The Psychic Warrior: Mr Jones is hiding something

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The first four slides begin with a somewhat remote psychotherapist musing that the patient ‘may be hiding something’. The therapist urges the patient, Mr Jones, to reveal what it is that’s hidden. The patient is wearing a large overcoat as if something may well be hidden concretely underneath or within. The patient is prodded by the therapist in a way that in ordinary practice would be quite unacceptable but for the sake of the cartoon makes the point that the patient is perhaps resistant to revealing what it is that they have hidden and requiring some pressure from the therapist to open up.  

Finally Mr Jones, the patient, opens his overcoat to reveal his mother upon whom he gazes with loving eyes with hearts popping out from his head towards her. The therapist muses ‘ah yes, your mother’ as if he had expected this all along. I think this series shows something of the early experience and an experience of exposure that continues through a therapy of a process of exploration and exposure. Psychoanalytic psychotherapy does involve the uncovering of hidden relationships not so concretely that a patient carries their mother around under their overcoat but they may well carry an aspect of that relationship around inside of themselves symbolically which they don’t want to reveal. When something is revealed, something that’s been hidden, this may be shaming for the patient.