Finding the analytic couch upstate was the hardest part. Psychoanalysts never made it much further North from New York than Westchester County. (I know they call Westchester “upstate” from Manhattan, but from Ithaca it is a long ways downstate. ) Finally I found a couch in Philadelphia, where each obituary of a psychoanalyst sends another couch to the used furniture store. Gus, who had been keeping his eye out for me, called me up. “Got one here that just came in, doc,” he said in his South Philly staccato. “Fifties style, but it belonged to a Jungian, so it’s not too rigid.” It sounded good to me. Although I don’t usually use a couch myself, I had tried one out that had been owned by a Freudian. It was no use: everybody’s dreams were both sexual and rigidly interpretive. I mean, how many bicycle masturbation fantasies can there really be? Besides, rigidity isn’t big in Ithaca, except among certain vegans, and I’m not. So I jumped in the pickup and by that Friday night I was backing up to my new stand at the market.
My neighbors at the goat cheese stand and Micro Mama’s on either side of me helped me carry it in. Then I had to only hang the curtain on a rope, stick in a folding chair for me and a box of Kleenex, and I was ready to hang my sign. People could lie down on the couch and couldn’t really be heard against the hubbub of Saturday mornings, while their feet sticking out signaled those in line that there was somebody in the stall – like a bathroom stall, only you didn’t have to duck to see.
Of course I had to address the concerns of the board of directors in the beginning. It is not like I would be in competition with anybody. But some members remembered the problems when they had psychotherapists there before. Behaviorists didn’t really fit the ethos of the market, and various new-age practitioners were disruptive: complaints about the primal scream stand had been particularly vocal. (They moved on to city planning board meetings.) A moratorium on therapists had been declared after the unfortunate incident with the shock therapy stand, when a confused patient wandered off the end of the dock with a full backpack of rutabagas and sank like a stone. Even though the practice was both ecologically correct and sustainable (the electricity was generated by stationary bicycle) the legal liability was judged just too great. Jim Hardesty took back his custom-made Tesla coil to sell to some museum, and the sign: “Zap your worries: Real Brief Therapy,” kicked around until somebody recycled it as a garlic shelf.
Psychoanalysts are the Amish of the mental health professions: they never bought in to the technology, and so remember how to do things in the “old school” way. Dream analysis, a cornerstone of Amish practice, is as potentially illuminating as an MRI, with the advantage of being more portable and a lot cheaper. Of course, it depends upon what you are looking for: if you are searching for brain damage, it’s the right technology. If you are trying to identify sources of persistent and recurring personal suffering, though, a dream can be just the thing. All sorts of people lie down on my couch for a few minutes while shopping, like getting a quick massage on the Commons: people with emotionally-based physical illnesses, depression occurring in Ithacans other than during January through March, the ever-expanding sea of human troubles that are diagnosed as psychiatric illnesses (for these I use de-diagnosis) or the myriad manifestations of hopelessness, even in doctoral students. For these, dreams are just the instrument.
It is true that the preparation of a competent dream analyst takes vastly longer than that of a radiologist. In the Philadelphia psychoanalytic community, where I learned my trade, there is a saying that “It takes 25 years to know what to say in an analytic session.” You can’t really use a dream analysis book. That only tells you the associations of the person who wrote it, along with the usual collective unconscious material. To be competent at reading dreams requires long practice in developing a certain inward focus, an ability to grasp the person’s associational network or personal cosmology as separate from one’s own, and the opening of certain intuitive capacities. When you get it right, you can feel the illumination ripple through the person (this is where the Kleenex is often useful) following which their wings open just a little bit more. If you keep this up, eventually you can fly.
Just before the market opens, a short, weathered potato farmer from Newfield pulls the drape back and plops down on the couch. “Had this nightmare last night, shook me up,” doc, he starts. I was planting potatoes, but all that came up was marijuana.” “You farm organic?” I asked him. “Yeah: biodynamic.” As I suspected: it’s another dream about money, a common theme among organic farmers. I lean back, drawing in on my briar. “I see,” I say, leaning in attentively. “Tell me more.” I suspect that for this one I’m going to be paid in potatoes.
David's home sidewalk is in under his usual table in front of Gimmie Coffee on Cayuga Street.
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