A few months later I thought it time to end therapy - I thought we had talked about my life sufficiently, and I assumed it was healthy that I assert myself. But Dr. Edberg thought it was a bad idea and suggested I stay because our "work" wasn't finished - he even suggested I come twice a week. I knew from experience that twice a week therapy was helpful for many patients--why wouldn't it be helpful to me? Yet, I had no desire to come a second time - even after all the time we had spent together. Still, how could I end therapy when Dr. Edberg was suggesting I needed to come more often? Dr. Edberg seemed to have no better sense of who I was and what I needed than when we started. Still, one could attribute my dissatisfaction to "transference," the resurrection of familiar childhood feelings. Perhaps he knew me better than I knew myself - wasn't he the expert? Wasn't that why I had gone to him in the first place? 

Soon I had another dream.

I was working my own farm in Germany, a peaceful bucolic place, when suddenly I realized a foreign army was coming. "Go!" I yelled to everyone on the farm, and I watched the women and children flee through the fields and into the woods. Soldiers with rifles arrived, and quickly I was captured. A soldier attached me to a pitchfork in the middle of the farmyard and soldiers stood and watched as the pitchfork rotated in circles. Somehow, I managed to free myself when they weren't watching. But they saw me and chased me toward the farmhouse. I ran desperately - a soldier was close behind - suddenly I saw a wire fence on the edge of the yard. There, a sympathetic woman teacher stood on the other side of the boundary. "I'm an American, " I yelled. She helped me across. I woke up in tears, with my heart pounding.

Dr. Edberg and I talked briefly about the dream. It didn't make sense to me at the time - it felt like a Holocaust/pogrom dream, and yet I was a German (part of my heritage is German Jew), and a foreign army was invading my land. Was the pitchfork a cross? Why was I being martyred? We were not able to shed much light on it. But I understand it now.

Dreams serve a problem solving function, and the particular problem I was working on was my relationship with Dr. Edberg. Part of me knew I was being tortured by him, and that I had to escape - even if intellectually I thought there was still hope for the therapy. And I trusted that if I escaped, my wife (the professor), like many of my teachers in the past, would give me refuge. The dream represented the story of my therapy (and, in some ways, my life) in symbols that were familiar to me.

I had the dream because I was beginning to sense the true nature of my relationship with Dr Edberg. A few months after we spoke about the dream, I left Dr. Edberg's office, without his blessing, for the last time.

About the author: Dr. Grossman is a clinical psychologist and author of the Voicelessness and Emotional Survival web site.

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