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The sweat I was shedding in the sauna wasn't all
my own. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was getting steamed up by someone else's
anger. An emotional fantasy had seeped into my meditation: I was telling off my dentist
and handing him a summons to a malpractice suit! My temperature reached the boiling point
and I came out of the fantasy and the sauna, too. I cooled off, patted down my rage enough
to sort through the embers for clues to what was burning. The dentist's hygenist had
talked me into taking a flouride rinse, and then billed me $40 for that bit of mouthwash.
I thought I had already worked through my anger feelings. What hadn't I addressed? I
realized that I was still angry about being a weak person that someone else could coerce.
I hadn't wanted to take the rinse, but the hygenist made me swallow my reluctance. Now it
was coming back up. But why such a volcano? Unexpectedly I thought of Mr. Johnston. A
former client, he had called recently for an appointment. I'd be seeing him that night.
Not making any connection, I shrugged it off with my shower.
That night, as Johnston sat on my couch, he told
me his tenant kept giving him the "check is in the mail" routine, but the
magistrate wouldn't let him evict the deadbeat. Also, a policeman gave him a ticket
unfairly for something his wife did, and his wife blamed him too. When he mumbled,
"no respect," I jolted. Here was a line right out of my sauna fantasy. Suddenly,
something I had been noticing subliminally bopped into my awareness. Johnston was laying
out his entire story without any emotion. Cool as a cucumber, he didn't even break a
sweat. I had done all the emoting for him in the sauna! Reclaiming my professional pose, I
helped Johnston reclaim his feelings while I reclined in my Lazy-Boy.
Afterwards I pondered my first lesson in the
psychic side of psychotherapy. The caution against taking on your client's problems must
consider the possibility of psychic proxy! The experience also gave me a deeper glimpse
into the potential we have for empathy with one another. Whether that empathy is by choice
or compulsion, I was learning, depends upon the extent of our own self-awareness.
When Judith Orloff, M.D. had a fantasy about one
of her clients committing suicide, she dismissed it as worry. When she later learned that
the client was in the hospital recovering from a suicide attempt, she vowed she would
never again ignore her psychic perceptions. In her book, Second Sight: The Personal Story
of a Psychiatrist Clairvoyant (Time Warner), she tells us the implications of that
decision.
A rebellious hippy in her youth with a touch of
recklessness, her parents sent Judy to a therapist. Here she was able to confide the
psychic experiences she'd had since youth. The therapist steered her toward Thelma Moss's
famed parapsychology laboratory at U.C.L.A., where she found comeraderie, insight, and the
decision to become a psychiatrist. Medical school training then pushed aside her intuition
until her patient's fateful suicide attempt forced Dr. Orloff to learn to intergrate the
psychic into psychiatry.
Imagine having a psychic for a psychiatrist! She'd
know all about you, including your wounded infancy, foresee your glorious future, and
describe the path you need to take to get there! Dr. Orloff certainly has those abilities
and she shares more of herself with her patients than we might expect of a psychiatrist.
But she doesn't want to do all the work. Her solution is to teach patients how to use
their own psychic ability. Here she leads psychoanalysis into the future!
Replacing unconsciousness by consciousness was the
original, defining affirmation of psychoanalysis. The use of dream interpretation and free
association uncovered the contents of the unconscious to the light of day. Dr. Orloff uses
this process to introduce the patient to psychic awareness. The unknown becomes the known,
and the patient advances to the next developmental task: accepting responsibility for
having all that awareness.
I'm oversimplifying a lot, but sharing the
essential innovation Dr. Orloff portrays in her book. The secret of Second Sight is that
psychic ability is not some strange appendage but a healthy expansion of awareness. It
comes from dropping the usual repressions that separate us from the rest of us. By the
"rest of us" I mean both our unconscious mind and our essential oneness and
connectedness with each other. The message of this clairvoyant psychiatrist's story is
that psychic ability is the consciousness of spirituality, the awareness of our shared
essence as spirit.
The responsibility that comes with that awareness
is expressed in the familiar "Know Thyself" and "Do unto others...."
Orloff shows that as we accept the psychic, we must know our own motivations more
thoroughly and set our ideals higher. What is unconscious in us can be activated
psychically by the thoughts and feelings of others. Second sight in the sauna taught this
unwittingly psychic counselor that very same lesson. What Dr. Orloff goes on to teach is
that learning about love makes it easier to get beyond the first lesson. But that's
another story.
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