Chapter 56 Section 3 Your "Oedipus Complex"

Green is a handsome white man.He feels that he can't handle the relationship with women, so he hopes to find the answer from me.I told him the answer was not with me, but with himself.So he began to record his dreams, telling me one or two dreams every time he came.I always let him do a self-analysis first, and then I have a little opinion. One day Green told me an interesting dream.He dreamed of a flock of chickens, one of which swallowed a child alive.The child's parents anxiously searched for their child among the chickens, picking up each chicken and trying to find their child.At last they found the chicken, killed it immediately, and took the child out of it.Thankfully, the child survived unscathed.

I let Green interpret the dream himself.He said that the theme of the dream was death and rebirth, and I agree with him.Then I asked him to make free associations about chickens, which is also the main method of dream interpretation in classical psychoanalysis. "Chicken means food, no willpower, laying eggs, cowardly, submissive, mediocre, law-abiding. The chicken that swallowed the child broke the code of the chicken. It swallowed a child. But it didn't show it on the outside, which means The change is internal. A child means creativity, imagination, strength, simplicity. Parents represent protectors."

"So, what does it mean to string these meanings together?" I asked Green for his first interpretation. "A mediocre chicken trying to stand out from the crowd." He learned to explain with new knowledge, "trying to make himself different from other mediocre chickens." "But the chicken that was trying to get ahead of the flock ended badly." I pointed out the holes in Green's self-interpretation of his dream. "It could also be interpreted as the chicken trying to transform itself into a higher being." "The end of the chicken is death, and its fate after death is not directly expressed in your dream. If you replace the image of the chicken with a person, the story is a bit unrealistic. Does a person's self-transformation have to be Is it based on the death of the ego?" I hope Green further interprets his dream to gain a deeper understanding of the dream.

"Dreams have many entry points. In your dream, there are three main images of chickens, children, and parents. You only started from the chickens just now. If you start from children and parents, you will get different interpretations." I Point out the direction, but still hope that he can find new meaning from the new direction.He followed my direction and said: "If you start from the perspective of parents, children can interpret it as their lost precious things, and finally through their efforts, they finally achieve a state of reunion." "This dream can also be interpreted as an original child who was devoured by the mediocre crowd, and with the help of his guardian, escaped from the mediocre crowd and was reborn." Green's explanation just shows that he your current mental state.He had been treated by a psychiatrist for 3 years, but he felt that it was fruitless.Later, during the psychotherapy, the two had only chatting.After he was transferred to me, and after only a few interviews, he felt he had an epiphany experience in his state of mind.He told me that he had recently been undergoing radical changes, so it was not surprising that his interpretation of his dreams emphasized rebirth.Green was obviously satisfied with his own interpretation of this strange dream, but he was also curiously waiting for a different interpretation from me.

"Do you think there is any other possibility of explaining the dream?" "I suppose there is, but I don't see it." "I found that in your free association with chickens just now, there is a very common symbolic meaning about chickens, which you didn't mention." I wonder why Green didn't think of the association between chickens and prostitutes.After I kept asking, Green still didn't respond. Finally, when I said the meaning, he was surprised that the chicken had such a symbolic meaning.Associating chickens with prostitutes is not a Chinese invention. In English slang, chickens have the meaning of prostitutes.Although Green is surprised that he doesn't know the meaning of the chicken, according to Jung's theory of the collective unconscious, this imagery should have a wide potential influence.

If the chicken is regarded as a prostitute or a symbol of sex, then the child can be interpreted as a man's penis.The image of the child being devoured by the chicken is clearly a sexual image, while the image of the parents rescuing the child from the chicken can be a sexual transcendence of the ego.Green had many girlfriends, and he had no shortage of sexual relationships, but he was never able to enter into an overall harmonious relationship with women that went beyond sexual relationships.He said a certain part of his psyche had been cut off, and he was struggling to regain a sense of wholeness about himself, and naturally, temporarily cutting off sexual relations created time and space for the self to reintegrate.This interpretation of mine was accepted by Greene, and in another of his dreams the sexual paradox was further elucidated.

Green's second dream went like this: He went to the house of a woman who was having sex with many men.He walked over and pulled the woman away from the men, and they had skin-to-skin contact in the darkness of another room, but no sex.Just then, the woman's husband came back, and the woman pushed him out of the window, where they were still inseparable. I asked Green how he felt when he was dreaming, and he said he just felt cold and indifferent.But after waking up from the dream, he had a strong emotional reaction to the dream.Green confessed that the dream was actually a replica of a relationship he had 10 years ago.

"That girl is a girl who fascinates and distresses me. Her husband is an alcoholic who usually beats her, abuses her, asks her for money, and even forces her into prostitution to make money. And that girl is indeed with many men Go to bed. When Green met this girl, he was overwhelmed by the girl's beauty and fell in love with her deeply. However, the girl only regarded Green as one of her many boyfriends, and Green tried his best Tried to save the girl from the fire, but he completely failed in the end. When the girl and his alcoholic husband moved to another city, they lost contact. Obviously, the girl did not want to remain in a relationship with him. In the past In the past 10 years, Green has been in love many times, but the image of that girl has always lingered in his mind. When Green had the above dream, he immediately realized that it was about his relationship 10 years ago dream.

When dreams are strikingly similar to reality, there seems to be little explanation for such dreams.But dreams always have their special meaning. We can ask, why does Green re-fry the same thing now?Intuitively speaking, that bowl of cold rice has a special taste that cannot be replaced by other rice.Asking further, what is it that makes that bowl of cold rice have a special taste? Green's dream shows that he had an unfinished love affair 10 years ago, and the reason why that love affair haunts Green must have its internal reasons.Shortly after I began psychotherapy with Green, I discovered that his childhood family relationships were the source of many of his later psychological problems.

Green's parents were at odds.His father had an extramarital girlfriend, his mother was very cowardly, and his father was very domineering.Green often stood up for his mother, and from a very young age, he often stood up to help his mother against his father.Although her mother has the support of her son, she deceives Green in many things, which makes Green feel betrayed by her mother.I analyzed Green, according to the theory of psychoanalysis, this is a very classic Oedipus complex.The son falls in love with his mother and fights against his father, but castration anxiety is inevitable.

In the triangular relationship between Green and his parents, the "betrayal" of the mother, the "threat of castration" of the father, and the objective impossibility of combining with the mother constitute the conflict that Green cannot resolve in his heart.When he met the girl mentioned above, he was attracted by her beauty on the surface, and tried to help the girl build up her self-confidence, get rid of a life without self-esteem, and finally combine with him.But its subconscious meaning is just that: trying to help his mother build self-confidence, get rid of a life without self-esteem, and finally combine with him.When Green failed to help the girl in real life, his inner conflict became an unresolved heart disease. At the beginning, when I bluntly pointed out Green's "Oedipus complex", it was a shock to Green.Green told me that he actually had doubts about whether he had an "Oedipus complex," but he denied it as soon as the idea came up.He accepted my analysis and promised to think about it.In fact, my analysis of Green's "Oedipus complex" became a turning point in his later psychological transformation.