 Last night was discussion so that everybody could get in it. We were free, we had free for all. And the theme that I want to start with this morning is the one about the fear of getting into the muck and the relation to images, being in the, going to the image. Because this has to do with some of your concerns about imagination and life. The relation between idea and image or something like that. And the question of if you go down, if you get into the mess, you may never get out or it may get worse or something like that. So it's that area that I want to talk about or address this morning. And I'm going to read a piece from interviews. And some of you are very familiar with it, but that's just how it is. You as a person have to step back so that the images can come forward. The theory of transference has overvalued the analyst. And in all therapy one knows that one is a projected image. It isn't only that one is a projected image. It is that the analyst has absorbed the imagination of the patient. So you're always thinking about the analyst instead of thinking about the dream or the images. Even replaced it. So his views and his thoughts, well, go. So the analyst has to get out of the way. That's the whole problem all the time in everything. And by that I mean whether it's potting or writing or painting or whatever. That's the whole problem all the time in everything. Standing in the way of images. And that's true no matter what you do. See the moment an image comes up and you interpret it you are standing in the way of it. Even in this interview we have to get out of the way of it so it can happen by itself with just a little help here and there from us. It's just like analysis. Let it come up without so much personalizing of the analyst or of the patient. They are the means by which analysis goes on and that's what people are in the room for. See that's a crucial thing. The two people, your question, the two people are in the room for the analysis. They're not in the room for the patient. They're in the room for the analysis so that the analysis can go on. Not for themselves. Just like our conversation now, it's for the sake of the interview, not for us. Can you imagine being in a conversation sitting at a table in a Greek café and you're there for the conversation. That's where you go to have a good talk in the evening. Or in Calcutta I've read a book once about a guy who was a babu, had a job in some office, bureaucratic office. In the heat he would cycle clear across town just to sit with four other guys in the dark room and talk in the evenings. That was his life. That was his life. To be there for the sake of the conversation and that the conversation does something then back for you. And it's the personalistic idea that I'm an analysis for myself that fucks it up. It's that you're in analysis for the sake of the analysis and that then has a side effect back on you perhaps. You are the music, as Eliot says, the note of the violin. You are the music as long as the music is on. Well, you're making the analysis, you make it, don't you? You've already made it. Go ahead. If it were, this was about the interview. If it were just us, we wouldn't know what to say to talk about. We don't have anything really to talk about. You don't know me and it was a fact. We didn't know each other. You know, we met to do an interview. I don't know you, yet look at the interview. It's moving right along. The interview seems to know what it wants from us. You see, the analyst is in the same sort of place. He, the analyst, doesn't really know that much, doesn't know which way this person's fate is going to go, doesn't know why these symptoms are occurring. Of course he always has clues about it, but he doesn't know as much as the psyche knows. You've got the psyche knows what it's doing. The psyche is not unconscious. We are, we patients, we analysts. The psyche is constantly making intelligible statements. It's making dreams and symptoms. It's making fantasies and moods. It's extraordinarily intentional, purposive. But the system of therapy has projected the unconscious into the patient's psyche, calling what the psyche is doing the unconscious. Whereas what's unconscious is that you can't understand what the psyche is doing. You're unconscious. Then because of opposites, this means that the analyst must be conscious. Both patient and analyst tend to believe this system. The you, you, who just asked the question, the normal person, the habitual, what we would call the conscious ego, although nobody's ever seen one, but we use that term about the other, the habitual, the habitual person. The person, the part of you that you identify yourself with, it gets up in the morning and eats breakfast and so on, and then has a dream and thinks that's the unconscious. For instance, wait a minute, no, I missed it. For instance, consciousness floats around. Sometimes the patient has an insight, and another moment the analyst is conscious by simply being reticent, and another moment the consciousness is really in the image. For instance, a black snake comes in a dream, a great big black snake. You can spend a whole hour with this black snake talking about the devouring mother, talking about the anxiety, talking about the repressed sexuality, talking about the natural mind, all these interpretive moves that people make, and what is left, what is vitally important is what that snake is doing, this crawling, huge black snake that's walking into your life. Now that's an absolutely basic, important distinction between interpretation and imagination. And the moment you've defined the snake, interpreted it, you've lost the snake, you've stopped it, and then the person leaves the hour with a concept about my repressed sexuality, or my cold black passions, or my mother, or whatever it is, and you've lost the snake. The tasks of analysis is to keep the snake there, the black snake, and there are various ways for keeping the black snake. You see, the black snake is no longer necessary the moment it's been interpreted, and you don't need your dreams anymore because they've been interpreted. So