“This anxiety is driving me crazy,” a woman said. A man said: “I can’t stop counting everything I do—count, count, count—see, I said it three times.” Another woman cried: “I’m always crying—at the slightest thing—damn it.” Answering for her husband, still another woman said: “He can’t face going to any social thing—parties, weddings, anything.” And then there was the man who reported that every night before he could go to sleep, he would need to check the locks on his front door—“over and over,” he said. And how about this man who said, “Things pop into my head and sometimes they scare me, like I might do something wrong to someone.” And then, while holding a handkerchief over his mouth, another man said: “I don’t touch doorknobs, or light switches, or anything that’s loaded with germs.”
All of these people are talking about their psychological symptoms. Migraine headaches, fear of heights, fear of open spaces, scary thoughts that you can’t shake, obsessions, ritual behaviors, compulsions, and thousands of others. Have you ever had any? Not to worry. Actually, just about all people have such symptoms at one time or another.
When I first trained as a psychologist and then as a psychoanalyst, these were some of the problems that interested me. So, in the past nearly fifty years, I’ve worked with people in clinics and hospitals, as well as in private practice, and have had the chance to see all kinds of symptoms up close. In most cases, when I asked them, patients would usually say that it was their main relationship (or not having one) that bothered them. Yet, what they would always, always say when it came to the cure, was that it was their symptom that they wanted cured.
When people sense that they’re having an experience that they can’t control, it’s a good bet that they’re already in touch with the eerie presence of a symptom. An emotional/psychological symptom, therefore, is some experience that you feel is really out of your control. Basically, you just can’t control it. Rather, your symptom controls you, and on top of it all, there’s not much you can do about it. The symptom will dominate you. It’s at such times that you know that some inner force—different and greater than the force of your conscious mind—is present. And so, if you’ve ever had such an experience, then you know that it feels strange, it’s definitely inconvenient, and, a lot of the time, it’s even downright embarrassing.
Over the years, I slowly began to tease out the core elements of the symptom—to see inside—into how a psychological symptom works, how it develops, and how curing it might then be accomplished. The fantastic fact is that psychotherapists have never really had a map or an instruction manual that they all could follow so that any symptom could be unlocked and cured. Yet, even though psychotherapists know a great deal about the process of psychotherapeutic treatment, the sad fact is that nowhere is there any spelled-out technique that therapists use to systematically penetrate the symptom and then cure it. Well, the symptom can’t just be wished away and it can’t be reasoned with—it won’t listen! To cure the symptom, you need to know its code—what it’s made of. Even Sigmund Freud, who told us a lot about symptoms, never set forth the equation, the formula, the basic code of the symptom, so that then we would know how to reach into its core and cure it.
Exactly such a formula—a symptom code, as I call it—will be set forth in this book. When used, this formula can unfold, penetrate, and cure the symptom. In other words, it is my aim that a person can use this book to understand, alleviate, and, yes, even cure, his or her own symptom—and thereby gain a greater measure of peace of mind. In some cases, a combination of the symptom code and medication is needed to improve or alleviate a symptom.
In part I, I describe the four points of the symptom code, which I’ve briefly outlined here:
1. Point One. That you have a wish but you may not realize its presence.
2. Point Two. That you are angry, although you may not be aware of it.
3. Point Three. That you are angry at someone specific—a who.
4. Point Four. That you need to do something about Point 1—the wish.
In part II, I present a series of symptoms and show how the symptom code is used to cure the problem. In part III, I describe what the symptom really means so that you have greater understanding of what you’re experiencing. In part IV, I present a series of symptoms that resist cure through the use of the symptom code and show why medication is needed in these instances to help provide a cure. I summarize the symptom code in part V.
When you finally see or understand the answer to each of the four points outlined above—you recognize that you have a wish, that you are angry at a specific person (a who), and that you need to do something about it—then you will be well on your way to curing your symptom. Now, let’s begin.