The Psychic Warrior: Keeping abreast

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The next series of cartoons begin with the psychotherapist, The Psychic Warrior, sitting in bed struggling to understand his patient. Next to him is a teddy with glasses and beard looking somewhat like Sigmund Freud as if the therapist has his own transitional object to his psychoanalytic theories which go back to Freud. He is reading a journal called ‘Keeping Abreast’. The Psychic Warrior’s mother then comes into the room somewhat deflating our image of a heroic psychotherapist, telling him that he has got to turn his lights out and giving him his nightly milk and his hot water bottle. Perhaps somewhat timidly the therapist says to his mother ‘thank you mummy’ and asks her whether she will look under his bed for monsters as she usually does.

In the next cartoon we see the therapist asleep and having a dream where he is naked and he has on his head a mechanical device with a slide rule to which is attached a breast, which is at some distance from him as if it is a carrot that he is having to follow but which remains at something of a distance from him.  

These cartoons symbolise the process of striving to understand a patient’s problems using one’s intellect and reading. The therapist’s attachment to his own mother is symbolised concretely in him still living with her and her treating him like a little boy. The therapist’s dream symbolises the process of him being reminded of some aspects of his own experience, for example his own attachment to his mother represented in the dream by the pursuit of the milk giving breast.

There is perhaps an identification with his patient Mr Jones in realising that he too has something of an attachment issue with his own mother in which it has been difficult to separate from her. This difficulty separating from mother may be shown in the dream in which he has difficulty in letting go of the breast symbolising a feeding relationship with mother. This inability to let go or separate from mother is symbolised in mother giving him the milk still as a man who is evidently middle aged.  

There is an important point to do with what one can learn from reading and from understanding through using intellect and the limits of this.

The therapeutic value of being emotionally engaged is proportional to the capacity to reflect on and use one’s own emotional experience when anxiety surrounding a patient is high. This is emphasised in this illustration that reading and intellect need to be complemented through learning from experience, including our own experiences and dreams. This is learning from listening to the patient and what the patient evokes in us, not just what we read in textbooks or journals.