you can also imagine that interpretation, reductive, clarifying interpretations are a way of getting rid of imagination. And that's one of my complaints about therapy. I'm not saying that's what it does and has to do and only does, but that's one of the possible complaints about therapy that it can get rid of imagination rather than promote imagination. But I think you need them, the dreams, all the time. You need that very image you had during the night. You need that very image you had during the night. And you see, it's a disturbing image because in some cultures, Eskimo culture, you have several souls, and the soul that dreams is going off somewhere and doing things, and then it doesn't fit easily with the day world soul. So when it comes back, the day world soul doesn't want to know all this stuff. It disturbs whatever else you're going to do. And so the feeling that you need your dream isn't something that we live with usually. We try to fit the dream into the day world, although it comes from another place. See, at night you are in your dream walking around in it and you feel yourself to be enclosed in this scene, which is the dream. And the moment you wake up in the morning, you say, I had a dream and you think the dream is in you. So you can get the feeling of these two souls very clearly that way. The morning you believe the dream is somewhere in you, in your head or somewhere. But at night you're in the dream. The dream has you. And it's hard to move back and forth between those two feelings. Yes. Well, let's really go on a little longer. We'll see what happens. You need that very image you had during the night. For example, a policeman chasing you down the street. You need that image because that image keeps you in an imaginative possibility. If you say, oh, my guilt complex is loose again and is chasing me down the street, it's a different feeling because you've taken up the unknown policeman into your ego system of what you know you're guilt. You already know you're guilty and so you just put the label of guilt on the policeman chasing you down the street and then you're comfortable again. I mean, you still may feel guilty, but you're comfortable. The dream isn't doing anything upsetting to you. It's a different feeling because you've absorbed the unknown into the known or made the unconscious conscious and nothing, absolutely nothing, has happened. Nothing. You're really safe from that policeman and you can go to sleep again. So rather than as Freud says, the dream protects sleep, I think interpretation protects sleep. Your interpretation protects your sleep. I want to let the psyche threaten the... I want to let the psyche threaten the hell out of you by chasing that policeman there, chasing you down the street, even now as we talk. The policeman is more important than what we say about him. Now, that is so hard for us. That is so hard to realize that a phenomenon is always more interesting than the explanation of the phenomenon. Explanations are never as interesting as the phenomenon. And the phenomenon, the only thing interesting about an explanation is to take that too as a phenomenon. So we come to the question, what's the point of interpretation or criticism and how do you do it and so. I mean, the image is always more inclusive and more complex. It's a complex, isn't it, than the concept. Let's make that a rule. That's why stick to the image is another rule in archetypal psychology. So who is the policeman? Is he guilt? Or is he the sense of the law? Is he the sense of order? Is he the sense of the city, the polis? Has he something to do with an inherent structure of consciousness that wants something from you or reminds you of something or calls you to him? Otherwise he wouldn't be chasing you. You need to keep the policeman there so that you can learn what he is up to and what keeps you running and running in the street and into the street. See, each of those is a metaphor, running into the street, running in the street, being chased. Are you chased because are you being pursued because you're running or are you running because you're being pursued? Maybe the policeman wouldn't chase you if you stood still, but because you're running he has to be chasing and so on. So all of that play goes on which is imaginative play. The images are where the psyche is. People say, I don't know what the soul is or I've lost my soul or whatever. To me the place to look when you feel that way is immediately to the images that show where you are with your soul and your dreams. What we tend to do is try to get up and outside and look down on ourselves and evaluate where we are. I'm now 37 and I'm nowhere with my career or I'm now 46 and my wife just left me. Where am I? What am I going to do next? Lay it all out from some point in outer space and then I'm lost. I don't know who I am. I have no identity. All of that stuff. Whereas if you just see where you are in the house or the neighborhood or the physical place you are what did you dream last night? That's where your soul is. What is your mood? That's where your soul is. My mood is actually I'm questioning myself I'm trying to find out who I am. That's telling you where you are. That's exactly where you are. You're about 400 feet up watching. Did you say in the psyche what images... Very precise images. Very precise. No it doesn't communicate very well because you don't usually get it. That's the way I would think about it. It's constantly sending you messages. Not messages, images. Images. So could it be a teacher of imagination and instead of imagining it as a communicator it is an imaginer. And we keep trying to get the information out of it and maybe it isn't an information service maybe it's an imagination service but we're hooked on information. That's a big difference. And then you don't read the dreams for messages you read them for inspirations, fantasies laughs tears, you read them for other things not for information. Now we absolutely hooked on information we have to realize that. There's more and more and more information less and less knowledge they have nothing to do with each other.