PsychBytes

A publication of the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis

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First Love*

Paula J. Hamm LPC
Member, Washington Center for Psychoanalysis
February 2015 | Volume 2 | Issue 2

Emotions matter. Pretending that emotions do not exist creates dissonant background music that, eventually, cannot be drowned out by pleasurable distractions.

Such was the case of the forlorn man who came to my office with a sensual dream. Entering the room he went to the couch and lay down. “I had a dream last night that I have to tell you about.”

Beatle music was playing on the stereo: “Would you believe in a love at first sight? Yes, I am certain that it happens all the time.” My hands embracing her face, we looked into each other’s eyes as if this were the last time together, or perhaps the first. Skin, breath and hair seemed to be crystallizing into the words, “I’ll never stop loving you” as I began pulling her mouth to mine.

“I woke before the kiss. Gazing out the window watching the gentle swaying of the trees in the wind, my mind drifted in and out of the dream. It felt so real leaving me breathless with my heart pounding. Tears filled my eyes blurring my vision of the trees through the open window.”

Dreaming evoked what had been unspoken. “I rejected a beautiful woman in my youth. Now I am haunted by her loving memory.” Following his emotional footprints together, we began to navigate through his youthful emotions with traces of yet an even earlier love, mother.

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On Leaving and Holding

One aspect of Joachim Trier’s 2026, Academy Award-nominated film, Sentimental Value, lingers: the idea that a house can hold memory, and in doing so, remind people of who they are and who they have been. The family home in the film becomes a kind of unconscious structure, a repository for grief, history, and the versions of themselves they could not keep.

I have never had that kind of house.

I have moved every two to four years for as long as I can remember. My life can be mapped through new cupboards and unfamiliar ceilings. I learned early how to fold myself into spaces never meant to hold me for long. Even now, some part of me is already preparing an exit.

WHY MAKE MIRROR ART IN WAR-TORN TEHRAN?

Why does Aref Montazeri, an Iranian sculptor whose art sells for over a million dollars, continue to make his towering works from shards of mirror glass in his studio in Tehran, amid window-shattering bomb blasts? He gently wraps his creations in shock-absorbing material, but why continue with such a fragile medium? In a Wall Street Journal article by Kelly Crow (May 2-3, 2026), he says, “Nothing, not even war, should prevent us from pursuing what we aim for.”

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