroaches that overran our Lower East Side tenement. How I concluded that they had a love life is explainable only with the thought that I identified with them, and looked for their family life. Also, that I was aware of a deep lack in my life, a low estate, and could identify with them as pests and the way they sought crevices, for safety and to expand their numbers.

A grim determination to attend to life’s pressing business and my mother’s injunction to be happy caused my poetic/dreamer muse to go underground. But the unease persisted in my adult years, and though I was a successful psychoanalyst, I lacked the capacity to come to grips with this unease in myself, despite work with several analysts. I could help many of my patients through my intuition and analysis of their dreams, leading to critical experiences in which they freed themselves from the thrall of the past. Most were working their way through crises in their mid-life, as they faced the meaning of the death that was ultimate.

My crisis was to surface in a dream, allegorical in nature, at the age of fifty-two. Ended was my up-to-then comfortable sleep, with its sparse and allusive dreams. This dream was clear and direct.

I was in a coffin, dead

Lid over me

I would really die

Were I to struggle to be free

In its inherent drama this dream set the stage for a life-long research project, an inner journey that has been my self-analysis. This venture into the tribulations of my very soul and psychic death itself has been the culmination of the adventuring into new lands—the lands of my progenitors, my grandfather and father, fellow spirits and presences.

I hold that the reappearance of my capacity to generate poetry marks the success of the search. Despite advancing age, my inner voice grows stronger and more fluent. Many works in prose have followed, a summation of my life’s work.

Dreams and poetry appear to stem from an inner consciousness. Underlying is a process called the Id by Freud, who thought it to be marked by impulsions of chaotic nature. In my 60 years of experience in the analysis of self and other I have noted the existence of the chaos, but also a meaningful organizing process.

That process appears to be the familiar one of myth. We now believe myth to underlie mental and emotional life, and that mythopoesis, or one’s capacity to generate one’s own personal and social myth, is essential to selfhood in modern life. It was not always so. In former times, one lived out the myth of one’s forebears, in fealty, or was in a state of ostracism or alienation, a state on the way to psychic death.

Myths speak of the drama of entrance into and emergence from that death and its valley of the shadow. Others speak of return through resurrection. This volume is in effect an inquiry into that death experience, within the context of my life. It also evidences a struggle to work my way to a selfhood in which I could call my soul my own, from the imperative claims of prior myth and attachment. My poetic capacity, through an inner voice, is playing an important role in that drama. It all adds up to soul talk, stemming from an inner voice.

Part II

THREE GENERATIONS OF PASSION

Grandfather Joseph Abrahams Comes to America, 1892

Joseph Abrahams was a miller who lived somewhere in central Russia, beyond the Pale to which Jews were confined. He was forced to move back to the Pale, in one of the recurrent reactionary waves. I sense that he was physically venturesome like his younger son Harry, also intellectually so, like his brilliant older son Adolf. He ran a mill in a small town or shtetl in southwest Lithuania. He married a beauty named Frieda Levine, and they had four children. The older of the girls was Rebecca, the younger Ida. Ida was small and petite, like her mother. Becky was larger, taking after her father.

Grandfather moved again, to America, in 1892, not to avoid service in the Czar’s army, but I suspect, because of his enterprising spirit. He continued support of his family until he died, suddenly, in 1900. There are three versions of that death, the last crucial to my concern with death. In the first, he jumped to avoid a tenement