version.THERAPY

Max dreams that he is neurons, passing chemicals across synaptic chasms like a frenzied trade in leaps of faith. Max dreams that he is an egg-shaped field of energy. Max dreams that he is an infection. Max dreams that he is the fingertip of a god, tracing patterns on the surface of a pool of matter from outside time. Max dreams that he is dreaming. Then he wakes up and begins dreaming that he is Max.

JOURNAL EXCERPT: DR. SUSAN LONGFELLOW

Max has been taking part in counseling with me for XX weeks. We meet regularly to discuss his issues with sadness, his inability to find satisfying work or engage in romantic relationships, and his recurring uncertainty regarding identity questions. Max is intelligent and articulate when he speaks with me; he demonstrates a clear understanding of the complexities of his problems, as well as a willingness to share information, explore options, and to create and carry out action plans. Max reports that he finds our sessions useful and while he tends to intellectualize his problems, he has shown little resistance to speaking about them. However, he has yet to make any significant progress in resolving his issues. I plan to continue encouraging Max to try and become aware of the unconscious, possibly repressed, forces that underlie his behaviour so that he might achieve his goals of contentment, satisfaction and a sense of wholeness (Corey & Corey, 2003).

 

JOURNAL EXCERPT: MAX CUBE

It’s raining inside me. And there’s thunder and sometimes lightning. Do normal people always walk in mud like this? I think other people might sometimes feel like sunshine. Or clean. When I talk with Susan, it’s like I step outside the storm, like her gentle questions and suggestions are the wingbeats that calm the hurricane rather than cause it. I know that when I think I’m falling in love with her that it is only transference. Her willingness to listen to me is not love, but it is what I imagine love might be like. It feels good telling the stories, hearing them make sense, analyzing my habits and patterns, each session each week like an episode of a hit show, each week a new mystery solved. And when I’m working on the action plans – writing down my thoughts when I think about asking a girl out, making wish lists for an ideal career – it feels like I’m on a mission. Purposeful. But then it starts to rain again, or I remember that it is raining, forget the stories or the clues to the mystery or the answer to the question.

REPORT: META-STATION 12, CODE OMEGA. TARGET MAX CUBE.

We are planning to escalate the experiment past fiction parameters into science fiction parameters for intensified informational cross-pollination. Max’s designated initial conditions will be subjected to Initiatory Class stimuli via agents uploaded with the following Consciousness Models and para- and supra-normal capabilities as necessary:

Trance Theory (Crabtree 1997) – Agent O’Connor.
Constructivism (Hollan, 2000) – Agent Welland.

Shamanism (Sanchez, 1995) – Agent Estabar.

Neuroscience (Norretranders, 1999) – Agent Leung.

Bodywork (Allen, n.d.) – Agent Masters. 

Magick (Hine, 1995, Morrison, 2003) – Agent Sarvanadan.

Memetics (Blackmore, 1999) – Agent Berkshire.

Meta-Station 12 deploying agents.

Max is sitting in the cafe when the lights suddenly go dim and the sound of the conversations around him fade. A man is sitting across from him, looking at him. Agent O’Connor. 

“What is going-?” Max starts. 

“You are in a trance, Max. Your awareness of the environment has been abstracted and your absorption in my presence has been intensified. Don’t worry, it’s perfectly natural.” 

Max blinks. “I want out. Get me out of it.” 

O’Connor smiles. “There is no ‘out of trance’, Max. There is only moving between trances. It is why nothing seems to be changing for you, while it is nevertheless constantly changing.” 

Max takes a deep breath, like Susan taught him. The man continues. “You feel good when you’re with her because of the specifics of your relational trance; you feel good when you’re making your lists because you are engaged in the situational trance. You are always moving between trances, always ignoring and focusing on different aspects of the world. So you can always return to the inner-mind trance where you feel sad, no matter where else you’ve been. You won’t find the peace of the sessions outside the sessions because they are distinct trances.” 

“Then what… How can I-?” 

