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MY PATIENT CAN INTRODUCE HIMSELF with the first dream he reported in treatment.
I dreamt I was a secret agent. I had some sort of secret information so important that I'd been obliged to take cyanide to keep it from being found out. Only I woke up the next day—it hadn't been enough to kill me. Then this distant friend came to take me to a safe house, which involved leading me through a sort of college campus. We came across the enemy Russian agent, who was playing tennis. I think he wanted me to play against him. I remember taunting him, getting him good and angry. Then at the safe house I remember saying good-bye to my wife and son, matter-of-factly, and taking enough more cyanide to kill me.
We meet here a man poisoned with self-containment. He had sought out psychotherapy at his wife's insistence. His irritability, emotional distancing, and lifelong depression were strangling their marriage. The dream occurred after two months of treatment, during which he had sketched out the picture of a bleak and lonely childhood, marred by humiliation, rejection, and betrayal. An association to the dream was that the Russian agent looked like me. My patient scoffed at the suggestion that he might see therapy as a battle between us, one in which I was trying to get him to give something up. After all, because dreams were open to so many interpretations, they were next to useless; besides, if I were such an enemy, why would he be bothering to come to see me? My remark to the effect that he had volleyed back my suggestion—that our current interaction seemed like the tennis match—he dismissed as so much psychological trickery.
A few days later he had a second dream: he allowed himself to be