Paul H. Elovitz, PhD, is a presidential psychohistorian
trained in history, political science, and
psychoanalysis, who has been researching and writing
about the candidates and presidents since 1976. He is
Editor of Clio’s Psyche, a founding faculty member at
Ramapo College who formerly taught at Temple, Rutgers,
and Fairleigh Dickinson universities, and a founder and
past president of the International Psychohistorical
Association. He has over 200 publications and for over
three decades has organized psychohistorical meetings in
Manhattan on a regular basis. He has published on the
dreams of historical personages such as Humphry Davy,
Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelly, and
Robert Lewis Stevenson, as well as historical dream
methodology. He studied dreams in psychoanalytic
training and later with Montague Ullman (1916-2008, a
pioneer in the field), ran dream workshops for years,
devised a method of probing the dreams of historical and
public personages, wrote various articles and chapters
of books on dreams, and edited the dreams of others as a
journal editor. Prior to working on Obama’s dreams, he
did an intense biographical and psychological portrait
of the Illinois Senator, published in the fall 2008
issue of the Journal of Psychohistory. Dr. Elovitz may
be contacted at
pelovitz@aol.com .
His extraordinary
abilities as a listener were key to Monte Ullman’s
specialness as a human being. He listened to the
conscious and unconscious with rapt attention and taught
others to do the same in a playful manner. The safety
and playfulness of his dreamers, built into the
experiential dream method, was central to its success.
Adults must trust and feel secure to reveal their
unconscious before others; his method guaranteed that
the dreamer was in charge and could stop the process at
any time. It also enticed dream group members to
literally “make the dream their own”—“playing with
it”—as they projected onto it and teased out its
nuances. This offered new possibilities to the dreamer,
to be accepted or rejected. The dream dialogue also left
the dreamer totally in control of the process.
Members of dream groups knew Montague Ullman was
something special. After all, here was a psychiatrist
and psychoanalyst welcoming people into his home, using
his first name, and working in the dream vineyards (in
my personal experience illegal, illiterate grape pickers
probably make more money for their labor than do most
dream workers!). He did not seek to squeeze the reality
of those he sought to help into some theoretic
Procrustean bed, as was not uncommon in his profession.
As a “recovered psychiatrist,” rather than making a
handsome income prescribing legal drugs to patients, he
put aside the authority and prestige of psychiatry to
help people come into close contact with their
unconscious desires because of his belief in the healing
power of dreams—when listened to rather than suppressed
and repressed. He did not need the big income, office,
and title to heal people. In fact, he thought these were
obstacles to helping people know themselves, since they
expected knowledge to come exclusively from “the doctor”
rather than themselves. Monte believed the Socratic
dictum “know thyself” was the key to healing.
Psychoanalytic training and experience were invaluable
assets in Ullman’s work with dreams and dreamers. They
helped him see past the defensiveness, reaction
formations, rigidity, and verbiage so often used as
defenses against relating to others positively and
knowing oneself. When a new member appeared in the dream
group behaving like a bull in a china shop, he listened
to his own dream in which the disruptive man appeared as
a teddy bear, and Monte knew the individual could
ultimately adjust to the group, which he did. In dealing
with an energetic, loquacious, talented, dream
enthusiast who for years did not accept the need for
boundaries, he was insistent to the point of toughness,
about enforcing the rules allowing space for the dreamer
and the other participants to understand the dream’s
meanings.
Monte was quite willing to reveal
himself when he thought it might help someone struggling
with a problem. In my case, both my brother and mother
had died quite young at the same age, and when that age
loomed before me, my death anxiety was revealed in a
dream. Monte spoke of having confronted the same issue
as he approached age forty-four when his father had died
of a stroke. His sharing of his own anxieties was most
reassuring.
My own route to discovering the
enormous value of Ullman’s work was circuitous. My
course on dreams in psychoanalytic training had been
disappointing. The instructor and materials were
uninspiring. In therapy sessions and control
(supervision) analysis I discovered the enormous value
of dreams for probing the patient’s unconscious, but
felt frustrated since the patient did not see what I saw
in the dream, yet looked to me to articulate what it
said. I appreciated the insight regarding my own
countertransference when I dreamed of being President
Carter’s psychoanalyst at a time I was writing a
psychobiography of him, yet I needed additional tools
for probing dreams. I wanted to be able to probe the
treasure trove of dreams of the pioneer chemist Sir
Humphry Davy (1778-1829) which I had discovered on a
1981 sabbatical in England and most of all, I wanted to
uncover the creativity revealed in our dreams.
In 1982, after Monte spoke on dreams at my New Jersey
psychoanalytic institute, I found a new way to
understanding dreams. The outcome was that after I
attended his dream group sessions in Ardsley, New York,
as well as one or two leadership training sessions, I
became an Ullman dream group leader. I worked with
Monte, Don Hughes, Mena Potts, and others to apply a
modified version of the Ullman technique to the dreams
of historical personages (The Historical Dreamwork
Method), and I wrote articles and chapters of books on
dreamwork. We may not have been able to get deceased
dreamers to associate to their dreams, but we could
greatly enlarge the number of possible explanations for
it and help the historical biographer to understand much
more about his/her own countertransference to the
subject. Without having in-depth knowledge of
psychohistory, Monte supported the Psychohistory Forum
and occasionally wrote for Clio’s Psyche.
As a
historian and psychoanalyst, I was taught to be
skeptical of claims of precognition and telepathy,
generally finding other disclaimed explanations for
these assertions. Yet, because of a precognitive dream,
I can happily report that a gift copy of Ullman and
Krippner sits on my shelf with a dedication reading, “To
Paul[,] who precognized a situation and solved it[.]
Appreciatively[,] Monte[,] July 1984.” On July 9, 1984 I
dreamt that I had a flat tire and presented the dream in
Ullman’s group which was meeting for the first time on
the following Monday. Uncharacteristically, he left the
group briefly to answer and make phone calls and
appeared to be a bit distracted. Amidst his apologies to
the dreamer and group for the interruptions, he
explained that a potential buyer, with whom he had no
way of communicating, was coming to look at his used
Volvo shortly after our meeting and that the mechanic
had promised to come directly to fix a flat tire that
had been discovered only that morning. After the meeting
was over, I volunteered to replace the flat with his
spare tire, which I did. The following week as I walked
out of the next dream group meeting, Monte handed me his
book with the dedication.
A key reason for Monte
Ullman’s success was his genuine interest in and respect
for people. He sat back in his chair in a relaxed
manner, radiating curiosity, good will, kindness,
infectious humor, intelligence, interest, and warmth. He
kept the focus on the dream, gently rejected theory as a
distraction, and helped dreamers focus on their own day
and life residue, associations, feelings, and fantasies
regarding concrete images in their nocturnal
productions. As he spoke slowly and deliberately, we sat
at the edge of our seats listening to his every word.
Dr. Ullman’s very expertise would have been a
distraction form the ultimate source of knowledge of the
dream—the dreamer. The ultimate genius of his
methodology was that most of the time he took the back
seat, serving only as the protector of the dream method,
while the dreamer was allowed free rein of
interpretation, and the group projected onto the dream
(“played with it”) and dialogued about the possible
meanings of the dream.
Our best ways to
commemorate Montague Ullman are to probe our own dreams,
lead dream groups using his methodology, examine claims
of precognitive and telepathic dreams as well as of
paranormal experiences with his scientific precision,
and value the creativity and the healing powers of
dreams. Should I find the time to complete my book, The
Creativity of Dreams, the dedication will include
Monte’s name alongside that of my wife. |