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Snakes figure largely in the delusions, fears and dreams of Lac-can, often pointing to previous sexual abuse e.g. ‘snakes in and around her.’ Athough related to all the snake remedies, Lac-can’s closest relationship is with Lachesis.
Their similarities are too numerous to detail here, as are those existing between Lac-can and Lycopodium, significantly known as Wolf ’s Foot or Claw. The wolf and the dog are hierarchical animals that observe the rituals of dominance and submission. In the corporate world, Lycopodiums can play out these hierarchical rituals in a sophisticated parody of wolf behaviour.
Both Lac-can and Lycopodium can flatter and act the obsequious minion with their superiors, and then arrogantly play the petty tyrant with their subordinates. ‘Fear of dogs’ is a rubric which reveals other important relationships of Lac-can, most of which have already been mentioned, but in addition China, Causticum, Pulsatilla, and Tuberculinum must be particularly noted.
Finally, the extreme duality, lack of confidence, violent anger, and anti-social potential of Anacardium must always be differentially compared with Lac-can.
Lac-can is a remedy of indispensable value to the practitioner of depth homeopathy. The ancients quite rightly understood the dog to be guardian of the underworld, guide of souls from one realm to another, and the intermediary between different levels of consciousness. When a patient’s emotions and feelings are deeply repressed, when dreams have ceased or never been, when the personal shadow is heavily burdened with unresolved, unrealised, and undeveloped aspects of the soul, when the false-self holds sway, it is often the dog that leads the physician into the deepest realms of the unconscious and releases the pains of the past through the myths of dream and delusion.
Lac-can can rescue the wounded child in the depressed adult. When in doubt, give Sulphur we are taught, but more often, when we stand at the crossroads of dilemma and decision, in the presence of a complex, emotional state due to past or present trauma, a severely repressed state, a paucity of symptoms, a picture simulating various polychrests, or a constitution reflecting multimiasmatic influences, Lac-can is often the remedy, which true to its canine nature, will open up the case and guide you out of the darkness into the light.
© David Lilley 2006
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