Uncle Gary and the Inner Objects

More than just another great name for a band, this is what I call the latest piece of inner work I’ve decided to share with any interested readers.

Several nights ago, I had a dream that I had an uncle named Gary who had heart problems. I was driving him around in my car—in the dream, an olive green station wagon with side paneling--very 1974. There were several important things about Uncle Gary. One is that he was clearly a “composite”--my current therapist, Friedemann Schulz, crossed with a professor from last quarter, Gary Penn. Another is that I really cared about him. I didn’t mind driving him around, trying to find “Santa Monica Hospital” so that he could get his heart fixed. I felt quite tenderly toward him and was more than willing to go out of my way for him. He sat patiently in the back of the car with his cane. This is significant because I don’t have those kinds of warm, positive feelings toward my father, who has had a lot of trouble with his heart—the body is so symbolic sometimes, n’est-ce pas? Perhaps the most significant thing about Uncle Gary is that he is a perfect symbol of growth in my psyche.

 

Uncle Gary, I believe, represents a shift, or at least a new possibility, in the world of my inner objects. Don’t know what inner objects are? Read on for a most likely very simplistic analysis of this complex branch of psychoanalytic thought!

 

In laywoman’s terms, object relations is a way of understanding the human psyche, and how we all internalize our caregivers. We all have inner objects, whether we know about them or not, and they powerfully influence how we feel about ourselves and others, and how we act in the world. If you’re interested in having a peek at my inner objects, check out the entry titled Always Running and Hiding. In it, the Feminine (the mother-daughter complex) is all good and all loving, and the Masculine is violent, irrational, and oppressive. This is how I’ve internalized the concepts of mother and father in my psyche. According to some theorists, these objects were concretized in early childhood and are based on my collective experiences of my mother and father.

 

Sally Kempton wrote, “It’s hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your mind.” This pretty much sums up my relationship to my father, the patriarchy, and the masculine inner object raging around in my psyche trying to kill people. I once did a painting of this horrible figure after a series of nightmares about a very large man waiting at the bottom of the stairs to beat me to death if I left my bedroom and tried to leave the house. In the painting, he wore a baseball hat and a pin that said, “I Hate Women.”

 

Suffice to say, I don’t have a lot of dreams about sweet older men about whom I feel tenderly. This is a new archetype for me, a kindly elder masculine figure. It’s on the heels of Uncle Gary’s arrival that I have made some real progress in creating healthy boundaries for myself with my real father, which is an example of how inner work leads to outer work, and how the unconscious can heal us from the inside, through dreams like this one.