“Trance Zero, Max. Have faith in your Ultimate Self, that part of you beyond each trance that remains you as you shift between them. Your therapy can remain a useful trance, that may lead to an understanding of the other trances that you experience, but it will always be limited. Awareness implies limitation. Only the Ultimate Self is limitless and only Trance Zero, the trust in that Self to guide you through the necessary trances of your life, will make you feel whole.” 

Max blinks again. The sounds and lights of the café return, the man is gone, the coffee mug in Max’s hand is now cool to the touch, he has a craving for a cigarette. He can no longer remember exactly what it was the man was talking about (Crabtree, 1997) .

“Where’s Susan?” Max is standing in the office, the warm browns of the wood-paneled walls, the soft lines of the comfortable furniture. The woman at Susan’s desk looks vaguely familiar. “I’m Dr. Welland,” she says. “I’m Susan’s supervisor.” 

Max scratches his nose. “I was hoping that Susan was… Well, I’ve had a bit of an odd day.” 

“Max, listen. I am aware of your circumstances. I’ve read your file.” 

“But, I never gave…” 

“I have an ethical obligation to inform you that I believe Susan’s approach with you is faulty.” 

Max frowns. “No, she’s doing a great job.” 

Dr. Welland smiles gently and stands. “Max, you know that you have made little overall progress. And I’m sure you realize that your feelings about Susan aren’t exactly objective…” Max looks down. “She has been promising you something that she cannot deliver. Something no one could. There is not a clear, cohesive self waiting at the end of your journey once you accept the parts of you that have been pushed into your unconscious. It doesn’t work that way. Your self is something that rises from your unconscious, moment to moment, situation to situation. It is a process, it is contextual. It is shaped by language, by culture, by the people you interact with, over time. You can never come to a full understanding of your self.” 

Dr. Welland sits casually on the edge of the desk and continues, “And Susan can never properly understand your processes sitting here in this room with you once a week. Because you change as you move throughout your life, and even the versions you remember and recount here in this office are already only that: versions. Versions of versions.” 

Max shakes his head slightly. “I think I’d better go,” he says (Hollan, 2000).

Max goes home and curls up on his bed and tries to cry, but when he thinks about the reasons why he wants to cry, what it is he wants to cry about, he can’t.

REPORT: META-STATION 12, CODE OMEGA. TARGET MAX CUBE.

Agent Estabar has requested an auto-induction of Inner Silence for the target via forced cessation of his Inner Dialogue, in order to temporarily extract him from awareness of the ‘tonal’ – the limited, rational description of reality – and introduce him to experience of the ‘nagual’ – the transcendental world beyond language in which we are aware of ourselves as fields of energy, as beings who are dreaming, and as beings who will die.

Meta-Station 12 uplinking with Max Cube’s consciousness… (I just want to feel normal and I want things to make sense and I want to feel safe and I want to be understood and I want to feel clean and I want to stop feeling this way and I want to understand what I want and I want her to like me and)

Meta-Station 12 auto-inducing Inner Silence.

JOURNAL EXCERPT: MAX CUBE

That was… I don’t know. I can’t describe it. Description. It’s like I can see now that it’s all description. All I’m doing every time I go see her is describing things, telling stories. Even writing this… It’s all my ego, reality filtered through my ego. All my efforts to analyze and understand my behaviour are, in the end, explanations and justifications. Fictions upholding a fiction. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Self-importance. Every hour I sit there in therapy I am enforcing the very description of the world that I am trying to escape, indulging in the ego that imprisons me. Even trying to change the way I think about women, about work, it’s only more description. Oh Susan, how were we so wrong? I’m feeding your description by being there, confirming the story that you’re telling yourself, that you’re a therapist, that you’re helping people. Is that all we are? It can’t be all we are… (Sanchez, 1995).

 

Susan gently asks Max if there is anything troubling him. She has noticed that he is more quiet than usual. Max remains quiet for a time. Susan feels slightly uncomfortable, but she tries to let Max sit quietly. Eventually, perhaps reluctantly, Max tells her about a man he met on the bus. Mr. Leung. 

