Sunday, August 20, 2006

New hope for a brighter future


Blogger is introducing a new beta version which I hope to try out soon. Can't use it yet because blogs will get rolled over gradually. I have been puzzled by the current system because I have noticed my most recent entries have not been posted on my home page. They can be accessed by RSS feed or from the August archives, but not directly if my gemother.blogspot.com address is used. I've reloaded the entire blog several times to no avail. The new version has an updated spell checker. The current one is useless and another reason I'd been considering switching to a new home for my blog. I'll give the new improved Blogger a chance. I hope the update doesn't eat bookmarks!

Otherwise things are good. I had a hard but productive week at work. Two old patients have circled back and it was good to see them again. Another patient who rotates between my training analyst and me looks as if he'll be seeing me exclusively. This is actually very good, not because I'm such a brilliant analyst or I charge less, but because he's becoming comfortable with a woman for the first time in his life.

Yesterday a female patient (who also sees my training analyst) brought in a wonderful dream. If you watch the movie Proof, you'll see her life. In her dream, she was on a Martian space ship as it flies over Phoenix. She voluntariy leaves the spaceship and lands in Phoenix where she starts to climb Squaw Peak. The interpretation by training analyst was that she was giving up her identification with her brilliant insane father (alien) and landing in Phoenix (rising from ashes), which was the home base of Milton Erickson (training analyst's mentor). I focused on climbing Squaw Peak, which I suggested was the strengthening of her femimine identity. She piped in that Men are from Mars so perhaps she must be leaving behind her masculinity. Her Mom was a very angry unhappy woman who did not provide an adequate feminine model for her. Dr. Erickson frequently ordered patients to climb Squaw Peak to gain a new perspective, to see life from a new point of view. A nifty dream whichever way one looks at it.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yay dreams! If you get a chance, hop over to Aliya's blog (http://alicroc.livejournal.com/). Her August 9th entry includes a dream that I threatened to tell you about :D She's quite enthused about the idea, actually. She has recurring dreams of West Highland Terriers...

the good enough mother said...

Read the dream. I've asked her for more detail. Recurring dreams are always significant.If someone's brain has to crank out repeats, it's processing important stuff. Sometimes a patient will dream a series of dreams with the same theme. They will keep dreaming variants until I figure it out. Then the next week, they'll dream a dream which confirms the interpretation and resolves the unconcsious conflict. Now that is very cool!