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Perhaps my best years are gone … but I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now.
(NOTE TO READER: Please scan the dreams first, which are all in italics and begin in The Treatment: Phase One section.)
“Iw-withdraw.” (she stammered on the first “w.”) Thus, “Ms. Bird” (as I will call her) answered my question, “Why did you come to see me?” That was more than 12 years ago: then she was a stylish but very stiff-appearing middle-aged woman, dressed in a full-length khaki jumper suit. Now, looking back, I can see that she was telling me much more about herself in her first sentence than I could have imagined. “I w-withdraw.” Her “I” that speaks connects itself with the “W's,” and her “W's,” by means of her stammer, are repeated, compulsively repeated.
She continued on in this, her first session: “My father died two years ago. He was withdrawn…. He was a bee keeper.” Little did I imagine then that she had already spoken sounds that signify her as a speaking subject: the W's, linked to her identification with her “withdrawn” father, now dead, and the bees—all the B's that I could not notice then, punctuating her speech, and emerging especially in