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3
Why Me?
The Skin Has Its Reasons


"Why me?" Probably everyone who's ever suffered a maddening itch or plague of warts has asked that question. It can be far more than a cry against fate. Beneath it lies "Who am I?" a riddle that will lead you to a fuller understanding of your skin problem and ultimately to relief. It was Hippocrates, the father of medicine, who said, "It is more important to know who has a disease than what disease he has."

You already know who you are? Not likely. Few of us have a grasp of our identity on all its buried levels. The search for self-knowledge is a lifetime task that goes beyond psychotherapy:  it wasn't Freud but an ancient Greek philosopher who commanded, "Know thyself."

Will self-knowledge heal your skin? It's not that simple, but the better you know yourself, the more able you'll be to confront your emotional needs with your head and heart, freeing your skin to carry on its normal physiological duties, and the better you'll cope with the psychological burden of problem skin.

This kind of self-knowledge, discovering what emotional task your skin is trying to do is a special challenge. The same fear and pain that kept you from facing your emotional needs in the first place keep your naked need for love, respect, and protection deeply buried. Don't expect your inner self to yield up its secrets without a struggle.

You've seen a minor league version of this struggle if you've ever hunted in vain for the vacuum cleaner on a day when you didn't really want to clean. Your heart wasn't entirely in the search:  you were the hider and the seeker simultaneously. A similar process may keep a word on the tip of your tongue but tantalizingly out of your conscious grasp. There's something within you that doesn't want the word to be found.

Similarly, when you look within to discover your deepest needs and feelings, you will find the truth in spite of that part of you with a stake in keeping that vulnerable side hidden. I recall one patient who grew up with the "I'm-tough-and-I-don't-need-anything-from-anyone" world view. He had suppressed his need for love until psoriasis, which required tender care, voiced it for him. Before he could change his life to satisfy these needs directly, he had to accept them, and this meant wrestling down the stalwart (but actually terrified) guardian of a macho self-image.

When you start living with the question "Who am I?" you might expect your pursuit of the answer to be double-crossed by ambivalence as the inner hider evades your inner seeker. At the outset, commit yourself to pushing toward the deeper truths about yourself, no matter how uncomfortable it gets. Remind yourself relentlessly how much you can gain by finding what you have hidden.

Once you get started, you'll probably find the pursuit of self-knowledge less a trial than an adventure. Many people who begin psychotherapy (a guided, intensive quest to know themselves) worry about opening a Pandora's box of dreadful revelations. In my experience, however, no one ever wants to go back to the status quo once he or she has turned the corner with major discoveries and the changes they bring. It's not a question of finding out some awful truth about yourself but of realizing new dimensions of your personality. This is the essence of growth, the great adventure of explanations in inner space.

Learning to know your inner self and its links with your troubled skin is partly a logical process, like solving a murder mystery, but more a creative exercise, like what an artist does in combining the right colors and shapes to evoke the majesty of a mountain. While logical intelligence proceeds in a straightforward 2+2=4 manner, creative thinking leaps by association, connecting things that have no apparent link; thus, it is best equipped to grapple with the hidden parts of your personality that you have tried to bury under the logical facade of adult life.

There is no road map to self-knowledge; your path must be your own discovery. The only rule I know that applies nearly universally is this:  be alert for surprises. Be ready to learn things about yourself that you always believed untrue?things, perhaps, that contradict a family or personal party line. Were you always the mild-mannered sister, the one kid who never lost her temper? Do you still think of yourself as a person without an angry bone in her body? Don't turn away if your self-searching finds a deep reservoir of anger. Many people are mild-mannered because they harbor anger that they fear is destructive and dangerous.

Where will you find clues to your inner self? If your eyes are truly open, you'll find them everywhere. Personality is like biology. Just as each cell of your body contains a full set of genes?the inherited code that determines what, biologically, you are?every experience, every introspection, and every interaction with others bear the unique stamp of your personality.

You may find it useful to keep a notebook. I once asked a novelist friend how he invented his characters. For months before he sat down to the actual writing of a novel, he told me, he'd note down random events in the lives of his characters as they occurred to him. He sketched details of their appearance, imagined quirks of their conversation. Eventually, from these scattered mental brushstrokes would emerge full-fledged (but fictional) human beings. You may discover your inner self the same way. Don't worry about filling pages with grammatical prose. Just jot down whatever you want to hold onto:  the same forces that buried your feelings of fear or anger once will work double-time to make you forget them again.

