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Layers of Fear, Levels of Love 75
the real solution that only the deepest kind of human warmth and love can provide. She was now willing to face the infant’s awful feeling of separation from parents—and was humbled, confused and lost. This was the point to which we had come in this current session—a session in which the therapeutic work of two years was recapitulated as we moved from Oedipal, to anal and now oral defensive positions.
A.T.’s first awareness of her oral conflict came by way of recognizing how her intellectual defenses constricted consciousness. “You know, my dancer friends, even people on the trip, talk about another kind of reality that seems so foreign to me. When people talk like this I feel left out. One evening on the raft trip, I had a long conversation with a lady who told me how she re-experienced her birth and a new awareness of early memories after taking psychedelic drugs. She felt more open to life afterwards.
“I know that’s not for me, but I wonder if it’s really possible to have such a powerfully meaningful experience that can change attitudes about reality. Why don’t I have these insights and experiences that bring deep meaning?
“My dance friends and others speak of chakras, centers of energy that they feel in the body; it sounds like Greek to me. Yet some of this must be real; everyone can’t be just imagining this— these are productive and creative people. Why can’t I see it? Why am I stuck in this intellectual, rational way of being?”
She fell silent. Her body posture weakened; she no longer had the look of confidence in her eyes. During this interview, she had gone from talking intellectually about her trip . . . to expressing Oedipal feelings and looking for my approval when recounting the story about her appreciative friends . . . to guarding herself against an anal feeling of loss of control . . . to an experience of oral deprivation in which she felt a deep sense of separateness from others: “What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I feel closeness and contact with you— why am I different from everyone else?”
Rather than intellectually talking herself out of this feeling, A.T. settled into it. I knew that if she allowed herself openness to this pain she would also open to the kind of human warmth and love that could resolve it. As long as she had to block awareness of this helplessness and separateness from an insufficiency of nurturing, she would also limit her ability to experience the full innocence and openness of the young child and her ability to receive the full power of nurturing love as well.