ior. This method is widely used in analyzing dreams, neurotic symptoms, behavior, and even seemingly trivial everyday actions, such as slips of the tongue or other small errors, Freud’sFehlleistungen (Freud 1960a). Another area in which interpretations are commonly applied is interpersonal dynamics, including transference of various unconscious feelings and attitudes on the therapist. Therapists spend much effort trying to determine what is the most fitting interpretation in a given situation and what is the appropriate timing of this interpretation. Even an interpretation that is “correct” in terms of its content can allegedly be useless or harmful for the patient if it is offered prematurely, before the client is ready for it. A serious flaw of this approach to psychotherapy is that individual therapists, especially those who belong to diverse schools, attribute very different value to the same psychological content or behavior and offer for it diverse and even contradictory interpretations. I will illustrate this by a humorous example from my own psychoanalytic training. As a beginning psychiatrist, I was in training analysis that involved three sessions a week for a period of over seven years; my analyst was the Nestor of Czechoslovakian psychoanalysis and president of the Czechoslovakian Psychoanalytic Association, Dr. Theodor Dosužkov. At the time of my analysis, Dr. Dosužkov was in his late sixties and it was known among his analysands – all young psychiatrists – that he had a tendency to occasionally doze-off during analytic hours. Dr. Dosužkov’s habit was a favorite target of his students’ jokes. In addition to individual psychoanalytic training sessions, Dr. Dosužkov also conducted seminars where his students shared reviews of books and articles, discussed case histories, and could ask questions about the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. In one of these seminars, a participant asked a “purely theoretical” question: “What happens if during analysis the psychoanalyst falls asleep? If the client continues free-associating, does therapy continue? Is the process interrupted? Should the client get refunded for that time, since money is such an important vehicle in Freudian analysis?” Dr. Dosužkov could not deny that such a situation could occur in psychoanalytic sessions. He was aware that the analysands knew about his foible and he had to come up with an answer. “This can happen,” he said. “Sometimes, you are tired and sleepy – you did not sleep well the night before, you are recovering from a flu, or are physically exhausted. But if you have been in this business a long time, you develop a kind of sixth sense; you fall asleep only when the stuff that is coming up is irrelevant. When the client says something really important, you wake up and you are right there!” Dr. Dosužkov was also a great admirer of I. P. Pavlov, a Russian Nobel Prize-winning physiologist who derived his knowledge of the brain from his experiments with dogs. Pavlov wrote much about the inhibition of the cerebral cortex that occurs during sleep or hypnosis; he described that occasionally there could be a “waking point” in the inhibited brain cortex. His favorite example was a mother who can sleep through heavy noisSpirituality Studies 1 (1) Spring 2015 21 (19)
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