EXERCISES IN SELF-KNOWLEDGE

I can't give you a magic flashlight to find your hidden self because there isn't any, but I will share some exercises my patients have found exceptionally useful in illuminating those dark corners of the self most often linked to skin problems. To begin with, here is a toolbox of techniques to help you glimpse your inner self through the mask of your everyday life.

What Do You See in Childhood Photographs?

Study these windows on your early world for insight into family politics and key relationships. Who stands with whom? Who's looking at mother, or away from father? Are you staring into the camera or gazing away? What moods are reflected in your family's faces, in your own face? Are you happy? Is there a surprising hint of anger or sadness?

Particularly valuable are family photographs taken just before or after your skin problem started. What's going on here? Remember, we're not engaged in logical analysis. Don't dismiss a mysterious hunch about the picture. It may be part of the hidden truth.

One of my patients, whose genital herpes recurred constantly and painfully, used to talk evasively about sexual identity issues,his doubts about himself as a man. When he brought in a family picture, taken when he was five years old, the issue suddenly became very concrete. There were his three older brothers?brawny kids who looked like junior linebackers. My patient was dressed like a darling little girl, complete with long ringlets. It seemed his herpes recurrences served a necessary psychological function focusing attention on his penis and providing reassurance it was still there. His parents, apparently, had unashamedly wished it were not.

How Do You Dress?

Your second skin may play out the same scenario as your real skin. Become aware of how you dress. Is the style strikingly older or younger than you really are? Are you more or less formal than your peers? Some people dress to camouflage their sexuality, others to flaunt it. A natty dresser may put high emphasis on his packaging to compensate for doubts about the interior. Others dress so shabbily as if to say:  "I'm nothing. Don't take me seriously."

Choice of colors is more than simply a matter of style. A woman may dress in "basic black" and other somber shades because her heart is always at a funeral:  a clue to depression so obvious that it's easily overlooked. Bright, cheerful colors may reflect an authentically sunny outlook or an attempt to mask hollow feelings of need. Paradoxically, one can dress in orange for the same reason another dresses in black. Do you feel the way you dress?

Some people are constantly "in costume." Let your mind associate freely:  are you dressed like a doll, like Cinderella, like Dumbo? Do you look like a bar mitzvah boy, the high school floozy, or a sixties leftover?

A patient once described to me her discomfort at being a woman as she sat in my office dressed in combat books, baggy pants, and a work shirt. "My camouflage," she said. Discussion brought memories of her fear at her father's interest in her burgeoning sexuality and her need to hide it from him and from other men. Her long-standing rash (which she abetted by lax skin care) was part of the camouflage, she came to understand.

What Does Your Body Say About You?

In the circles of a tree trunk, you can read not only the age of the tree but its history. Good years and lean years leave their mark in fat rings versus pinched, dry rings; similarly, what we live through leaves its mark on our bodies, on how we stand up to the world and move through it.

Postures, stances, and movement styles express our relationship with others. You've seen people who walk down any street or enter a room as if going through a sniper zone, hugging some imaginary wall, trying to be as close to invisible as possible. The caricature of the dry intellectual, body eclipsed by the head, has some counterpart in reality. The development of arms, legs, and upper and lower body reflects heredity but also the physical and emotional habits of years. Your whole body, not just your skin, tells your story.

Stand in front of a mirror unclothed and look at yourself sensitively. Ignore your skin but focus on your proportions, your shape, your posture. Do you breathe fully or tentatively? Do you look frail, brittle, mechanical, angular? Are you well grounded, solid on your feet, or a bit wobbly? Do you stand as if the weight of the world were on your shoulders?

It's often far easier to see the inner man or woman within the body of another person. Practice these observational skills on strangers in the street; look inquisitively at friends and family. Do you see echoes of their personalities in bodily shape, stance, and motion? Do they remind you of anything in yourself?

What Tones of Voice Do You Use?

Become aware of how you sound in conversation. Do you always speak with the same voice? Most of us lapse into different intonations and vocabularies to fit the occasion. This can reveal our identifications, the aspects of other people we've swallowed whole. When we listen objectively and sensitively, we often hear more personality clues in the "tune" than in the words themselves.

