by Kendra Crossen
Written for the Shambhala Publications Autumn/Winter Catalogue 1989. This interview highlights Bosnak’s 1989 book Dreaming with an AIDS Patient, which was reissued by Delta in 1997 under the title Christopher's Dreams: Dreaming and Living with AIDS.
Robert Bosnak is a Dutch Jewish heterosexual psychoanalyst. Christopher is his Southern fundamentalist Christian homosexual patient who died of AIDS. These two extraordinary people got together and wrote a book.
I went to Robbie’s office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to talk to him about his work. When I arrived, I told him that I had no idea how to conduct an interview. He seemed equally unprepared to answer questions, so we settled comfortably into our common condition of not‑knowing. It was an auspicious beginning to a conversation with the man who’d written, in A Little Course in Dreams, that complete bafflement is the ideal state in which to work on a dream.
“Why should we pay attention to our dreams?” I began.
He appeared startled by the question. “Well, first of all because they’re there,” he said. We spend a large portion of our lives asleep and dreaming, he explained, and we can either dream it away or pay attention to it. Paying attention to it has the advantage of undermining our belief in the primacy of ordinary consciousness: we realize that not everything that happens to us occurs during the waking state. This awakens us to the inner life of the soul.
I told Robbie that some of my Buddhist friends feel uncomfortable about the idea of soul and asked if he could define this strange term. He burst into loud barks of laughter. It was a wonderful answer—but I still needed something to write down, so he said, “For me soul is the faculty that produces images. Soul is a very real substance—just as dreams, while you’re dreaming them, are very real. When you begin to work on soul, that substance begins to transform and produces new images. Although soul is constantly in flux, it does have patterns, and you can get to those patterns by getting deeply into the dream image. As you concentrate on the emotional essence of the image, the image becomes denser; it begins to ‘cook’ (in alchemical terms) and transform. Soul by itself will constantly transform, but you can help the transformation at places where it gets stuck or where you have to work on it because you hurt so much or because you’re confronted with an image that is so big that it forces you to change.”
Such a powerful, transformative image is at the heart of Dreaming with an AIDS Patient. It is so powerful, in fact, that it seems to have overwhelmed the therapist as well as the patient. “When you are confronted with something as terrible as AIDS.” Robbie acknowledged, “all your theoretical foundations are shaken. It doesn’t matter whether you approach this as a Freudian, a Jungian or an Adlerian—you’re really thrown back on your naked self.”
I asked Robbie what kind of transformation Christopher had undergone as a result of his dream work. He struggled to articulate an answer, at one point burying his head in his hands in frustration. I wondered if he was having trouble expressing himself in English, but he said no, that wasn’t it.
I observed that writing the book must have been very painful for Robbie. He agreed. He and Christopher had planned to write a book together about Christopher’s dreams, and after Christopher died, it took Robbie a couple of years to overcome his resistance to completing the project. “In order to generate the energy to write the book, I presented the material to groups of psychotherapists in Boston and in Holland, Switzerland, East Germany, and Japan,” he recalled. “Everyone realized that I was like the Ancient Mariner, going from one wedding to the next, reciting my tale. The resistance made me unwilling to believe that I had ever actually worked with Christopher. By telling my story again and again, it became more real—the images became denser, just like in dream work—until I was able to write the book."
Before publication, the manuscript was adapted for the theater by the playwright Jon Lipsky and performed in Boston. A Boston Globe reviewer, in praising the performance, observed that Lipsky’s play raised the dream material “to a kind of anguished psychological art.” The book, too, has this dramatic quality and, because of its emotional power, transcends the conventional case‑history genre.
Dreaming with an AIDS Patient is in fact a very difficult book to categorize. For one thing, it is as much about the analyst’s feelings as the patient’s and in that sense has the aura of a confessional work. The feelings expressed by the analyst range from physical attraction to “Jewish mother” anxiety, from fantasies of being the omnipotent healer (“the little Dutch boy who can stem the flood of AIDS with his finger in the dike”) to a sense of helplessness. There are moments of joyful masculine camaraderie, grief, compassion, and acceptance. It is this dimension of the book that makes me regard it as a very moving love story.
Robbie and I went on to discuss some of his other interests: for example, our culture’s fascination with the notion of “the end of the world”—the subject of a 1983 conference, “Facing Apocalypse,” which he helped to organize. The aim of the conference was to examine our collective dreams and images of apocalypse and explore the hidden impulses and anxieties connected with nuclear war. Through such scrutiny, the participants hoped to promote awareness of the psychological undercurrents that influence political action and threaten to make our fantasies of nuclear destruction come true. “I believe it is important to concentrate on archetypal images in politics,” Robbie said, “because I’m a Dutch Jew, and I know the way that a collective dream—in this case, the Nazi dream of ‘cleansing the Aryan spirit’—can turn into a catastrophic nightmare.”
A second conference, to be held in Newport, Rhode Island, in the spring of 1990, will focus on visions of the millennium; heavy Soviet participation is expected. Robbie has also been involved in a film project with Mark Whitney (producer and director of a documentary on Jung, Matter of Heart), in which Robbie works with teenagers from all over the world on their dreams of nuclear war. In addition, Robbie has explored the themes of dreams and nuclear war in a fantasy novel, Crossover.
It was time to end the interview, but Robbie wasn’t finished: he was still searching for the words to describe Christopher’s transformation. At last he found them.
“For Christopher, AIDS had become an archetypal image that surrounded him all the time and that he could never wake up from. It was something monstrous that he could not control, like a freight train about to mow him down. Through his dream work, he began to experience the disease as an entity that he could have a dialogue with. Once he was able to establish communication with the archetypal image, he no longer felt that the disease was happening to him as a passive victim. Instead, he could actively connect to it, and contain it.”
Also important was the change in Christopher’s relationship to his maternal side and to femininity in general. Before, he was anxious about appearing effeminate and hated “queens” and “faggots.” Working through the many feminine images in his dreams, he became able, as Robbie put it, “to mother himself, to hold the suffering AIDS patient in his arms, and to feel love for that part of his being.”
As I left Robert Bosnak’s office, I thought of another question I might have asked him: “Was it worth it?” All that intense feeling, painful emotion, and suffering-and then the ordeal of recording it all for posterity. But I realized that I already knew where the answer lay—in this exceptional book, Dreaming with an AIDS Patient.