metonymy4u

last night i dreamt that i was a suitor for the affections of a friend of my youth, a woman who i was once really in love with. in the dream, she ultimately rejected me, as she did in life, and married someone else. i left their wedding and returned alone to find that a storm had collapsed the roof of the hotel on my room and destroyed everything in it. the symbolism of the dream is fairly obvious, given both my life long dis-ease in matters of love, and my sister’s pending wedding next month. so what? there is a common misconception that behaviorists don’t notice symbols. on the contrary, we notice them. we just don’t think they represent anything particularly “special” or “causative.” we don’t think that by describing the events we have understood their causes. description is just the beginning of the analysis, not the end. it has been proposed that one of the active ingredients in behavioral therapy is the ability to accept what is and has been, to weep over the losses of one’s life, and move on. in this context, dreams do not point to the deeper causes of anything, though they may facilitate grief and discovery.