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The true opposites of belief … are doubt and inquiry, not disbelief.— William James (1890)
A YOUNG MALE PATIENT THE SON of a combat pilot, remembers a dream toward the end of a session in which he sees giant meteors falling from the sky, hitting the ground, exploding and hitting his grandmother's house. Several associations reveal his concern about his parents selling the home in which he was raised. He then he realizes that meteors do not explode but crash into the ground. Without further comment he changes the topic to a previously discussed mundane issue. This facile shift of topics triggered two questions in the analyst's mind: Why is he avoiding further articulation of the discrepant imagery that he himself had observed? What does the exploding meteor mean to him? I asked about the abrupt shift in the material and the two questions that came to my mind. He responded:
Well bombs explode when they hit ground. I didn't continue talking about it because I don't want to know, it is too painful to know. I didn't know much about my father's bombing until after I got married, overhearing