“And he said the fact that the readiness potential, the change in the electrical field in the brain, that it precedes our conscious decision to act… Well, it means we have have no free will. Because, if I understood him, because it shows that the brain has already decided what action to take before we think we decided to take it. It’s been proved, measured, studied. It’s science. Leung said that what we are conscious of is only the detritus of our brain’s information processing, a simulation resulting from the consolidation of all the data the brain takes in via the senses and responds to. We only think we choose how to act in the world, when really we are living a half-second behind reality, the time it takes for the brain to output the simulation to consciousness. The illusion of our self convinces us that we are in control. It is a fallacy to think that our consciousness can ever fully understand our unconscious, or even be aware of it. He said the science proves it. 

“He said therapy was at best a means for accepting the facts of our unconscious and the decisions it makes. That we cannot choose what decisions get made. You tell me that I can choose how I want to behave with women I’m attracted to. You tell me that I can choose what type of job I want. You tell me that I am in control of how I feel. But if Mr. Leung is right…” 

Max asks Susan if science is true, or if it is another story we tell ourselves. Susan pauses, then asks Max what he thinks. Max sits quietly (Norretranders, 1999).

He tries crying again at home in bed. And ends up thinking again. He is sad, terribly sad, about all of his confusion and his doubts, and about what has been happening with his therapy, but he is not crying.

Agent Masters enters his room, softly and quietly. She sits on the edge of his bed and slowly reaches out, touches his jaw at the neck. He has told Susan about the recurring ache he feels there. “It is so busy in here,” the woman says, pointing with her other hand at his forehead, “but that is not where the problem is. That is not where you are.” And she presses on his jaw, precise and strong, and there is something like an explosion under water, and he starts to cry (Allen, n.d.).

Max stumbles into the alleyway, grunts, tears welling in his eyes. Ragged steps forward, ragged breathing. He trips, scraping against the stained pavement. Agent Sarvanadan stands over him.

“Oh god,” Max whispers, “it feels like my thoughts are bleeding…What is wrong with me?” 

She kneels down beside him. “There is nothing wrong. It is only the demon Choronzon, come to devour your Egoic Self.” 

Max whimpers. “I can’t think straight, I can’t stop thinking, everything I think is wrong… I’m having a nervous breakdown.” 

“No, Max”, says Sarvanadan, “you are crossing the Abyss. This is the path to true magicianhood, where you transcend the limits of the Self that you have constructed to survive. It only hurts because you have grown attached to the thing you mistakenly believe is you.” 

Max curls into a fetal position on the hard ground. “I can’t, I can’t do this.” 

The woman looks down at him with sympathy. “Okay, it’s okay. Max, I want you to visualize four pentagrams surrounding yourself in space. Chant the mantra IEAOU as you imagine them lighting up in the darkness behind your eyelids…” 

Later, at the café, Max sits with the woman. “I feel better. Clearer.” 

“It was a simple banishing ritual,” she explains. Max sips his coffee. 

“I should visit Susan, tell her about what happened.”

Sarvanadan sighs. “Max, that won’t help. Not really. You should know that by now.” 

Max rubs his jaw. “Then what?” 

“Magick, Max. If you want to change things, you need to make magick.” 

Max takes another sip of coffee. “Alright… How?” 

Sarvanadan passes Max a pen and instructs him to write down a desire on a napkin. 

I WANT TO BE HEALED. 

She instructs him to cross out the vowels, then any repeating letters. 

WNTBHLD 

“Now transform the remaining letters into a visual image.”

“Max, you have made your statement of intent, then compressed it down into a sigil, abstracting it from your rational mind. Now we will launch it.” 

Sarvanadan stands up and draws a gun, pointing it at Max. He freezes, eyes wide in terror. “Look at the image or I’ll blow your fucking brains out!” 

Max blinks and obeys. And the fear shuts down his logical, analytical consciousness, where he has been conditioned to believe that magic does not work, and implants the sigil into the raw potential of his unconscious, beyond the limits of belief and rationality and language and even desire. The spell is cast. 

