Half-Tamed Demons
“No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.”
- Sigmund Freud, “Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, 1905″
I spent the first half of today at the hospital, scutting around as an intern in medicine, focused on antiretroviral medications, anal cultures and congestive heart failure.
I spent the latter half of my day in psychiatry didactic lectures.
I must admit that the latter half of my day was a bit more fascinating.
We had a monumental lecture today in our “introduction to psychoanalysis” course.
Our professor hit us all with a hefty task. He gave us several minutes to complete the following assignment:
“Take this piece of paper and write a screen play. You have two choices. Either write about the most incredible and fantastic sexual experience that you can imagine or write about the most horrific, terrifying experience that you can imagine.”
He actually used more charged and provocative language, but that is the gist that I could remember. He then said “go” and we all began.
It was incredibly uncomfortable for me to complete this assignment.
He then put all of the papers into an envelope and randomly drew them out and read them in front of the entire class.
We then analyzed all of our stories looking for the psychodynamic, underlying defenses that we each used to deal with our challenging task.
Talk about scary, awesome, provocative, eery, embarrassing, powerful and moving.
You think performing a heart transplant is difficult…try baring your soul to the world!
Psychiatry is awesome.
Nuff said.