Susan D., for example, was a ship captain's daughter, a successful executive who had trouble forming relationships with men. I noticed in therapy that she'd occasionally shift into a brusque, authoritarian voice that said "Don't mess with me" , a captain's voice. This worked wonders in the boardroom but apparently it frightened her male friends. She'd shift into her father's voice, she ultimately realized, in anxious, intimate situations:  a clue that her identification with her father left little room for other men.

On appropriate occasions, your voice may awaken echoes of early life, suggesting tasks you haven't yet resolved. Another patient, Laura B., realized that when she asked her husband for favors, she automatically lapsed into a meek little-girl voice. This realization in turn aroused childhood memories of standing outside her busy father's study, wondering if she dared disturb him. From this came a clue to the insecurity behind a tense, miserable marriage and hives that wouldn't go away.

Psychologists have long recognized special times when the unconscious self speaks with particular clarity. If you open your mind to its language, you can learn much.

What Do You Dream About?

Have you left the understanding of your dreams solely to soothsayers and psychoanalysts? While experts are particularly able to grasp their depths and subtleties, dreams can reveal the emotional life beneath the surface to anyone willing to tune in to them. Become aware of your dreams and take them seriously.

You are the sole scriptwriter, producer, and director of your dreams, so you can begin by accepting responsibility for them. Why do you have your dreams? Freud suggested that dreams reflect wishes, usually in disguised form. If something horrible, frightening, or shameful happens in your dream, don't dismiss it out of hand but ask yourself (it takes courage):  "In what sense does this dream belong to me?" This can spark fertile insights into the paradoxical, unacknowledged wishes and fears behind your skin problem.

George M., the young man in chapter 2 who was plagued by warts and an inability to express anger, made good strides in releasing his buried emotions to the point where he rallied himself to begin training for a career he really wanted:  driving long-haul trucks. Then one night, he dreamed he was driving a big truck and had an accident in which several people were killed. This clarified to him the danger of his anger, as he'd always imagined it, and helped him understand how he'd immobilized himself to protect others from it.

Everyone dreams; if you think you never do, it's because you resist the self-knowledge in your dreams. Dreams are freshest and clearest right after you have them, so keep a notebook and pen or tape recorder at your bedside to jot them down immediately on awakening.

What Are Your Daydreams and Fleeting Fantasies?

More accessible than dreams, these often express the same unacknowledged wishes. Daydreams may attempt to solve the same tasks you're giving to your skin, but free from real-life logical constraints. Frequently recurring fantasies and images have special importance.

Often the wish behind the daydream is clear enough:  we fantasize about wealth, success with the opposite sex, fame, and achievement. Not as obviously, frequent daydreams on such subjects suggest a feeling that you lack something in those particular departments. People who feel secure in their financial lives may not object to winning the lottery but they rarely daydream about it.

Unpleasant fantasies of being chased, attacked, or humiliated are paradoxical. What kind of wishes are these? They may represent an attempt to master a particular fear, the same way you go over a near accident for days afterward in an attempt to come to terms with the experience.

You must take the idea of "wishing" , in both dreams and daydreams, broadly. A young man who often fantasized about being chased and shot at, escaping just in time, expressed a wish to escape, not to be threatened. It was an attempt to rewrite history:  a childhood in which his father constantly took verbal potshots at him and otherwise belittled him. His fantasies also satisfied the wish to be loyal to a family party line that had cast him as a target. Tuning into the trauma that he repeated endlessly, he took a step toward challenging it.

What Causes Your Flashes of Thought and Flashes of Feeling?

Have you ever walked down the street and felt an unaccountable twinge of sadness or surge of joy? Like daydreams, isolated thoughts and feelings seem to arise out of nowhere but in fact come straight from your inner self; respect the fact that they have roots and you may come to understand them.

One summer day when I was hiking, I stepped around a rock and was struck by a mysterious wave of sadness. Following the experience back, I realized that in stepping awkwardly I had planted my toes outward, and that had been an eerily familiar sensation. As a child, I recalled, I'd been pigeon-toed and teased by other kids. I was told to fight the habit by walking with my feet planted outward, the same way I had walked moments before. This helped tune me in to a reservoir of negative feelings about my body, which wasn't what others wanted it to be.

Hunches and intuitions that pop into your head are similar. They come out of context with no apparent logic because they're the product of intuition. No matter how bizarre they are, think of them as metaphorical hints and they may give you insights that logic will take forever to reach.

