Gabriel Analyzed

"I want to talk about my dream last night," Gabriel started.

"Sounds good," his psychoanalyst responded.

"I was living in an apartment, one different from mine. It was very bare. The walls were almost stripped. There were dead flowers near the window. I'm not quite sure what kind of flowers they were. They started to grow, incredibly long. From the stalks of the flowers came these black, poisonous snakes. I thought they were asps although I've never seen an asp. One short asp bit me. I feel asleep with thousands of asps. I felt incredibly erotic.

Apartment -- body. lifeless, and old and dying. My body.
Dead Flowers -- dead women, especially beautiful, thin women.
The flowers growing incredibly long -- the sexuality of these women overflowing?
Black poisonous asps -- purely sexual beings, natural women.
One asp bit me -- a woman is giving me life again?"

"Are those your associations?" she asked.

"Yes, but what does the dream have to do with me? I lead a rather dull life as the owner of a grocery store. I have a few friends and a prostitute girlfriend if you can call her that. Why did I have such a dream?"

"Let's start with the apartment. Describe it more fully. The walls are stripped bare. It's decaying and getting old. Describe the full apartment."

"The floor is hardfloor. The walls are white, but the paint is being gnawed at by age. There are yellow stains here and there. It's incredibly cold in the apartment. There's a futon in the corner. It's a very sterile and lifeless atmosphere like in a T.S. Eliot poem or Last Tango in Paris."

"That represents your current condition?" she asked.
"I don't really know," Gabriel looked away from her, "My life is not very meaningful. I feel that I'm not really putting all my efforts into what I am doing. My mind always seems to be somewhere else... in fantasies or something."

"Are you fucking with me or are you being truthful?" she asked, smiling.

"I wouldn't do that to you. I'm being truthful. I just don't understand how Freud is really relevant in modern life. Nothing is repressed anymore. You can satisfy all your desires through pornography, you can almost have anything you want through fantasies. What sublime social goals do we have anymore? The culture has been broken into subgroups. Even within subgroups, there are sub-subgroups. What's the point of creating or doing anything?"

"Gabriel... you're saying no to life. It's funny that you would say no to life."

"I'm not saying no. I'm just saying that I just don't care."

"So you find life in watching Hollywood stars and starlets on the big screen and you fantasize about relationships with them?"
she asked.

"You are so cruel. I'm more ethical than that. Maybe my death instinct and my sex instinct are trying to balance themselves out. Either way, what am I repressing? Anyway, so you think all these dead flowers and asps represent Hollywood starlets or actresses, that I find life on the big screen, my erotic sexual life somehow. Well, that's very amusing. It's somewhat true, but it just makes me feel so guilty somehow. It's just so hard these days to find really, nourishing and life-affirming and ethical nourishment."

"Well at least you're trying."

"I don't know. This isn't how things ought to be... you're right. I've given up, but what's the point of fighting something that has a hundred heads? It never ends. I'm sorry for troubling you with my problems. How has your week been?"

"It's been good. I've been thinking about repetition compulsion and its relationship to "thanatos." "

"Repetition compulsion is a bad habit, like masturbation. The trauma is never healed... it's simply transformed into a sublime or not so sublime cause."

"Gabriel, you may be right..."