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A Young woman, eight years in mental hospital for manicdepression psychosis, brought two dreams to a session. In the first, she had some difficulty walking because there was a little pocket on the sole of her right foot which contained little sticks.
In the second dream, she had her head thrown back (she stood up to illustrate) and “sick was gushing forth eternally” (gesturing with both hands in a way that made it appear that the vomit gushed forth from her mouth and circled in the air to re-enter her body at her genital).
As she rambled on in further description and association to the dream, it became clear that the sticks in the pocket in her sole were arranged like the bones of a little foot, “like phalanges”, “falangists” (laugh). They were like the almond sticks with which she aborted herself the first time (when she was living with a fellow student whom she later married)—“What a bloody mess!” (said with vulgarity and callousness). “Later I thought I could have named him Karl, for Karl Marx.” (The six months fetus was male.) “I was weeping and weeping yesterday and kept saying to myself, ‘Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus’. He'd have been 16 now. It's no use! Next week is Rosh Hashonah and then Yom Kippur!”
The next week she dreamed that she was taken from her room and ward to the ward for old women and later she was taken to a place where she had nowhere to go.
Here then is a picture of the structure of this young woman's despair: by destroying her baby with the almond stick she had created a pocket of sickness in her soul in which every bone of the baby's body had turned into a persecutor (falangist) murdering her Jewish-Communist babies (her six subsequent miscarriages) and filling her mind with the sickness that poured forth from her mouth as vulgarity and obscenity. She was on trial and would be condemned to death, to be taken from the place of judgement (her present wa