What Causes Your Slips of the Tongue?

There is much to the idea that "Freudian slips," misplaced or mispronounced words, are messages from the unconscious. Tune in to them and allow yourself time to wonder what they mean. One of my patients was talking about family pictures when he referred to a"phonograph" of his mother; he came to realize that he avoided looking at her and thought of her as an endlessly nagging broken record.

Similarly, try to be sensitive to the images and recurring phrases of your personal language. A patient of mine always referred to his latest project as "this baby." When we discussed this, what emerged was striking envy of his pregnant wife because he himself couldn't bear a child. Another patient expressed himself dramatically:  "Here's a real killer for you," he would introduce his stories. "I blasted out the office . . . but the traffic on the expressway was crushing." He was unaware of the constant undertone of mayhem in his conversation. Bringing this up helped him to appreciate his buried concerns about anger and safety.

What Do You Forget and Why?  

It's a psychological axiom that you forget what you want to. Perhaps one part of you resists actions that are out of tune with your inner needs. Your party line, the idea of yourself that you received years ago from your family and still confirm with friends,may blandly assume you like to bowl, that "I'm a person who loves bowling." If so, why is it you never can find your bowling shoes? It may be that your inner self really doesn't care for bowling and is rebelling against the force of loyalty that allows you to be trapped into doing what you don't much want to do.

Do you often forget your keys, meaning you must bum a ride? Do you leave your wallet home, forcing you to borrow lunch money? It may be that the payoff, perhaps getting others to take care of you, ?more than makes up for the inconvenience.

What Troubles Do You Have with Other People?

In the reactions of others, we see ourselves. Are you mystified by the way friends and acquaintances react to you? Do they seem unaccountably angry at times? Do they turn morose or lapse into teasing sexual innuendoes? Do they never seem to hear what you're saying? Your buried emotional life may come through your behavior to arouse reaction more appropriate than you know. For example, others may tune in to your hidden anger and respond with anger of their own.

Conversely, you can learn much about yourself by becoming more aware of your own reactions. Does weakness make you especially angry? Duplicity? Arrogance? We often accuse others of things we fear finding in ourselves, and any disproportionate response suggests emotionally charged issues. One of my patients often spent therapy time railing angrily about "freeloaders" and "welfare cheats." It eventually came out that his family had been on relief when he was a child. His indignation was a reaction that walled up the anger, pain, and humiliation of poverty.

Paradoxically, the things that bother you most about friends and family may alert you to what you find attractive. The woman who is first attracted to her husband because of his even-tempered consideration may later complain that he lacks spontaneity and seems "wishy-washy." She may marry a man who is "dynamic and effective" and divorce him because he's "driven and insensitive." The vices are relabeled virtues.

Other people can actively assist your quest for self-understanding. Feel free to ask selected friends and family for help. They won't have the same stake in keeping the roots of your problem hidden. Test your perception of yourself against theirs. If someone says something about you that seems farfetched, completely at odds with what everyone knows is the "real you," give it a fair, open-minded hearing. Perhaps there is something "constantly cheerful," "morbid," or "flirtatious" about you, something with an important bearing on your skin problem.

In a herpes treatment group that I directed, one man announced that he was ready for a serious romantic relationship. Members of the group pointed out that whenever his involvement started becoming more than pure sex or pure friendship, he'd get a herpes recurrence. This was a pattern he couldn't see, but after repeated emphasis by group members, people he'd grown to like and respect, he finally opened himself to this insight about his fear of intimacy and its role in his disease.

SUN ADDICTION

Sadie L. was living what many people would call the ideal retirement life-style. Fit, active, vivacious, her winters in Florida were full of friends, adult education and aerobics classes, and the pursuit of her love of nature. Summers she'd be back in New England enjoying her grandchildren and philanthropic activities. Widowed some years earlier, Sadie had enough money and other resources to feel as secure about the future as anyone can in an unpredictable world.

However, there was a darker underside to her yearly routine. In the winter, she would enjoy long walks on the beach and sitting in the sun. In the summer, she would return north to the dermatology department of a teaching hospital where some of the world's best doctors would cut off small parts of her body. Conferences beforehand were devoted to the details of the surgical procedures. The stock ". . . stay out of the sun; use sunscreen; you have malignant melanoma; you are destroying your skin; untreated this will kill you . . ." lecture was dutifully delivered afterward. Then the whole yearly cycle would begin again.