Max is shaking. She crumples up the napkin and leaves. He breathes slowly and deeply, like Susan taught him, forgetting about what he wrote, what exactly the strange woman talked about (Hine, 1995, Morrison 2003).

JOURNAL EXCERPT: DR. SUSAN LONGFELLOW

That was difficult. When Max and I began our session today I suddenly had the urge to confront him about his transference of romantic feelings onto me. Perhaps I was hoping to help him become more conscious of the way he relates to women, to help him become more aware of his unconscious patterns. I gently brought up the subject, and Max immediately responded, “That’s not the real problem. The real problem here is that I am not real.” He went on, calmly, to explain that a man named Berkshire had given him some materials to read about memetics. Max said he learned that what he thought of as himself was merely a collection of memes – thoughts, ideas, and behaviours passed between biological organisms through imitation. Memes, like genes, are neutral, seeking only to propagate and replicate. What we think of as our ‘self’ is only the complex of interacting memes that have successfully nested in our brains. Max’s sadness, his behaviour with women, his ideas about work, are the memes that have infected his mind. They are no better or worse than any other memeplex, and would only change if other, more fit (in the Darwinian sense) memes happened to be copied into his organism.

I didn’t know what to say. Sitting there, watching his downcast eyes, his slumped shoulders, I suddenly felt a wave of affection for him. I imagined crossing over to him and holding him. Counter-transference, I know.

Instead, I reminded Max of our first session, when I explained to him that should I ever feel like I was unable to effectively continue helping him I would be obligated to terminate our relationship, and refer him to another counselor if he wished. Max said that enacting the meme of visiting with me made him feel good, and if it was recurring then it was clearly a fit meme. I cautioned him about dependency. He began talking about trances, and demons, and about sigils and a pain in his jaw.

Then suddenly he stood up and left.

I felt like crying (Corey & Corey, 2003, Blackmore, 1999).

 

REPORT: META-STATION 12, OMEGA CODE. INTRA-AGENCY COMM.

     One of the Agents assigned to the Max Cube experiment met with the Director of Operations today to discuss the status of the op. They expressed uncertainty about the goal of the experiment and concern regarding the effects on the target. They detected a possible implicate order to the multiple Models being employed by the Agents – involving the limitations of consciousness and the resulting implications for psychoanalytic therapy – but felt that the delivery and experience of the various Models was too fragmented, chaotic and often contradictory for the effects to be clear. 

      The Director noted that the Agent was obviously experiencing feedback from the mission paralleling the target’s experiences regarding his identity. 

     The Agent was reminded by the Director that there is no clear and cohesive goal to the experiment. That Omega Code may have access to higher comprehension but that clearance was currently unavailable. 

     And that there is no final thesis to be proved.

Susan never saw Max again.

References

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www.phoenixcentre.com/bodywork/index.htm

Blackmore, S. (1999, March). Meme, Myself, and I. New Scientist, Volume 161

Issue 2177, 40-44.

Carroll, Peter J. (1992). Liber Kaos. York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, Inc.

Corey, M. & Corey, G. (2003). Becoming a Helper. Pacific Grove, California:

Brooks/Cole.

Crabtree, Adam (1997). Trance Zero. Toronto, Ontario: Somerville House

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Gurman, A.S. & Messer, S.B. (Ed.). (1995) Essential Psychotherapies. New York,

New York: The Guilford Press.

Hine, Phil (1995). Condensed Chaos. Temple, Arizona: New Falcon Publications.

Hollan, Douglas (2000). Constructivist Models of the Mind, Contemporary

Psychoanalysis, and the Development of Culture Theory. American Anthropologist, Volume 102 Issue 3, 538-550. Retrieved November 2004, from ProQuest Science Journals.

Morrison, G. (2003) Pop Magic! In Book of Lies, Metzger R. (Ed.) New York,

New York: The Disinformation Compnay Ltd.

Norretranders, Tor (1999). The User Illusion. New York, New York: Penguin

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Sanchez, Victor (1995). The Teachings of Don Carlos. Santa Fe, New Mexico:

Bear & Compnay Publishing.