Prologue (9)

‘By that time, however, I haven’t completed my interpretation of my father’s death. Since that time that my unconscious memories got gradually unraveled. I was in my forties that most of it got resolved, and after I turned fifty, I became able to discuss the matter decently.’

A very moving story. Dryer then reflected on his childhood experiences and analyzed them further, using psychoanalytic theory as the main tool.
‘I was prodded to say good-by to my father, but I couldn’t. He passed away right after.’ ‘I was thinking unconsciously that I haven’t said good-by to my dad, so the farewell greeting is not completed yet, therefore, he hasn’t passed away ….’’I couldn’t realize the death of my father until I began sobbing in the subway. Somewhere in my mind, I was thinking that if I greet someone, he will die.’’I learned that that analysis is valid, because after that, greeting became no trouble for me. I was not good at it until that time. The fact that I was not good at it means that I had some drag in my mind. If we take the mater more simply, I would interpret my difficulty greeting as the expression of my shyness or introversion. But if that interpretation was true, I wouldn’t have had any hang-up in my mind.’’’
‘Perhaps the benefit of psychoanalysis is here. When one of the hang-ups is resolved, there is a loss of a drag, freeing some amount of energy, which makes it easy for us to do things more smoothly …. Since that time, I stopped remembering the death of my father as often as before. Of course I had some memory of it, and that’s why I can talk about it this way.’
Again, the main mental mechanism that he considers in his discussion is psychoanalytic notion of repression. Here is his last quotation.
‘In my childhood, I was introverted and had a difficulty greeting. I did not greet my father good-by right before his death. He died right away. For some reason, I grew up with a difficulty greeting. I reminisced my father‘s death often, but I couldn’t realize it. One day, all the sudden an insight (intellectual understanding) came upon me and the symptoms disappeared. I was freed up by the repression, and I was also freed up by the memory of my father’s death.’