Sadie heard them, she knew they were right, she resolved to stay out of the sun?then didn't. She knew what Mark Twain meant when he said of smoking, "It's easy to stop. I've done it hundreds of times." Her doctors knew that they were bailing a boat with a hole in the bottom but were also resigned to the cycle.

It didn't take long for us to discover that there was more to her addiction than enjoying the sun. She had always been proud of her body; it had gotten her attention that was sometimes hard to come by growing up. Her life, though, had taught her that when her body was involved, pleasure came packaged with loss and gain. Her lovingly devoted grandfather had on several times moved disturbingly toward molestation. Her marriage had been pressured by a too-early pregnancy, and she had felt that the price of keeping the generally good relationship intact was tolerating her husband's occasional infidelities.

No one had ever said it to her and she had never said it to herself but the clear message of her life was that warmth and pleasure had to be paid for with a bit of her soul or a bit of her body. It had all fit so well with the sun and surgery cycle that it seemed as natural as night and day.

As this pattern emerged, she resolved to break it. Clearly, the answer was not to forsake the pleasures of the flesh. She came up with getting massages (in the shade) and saunas as the beginning of what she called her "No Pain--Lots of Gain" program. It looks like the surgeons may have, to their delight, lost a good customer.

PERSEVERANCE

There's more than one road up the mountain to insight, and knowledge of your inner self will emerge in its own time and in its own way. Perseverance is a must, not the kind that beats its head against a brick wall but the kind that is willing to leave things alone for now and come back later. Many people find that they are ready for self-knowledge, and as soon as they open their minds to it, they receive insight in an exciting flood.

Try to exploit the times when you're most likely to gain glimpses into your heart. I always found a visit to my Great-Aunt Annie put me back in touch with my childhood. As the last survivor of my grandmother's generation, she made me remember the little boy I once was and the feelings that made me the man I am now. Her stuffed cabbage was an elixir of memory that awakened the child within me!

Many people find physically demanding activities, such as dancing, running, or climbing mountains,loosen their minds and put them into a receptive state where they see the world and themselves with visionary eyes. For me, the days when I can get out of the city and hike in the hills seem filled not only with the magic of trees and rock outcroppings but a specially lucid state of mind in which knots untie of their own accord and things I'd found perplexing suddenly become clear.

The key is deautomatization. So much of our lives runs on automatic pilot:  anything that takes you out of the rut of custom and habit can help you to see a new world with new eyes.

Stir up your feelings by putting aside the usual security blankets that soften your perception of life. For a few evenings do without alcohol, without the radio, without your cigarettes. Make it a point to try things that take you out of your usual routing; if you customarily drive to work, for example, take the bus. You may find yourself with eyes open in new emotional territory as well. This is why vacations are so invigorating.

My mother has her own way of dealing with the crisis:  any time she has to make a perplexing decision, she shakes up her usual routine by doing things differently. "If my inclination is to zig, I zag," she said. "If I invariably say no, this time I say yes." What you need most in this pursuit of yourself are flexibility and a readiness, an eagerness, for surprises.

The journey to self-knowledge is long and full of stops and starts, a frustrating journey if you're anxious for relief of tormenting skin disease. Most of my patients keep up an encouraging pace of progress by combining the exercises in this and the next few chapters with relaxation and imaging techniques (which will be discussed later in this book) that aim to relieve symptoms directly.

Working with self-discovery and symptom-relief exercises simultaneously or alternately, my patients find their own rhythm. Going back and forth from one to the other is like walking:  one foot's advance enables the other foot to take the next step. Reducing symptoms directly with relaxation, for instance, often increases self-esteem (you've shown yourself that you can control your body), which gives you courage to face buried needs more squarely. A little improvement begins a cycle of change.

Even when your skin seems firmly on the road to recovery, keep on pushing for more self-discovery. If you simply clip a weed, it may or may not return. You're far more likely to be rid of it for good if you pull it up by the roots.

THE ANIMAL TEST

Self-discovery is an ambitious undertaking, but it isn't all hard work. In fact, the most useful thing you can bring to the task is the spirit of play. When you use your imagination, to daydream, to tell stories, you step out of the logic-bound world and into a reality of your mind's creation where you're most likely to glimpse your inner self.

