Though many CBSRMT episodes have a moral to the story, this is the most philosophical one I’ve heard so far – it’s almost like the moral *is* the story. So here are my philosophical (meaning “rather boringâ€) comments about it.

To me, the main point is made in E.G. Marshall’s comments preceeding Act III about the Trouble Tree . We all prefer our own troubles - even if we are given the chance to change them, nobody actually wants to or tries to. It hammers on this point pretty heavily: from Alice in Wonderland, “We run all day just to stay in the same placeâ€; the heroine’s line at the end, “To have gone through all that, and then to have to face it all over againâ€, and the therapist’s assessment, “What we’ve done, we must do again and againâ€ until we find the root cause of the compulsion to repeat.

I thought the fun was in guessing the real-life analogies to the dream elements, and I’m flattered as a listener that there was no “Moishe the Explainerâ€ scene (as Peter Falk once called it) at the end where the therapist tells us all what everything in the dream means.

Here’s my take: as some have already pointed out, the surgeon pretty obviously represents her father. But he also represents her longing for someone to authoritatively show her what to do in life, to answer her questions and help her out – a role she herself plays for her husband (both present and former). But the pressure of this constant demand by her husband to “tell me what to doâ€, while he doggedly avoids making any positive contribution to any decision, triggers her asthma attacks (and we hear an example of this happening). This all leads me to conjecture that the head represents her husband – she needs a husband transplant. Actually, the first answer was to “remove your headâ€, not transplant it. “It was so simple, so obvious. It seemed good, right, the absolutely correct thing to do.â€ But then of course, he wouldn’t just leave her with nothing, so we’ll give you a replacement. The tragedy is that when she actually did it (the first divorce) what she got as a replacement was another copy of the same thing. Just as with the new head.

So she was repeating her life (and her mother’s life), destined to do so until we uncover the root cause of the compulsion, which we are led to believe lies in her parents and their relationship to each other and to her. There’s more to dig for there, but this is already a pretty long and dry post, so I’ll stop here as a public service. Great episode, though.