PSYCHIATRISTS ARE TO MANUAL LABORERS AS THIS IS TO THAT.

This blog of mine is still a work in progress.

I wanted to tell my story about how I went from being a shy, sleepwalking, blind idiot to what I am now -- a (fill in the blank here). I don't want to fill in the blank myself for two reasons.

One, because it would look like I am full of myself -- which I might be, but I don't want to appear that way. Remember what I said about people not caring if you know they are stealing from you or lying to you, as long as you don't call them thieves or liars? Same holds true for braggarts. We can brag, but we don't want anyone telling us we be one.

And two, I might not be seeing myself with unbiased eyes.

I tried to find what episode I am on this journey from what I was to what I am now, and I realized two things. One, the titles I put up are in no way related to the subject matter of the particular blog, entered strictly for cutesie-pie purposes, and two, I needed to number them so I can relate which blog I am talking about. So from now on, the titles will relate to the subject matter and the Blogs will be numbered. Hallelujah!

So where were we..? Oh, yes, in Blog number 10, I related my hitch-hiking from Estherville Iowa to LA a few days before Christmas, 1974. In Blog number 11, I related flunking out of the Police Academy in LA and enrolling in Junior College for the purpose of taking a class in Psychology in order to find out what was wrong with me, if anything. Here I found Sigmund Freud.

In the late sixties I had a dream where I was in a cavern. In this cavern were large blocks of concrete about twenty feet cubed. The concrete cubes were standing in deep running water. I was standing on one of the cubes, looking for a way out. Pretty bleak scene.

I started jumping from one block to another, searching for an opening. Eventually I saw a bright light -- an opening, made a running leap for it, dove head first, and woke up.

I couldn't get that dream out of my mind. I talked about it, trying to get someone to tell me what it was all about. I tried to make a painting of it, couldn't get it right. That thing was on my mind constantly. I have had many dreams before this one. I never, ever, kept one on my mind before for more than a few hours. I could accept recurring dreams -- even nightmare recurring dreams without ever being obsessed with them as I was with this one. One of the puzzling things about it was that it was such an innocuous dream. Why was it preying on my mind so? Do you know? I don't think so.

I remembered from my college class that Freud wrote a book about dreams. Maybe I could find something in there. I was going to college in Sacramento at that time, so I went to the college library and searched for any of Freud's books pertaining to dreams. The book entitled, "Interpretations of Dreams" was checked out. Now what? I thumbed through a few of his other books, hoping that one of them might have something about interpreting dreams in them. I picked up "Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis" and was immediately hooked. That book had magic in it!

I eventually read all of Freud's books. One thing I discovered over the years was that anyone who ever criticized any of Freud's writings had never read any of his stuff. What they had read was something someone else had written about him. I have found this same phenomenon whenever I have run across any criticism of a "humanity-helping" person. The criticisers never have any personal relationship with the person's works. Their knowledge of their expertise is garnered from gossip by discontents. Go figure.

Yeah, I know - I may be grouping everyone in with most everyone, but this IS MY Blog! I got axes to grind.

I worked in an office with a secretary -- not mine. I got her interested in Freud and she started reading him. We talked about him and one day she told me a dream she had had about her sister, who was living with her. I interpreted the dream very hesitantly because it involved her sister leaving her house, which I thought might upset the secretary -- my saying that, but instead, she recognized it. My first bit of doing psychoanalysis. A success.

The thing about Freud's dream thing is that he claimed that when we dream, often it is our unconscious telling our consciousness what is really true about what is going on with us.

The interpretation of her dream was obvious to me because I had no stake in its revelations. She, however, was hiding from herself the idea that she wanted her sister out of her home and hearth. Thus the dream.

I just now thought of this, but when Iwas undertaking psychoanalysis for that year or two, six days a week, not once did I ever mention that fateful dream of mine to Dr. Burke. That seems pretty weird to me now. Also weird is that I never realized that fact until just this moment.

My wife, Teresa, was at this time, in graduate school for Social Work and she was doing an internship at a halfway house for the mentally impaired. One night there was a party at that house -- for the inhabitants, the Social Workers, and whoever else wanted to come. I was one of the latter. At this party was the resident psychiatrist, who happened to be a Freudian who had been psychoanalyzed by an English Jewish doctor by the name of Dr. Burke.

I was a real kook in those days, unbeknownst to me, and my wife was looking for someone to talk over this problem of hers -- me. This psychiatrist at the party told her about Dr. Burke.

As an aside, years later this same psychiatrist was my wife's supervisor and boss when she worked in the prison at Vacaville, CA.

She started going to Dr. Burke. I was envious. I wanted to go 'cause I wanted to learn how to do psychoanalysis. Fortunately, two things dovetailed. Dr. Burke was one of those special saints God sometimes gives us so that we don't lose all hope and he made his fees very acceptable to us poor people. Also, I was in the Air Force and part of his fee would be covered by the Air force. We got by cheap, let me tell you. I got to go learn how to do psychoanalysis. I was in hog heaven.

I once went to a counselor at Sac State (Dr. Burke had left for England - pissed at the U.S., you know. Cheated him out of a lot of money.) I was telling the counselor about Burke and I mentioned that Dr. Burke never charged for the initial interview and the counselor said, "Everyone charges for the initial interview," and at the same time we both said, "but not Dr. Burke." Hah!

So that's how I met my first life-changing happenstance.