One of the best ways to discover the inner you is actually a game, the sort kids play when they ask each other, "If you had to be an animal, what would you want to be?" The answer to this lighthearted question can be most revealing:  it's not always easy to guess who would want to be a tiger and who a cuddly puppy.

A few years back, a psychologist named Cole was leafing through a newspaper magazine supplement while enjoying his Sunday morning coffee. This issue featured one of those popular quizzes that invite readers to do a bit of instant self-analysis. "What animal would you like to be?" it asked, providing a system to translate answers into a quick personality readout. Such simplified self-tests offer little beyond a few minutes' diversion, but Cole was intrigued. He worked the notion up into a concise but searching psychological test, which has become known as the Cole Animal Test.

The Cole Animal Test consists of just three questions:  What three animals would you most like to be? What three animals would you least like to be? Why? It's hard to believe that such a simple exercise can reveal much of the mind's complexities, but I've found that it gives enough information in a few minutes' time to hold its own amid a battery of fancy diagnostic testing. It's a real shortcut to emotional issues.

Since the dawn of human consciousness, we've seen ourselves and our lives reflected in the animals with which we share the earth. Primitive people identified their tribes, their gods, even the good and evil forces of life with totem animals, such as the bear and the fox. Animals and people who change into animals figure prominently in folk tales and fairy tales. Our deep kinship with animals is expressed in poetry, in the signs of the zodiac, and in our affection for and identification with cartoon characters such as Bugs Bunny and Donald Duck.

Animals seem to embody our emotions, fears, and fantasies. The deer doesn't strike us as a shy animal but as shyness come to life. The tiger of William Blake's famous poem "Tiger! Tiger! burning bright/In the forests of the night" is a symbol of pure energy and rage.

The word symbol may have a dry academic sound but, in fact, we think in symbols all the time; the ability to do so comes as naturally as the ability to think in words. Symbols express ideas and feelings that otherwise elude us. A man who struggles with pent-up anger that he's afraid to express (or even admit to himself) may find it impossible to say:  "I wish I was powerful. I wish I could be angry and unafraid of the consequences." He can say it, though, all in symbolic form:  "I wish I was a tiger." This is the beauty of the Animal Test.

Looking sensitively at fantasy symbols opens up a channel of communication with that inner you that seems determined to remain hidden (that's why I stress becoming aware of dreams and daydreams). The Animal Test is an invitation to daydream in an organized way, to wander like a child in an imaginary world where people change into animals and back again. It's a simple exercise. Just answer these three questions:


What three animals would you most like to be?

What three animals would you least like to be?

Why have you made each choice?

This is not an exercise to ponder and mull over. The three "most" animals and three "least" should come quickly to mind?after all, it's only a game. Just think about it and write them down and then come up with some simple, direct explanations for your choices.

The work comes when you sit down to figure out the meaning of your answers. Here is more raw material for self-analysis:  just as you've been working on the messages carried by your dreams, daydreams, and fleeting feelings, you can look to your Animal Test answers for clues to your inner self.

This test has no simple scoring key, no turn-to-page-163 answers. What kind of person would like to be a beagle or an eagle? Be alert for surprises.

One of my patients, a doctor's wife, chose only one animal that she'd most like to be: a tiger. A tiger was powerful, proud, and independent, she said. It had claws to strike out. Her answer emphasized concern with two of the primary needs we've discussed:  respect and protection. A tiger is beautiful but not cuddly; its beauty is appreciated from a distance. This need for "hands-off" respect may have been the legacy of a childhood with an overbearing mother who constantly inflicted her own needs and beliefs with no respect for my patient's boundaries.

The animals she least wanted to be were worms and bugs, because they are "small, helpless, and disgusting . . . they can be too easily stepped on and snuffed out." What was striking here, what is often striking, was how the two sets of answers complemented each other. If the tiger symbolized protection, respect, and effective anger, the worms and bugs suggested a frightening life devoid of both. In my patients' words, these creatures are beneath contempt and unprotected against extermination.

Put very simply, the positive choices in the Animal Test, the animals you'd most like to be, symbolize wishes; the negative "least like to be" choices symbolize fears. For this patient, the wish was for protection and respect; the fear was of being contemptible and vulnerable. Positive and negative choices, like wishes and fears, are two sides of the same theme.

