By: Kurt Luchs
“What a piece of work is a man!” said Shakespeare; and while it’s possible he was merely gazing into the mirror and feeling his own biceps, he was probably referring to the human mind. A mysterious thing, the mind. One man discovers the principle of electromagnetic anti-gravitational polarity, and wins a Nobel Prize. Another one owns and operates a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. Perhaps it is the same man wearing a different suit, but in that case he is moonlighting and should declare his second source of income (the Nobel Committee).
The point is, few students of the mind have any inkling of its innermost workings, particularly at the subconscious, or street-level. One who did during the first half of the 20th century was Dr. Aloysius Gilbert, dream researcher and founder of the Gilbert Institute for Advanced and Gruesome Studies, which has given hope to so many. Dr. Gilbert was originally a follower of Freud, till one day Freud noticed he was being followed, and spun around suddenly to confront him.
“Just what are you looking at, eh?”
“The back of your head,” replied Gilbert, with the candor that was his genius. Freud was so moved by his frankness that he immediately rubbed out a lit cigar on the young man’s bald spot. The two became fast friends, remaining inseparable throughout the next 30 minutes, until they broke intellectually over who would pay for the cigar. Afterward, Gilbert credited Freud with teaching him “everything there is to know about eczema, and then some,” and how to get big laughs at parties by impersonating a meerkat.
He soon had a flourishing psychoanalytic practice in Vienna — one so lucrative, in fact, that his wife Grimelda could never comprehend why he persisted in renting himself out as a cuspidor on weekends (poverty had been his close companion during childhood, although when the two met later at a class reunion they hardly recognized each other).
But in treating thousands of refried psyches he sometimes resorted to methods that were, like those of Colonel Kurtz, “unsound.” One former patient charged that, under hypnosis, he had made her don a little sailor suit to “do the hokey pokey.” Worse, none of the respectable journals would publish his papers on dreams, forcing him to send his feverish theories to the only outlet open to him, Scatology Today, where the following cases and comments by Dr. Gilbert first appeared. These are the pivotal works which, in their collective unconsciousness and their intuitive grasp of dream symbology, Carl Jung declared “every bit as profound as the lyrics to ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat.’” Read the full story
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