Treasures of the Well

Memory is a funny thing. It flows in waves that reverberate in their own small universes of echo. And echo is the stuff of which mind and meaning, Lacan's Imaginary, are built. Along with the hall of mirrors, we have the realm of echo, the aesthetic residue of embodied, sensory, affective prosodies through which unconscious threads travel and link, forming patterns that call us forward to uncover their mysteries.

My earliest memory is of sitting outside my attic bedroom - which my grandmother had co-opted - anxiously waiting for her to be released from behind the door she could not open. At around the same age, 5, I remember being shamed by my mother for having picked the neighbor's flowers to present to her when she arrived home after the birth of my younger sister. I remember thinking that this sister was extraneous and expendable but then bonding with her, adopting her in a way that sustained us both for many decades.

I had recurrent dreams as a child, dreams of labyrinths and spaces narrowing and becoming impassable even as I tried to traverse them. In retrospect, I see how they marked aspects of my life story I had no way of consciously knowing at the time. Some dreams mark my mother and older sister as points of danger, opposing my family role of intruder breaking into the symbiotic entanglement of parents with their first child.

In one dream, I was being chased by the big bad wolf. I ran into our shared bedroom, hiding under the vanity table at my older sister's urging. When the wolf came to the door, my sister opened it and silently pointed to my hiding place. My unconscious mind recognized a treachery that lurked within the sister I so longed to be close to but who seemed repelled by me, whose own childhood dreams were of killing me and of watching my mother disappear.

Looking back at the ways my unconscious mind was always working at the enigmas life had left me, it is hardly surprising that psychoanalysis called to me. Where else can we find such a receptive