A twelve-year-old girl who suffered from warts most wanted to be a monkey "because they're cute and fun." She least wanted to be a pig ("They're dirty and yucky") or a frog, whose warts are "repulsive." Here the theme is lovability. The cute monkey is lovable and the pig and frog are repulsive: they repel love. The warty frog is a particularly poignant choice, all too clearly reflecting the girl's self-image. I found these choices revealing in a twelve-year-old, on the edge of adolescence. The monkey is lovable in a childlike way while the pig is repulsive in a down-to-earth, dirty way, suggesting a frightened view of the sexuality awaiting her. Passing from a cute childhood to sexual adulthood threatened the loss of love.

Responses rarely pick out a single theme:  love, protection, and respect are usually mixed in combinations as unique as the people who take the test. A California woman, a very successful business executive troubled by recurrent eczema attacks, said the animals she'd most want to be were a panther, "strong, smart, and fast" ; a lion or a racehorse, for the same reasons; or an eagle, which "flies free, has flights of fancy." She least wanted to be a monkey "because I don't like to be laughed at or to mimic others" ' or a giraffe because it was "awkward and tall. It stands out and looks funny."

The issue of respect stands out in her responses. If you're not thoroughly admirable, you'll be an object of ridicule. Protection is an important sub theme:  the panther, lion, and eagle are powerful creatures, well protected with claws and talons, but the choices suggested some conflict in her quest for respect and protection. The giraffe is a large animal and definitely one that stands out, as did my patient in her own field, yet it was a negative choice:  standing out too much or in the wrong way makes you laughable.

A sub theme implied here, one that arises frequently, is anger and aggressiveness. The physician's wife similarly chose her tiger for its independence and protection, she said, but her emphasis on claws brought out its potential to strike out. It was her inability to find the tiger within that brought this woman to see me. Instead of striking back at her infuriating mother, she constantly clawed her own skin.

In interpreting your answers, don't concentrate on meanings at the expense of themes. What common chords unite the animals you've chosen? This is not an exercise in logic:  the wishes and fears beneath your symbol animals may be expressed subtly, even backward, and working them out demands more creativity than rationality. The person who chooses a tiger as an animal because the tiger is allowed to be angry and no one can stop him and the person who wants to be a lamb because lambs are never angry are not opposites at all. To the contrary, they both need to work through the task of expressing anger, one of the eleven tasks discussed in chapter 2.

Instead of asking what the test shows about your wishes and fears, a more useful question is where the emotional action is. The person who fears losing control and the person who craves freedom are dealing with the same issue but in different ways. They are both grappling with autonomy. The area of conflict and confusion is more important than the specific wishes and fears that define it. Try inverting your answers:  imagine for a moment that the animals you chose as most desirable are actually the ones you least want to be and vice versa. Play the game with an open mind and you may stumble over some very suggestive surprises.

The ultimate question, of course, is:  Why should the person who emerges from the Animal Test, who wants to be a dog but would hate to be a weasel, have your skin problem? Connecting your fantasy animals and your skin is a creative process, and I don't want to prescribe a rigid method. I would suggest being systematic, however.

In the first stage of the test, picking animals and saying why, don't even think about "what it all means." Just be spontaneous and honest with yourself. Wondering whether you're saying the right thing, self-editing, shuts down the creative process, as anyone who's struggled with writer's block can testify.

Once you've written down the raw material of your answers, look for themes, the ways in which positive choices and negative choices group around the same issues. What motifs recur? Then try to connect these themes to the three fundamental needs for love, respect, and protection. How do these unresolved needs suggest emotional tasks? How might your skin be working to accomplish these tasks?

In actual practice, interpreting your answers will not be such a straightforward process. Possibly, as soon as you start thinking about your reason for choosing a wolf, the need to express anger will come to mind, and you'll recognize this task in your other answers, too. Don't expect all your choices to focus on any one need or task. They may come from different corners of your complex personality and thus arrange themselves in parallel, not converging, lines. Your answers will very possibly suggest three, even four tasks.

One question that some find fertile is:  If you were any of these animals, what tasks wouldn't you face? The animals you'd like to be have what you wish for (as least in fantasy)? they've won the game just by being eagles or tigers. The ones you'd hate to be can't have what you wish--ants and cockroaches can't be loved, respected, or protected (at least in our human minds) so they needn't str

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