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The Zulus have a name for this process. The inyanga, they say, suffers because the spirits give him no peace and he becomes a ‘house of dreams.’
At times it is necessary and renewing to turn to non-analysts to learn something about Psychoanalysis and what is at its core. John Berger, who turned 80 at the end of 2006, has written on a wide range of topics for nearly 60 years, including many pieces for the New Statesman, several novels and books of essays, screen plays, and much art criticism. Berger's most well known work, the book and BBC series, Ways of Seeing (1972), has forever altered our view of art as being the exclusive domain of the art establishment. Susan Sontag went so far as to call Berger peerless. His latest book, Here Is Where We Meet, completed in 2005 on the eve of his eightieth birthday, is a carefully crafted group of eight and a half essays that has much to teach us about the journey of mutual discovery that is at the heart of the psychoanalytic process.
In these essays, Berger creates a montage of person and place that is neither sentimental nor memorial. In a deceptively simple and evocative manner, he pulls the reader into his narrative so that, paradoxically, we come to know more about our own imaginative life than about the specifics of Berger's. We are encouraged to enter “a house of dreams” and poke around alongside him to find what is there. In this manner, Berger creates a world where we can join with him, on deep and imaginative levels, where he neither imposes his own experience as the experience, nor stands in judgment of ours.