October 18th, 1981
Dream:
I am with my mother and father. We are in my grandmother’s house. They have been fighting. I am in the living room with my mother. I am sympathetic to her— consoling. I feel anxious and upset by this conflict. My father is in the bedroom. The door is closed. I am afraid to go in to him— yet I feel the need to placate. I am full of fear. He is lying across the bed in his underwear reading a book. He is aware that I noticed his erection. We talk. I attempt to soothe his anger toward my mother. He tells me that she has been having affairs with two men. They are loathsome types and I am repulsed by this information. Repulsed and dismayed that my mother had lied to me— and suddenly sympathetic to my father. I am all this while obsessed with his erection— using this conversation as a facade to be with him. Wanting something to happen. As I begin to leave, I kiss him goodbye. I embrace him passionately, hungrily, and he allows it. He puts his arms around me and I press my body against him— thrilled with disbelief he is allowing me to do this. I kiss him on the mouth and thrust my tongue into his— as I do this, he physically lifts me off the floor above his head as we continue to kiss and begins to turn round and round— to whirl me around. I am overwhelmed by his strength and power and awake reeling in erotic ecstasy.
My mother made me a companion in her victimization. She made me share her bitterness and unhappiness. My loyalty and sympathy for her was in direct conflict to my own emotional needs for my father. I was never allowed to accept my needs for my father— my love for him. These suppressed needs matured in force— and eventually became eroticized. My sexualized needs were for a strong powerful man— authoritative, domineering. Yet the guilt I felt of disloyalty toward my mother insisted that I could not love my mother and father at the same time. Expressing my needs for my father and my love for him— meant disloyalty and abandonment of my mother. So my feelings for my father were clothed in guilt- and in order to justify them— I had to be punished for their expression. Hence, these powerful emotions could only be handled within a masochistic scenario. I learned from my mother that my father was a powerful, unloving cruel man. My sexuality demanded a powerful unloving cruel man to play that role.
My identification with my mother was enormous. I learned early her sense of lovelessness— abandonment— hopelessness.
