Childhood Ambitions

What did you wish you could do when you were a child?

Have you found that no matter how fantastical it might have been then, that now you can in some way do that thing, even just in a small way?

This idea has been knocking around my mind for a while, but a recent comment I made at CIP's pretty well summed up one of my childhood ambitions. Here's part of the comment in case you don't want to click a link:

And my amateur psychoanalysis is an offshoot of my childhood ambition to be able to do the "Vulcan Mind Meld" like Spock. Of course, it might be more effective if I could actually put my fingers on someone's head to 'read' him. And in certain cases, I might even require to 'meld' in a more intense and exhaustive manner in order to really get the full picture. ;-)

Yeah, I'm a geek and I love the original Star Trek. I grew up watching it. I never got into the newer shows.



To me as a child the Vulcan Mind Meld was incredibly sexy. I so wanted to be able to do that, or have it done to me. And yes, I was somewhat precocious and sensed the intimacy of such an act even if I didn't think of it in explicitly sexual ways. Maybe I was a little bit in love with Spock because he could do that, and I thought that really experiencing another's thoughts and feelings was as close to them as you could get.





One of my favorite episodes was "Devil in the Dark" in which Spock manages to do the Mind Meld with the silicon-based Horta to learn that it was a she, a momma in fact, that was protecting her eggs. A man who could even communicate with a rock was alright by me. ;-)

It's unfortunate that Freud never mastered the Vulcan Mind Meld, but then it wasn't even invented when he was alive. ;-) I've been studying a bit about the history of feminism in preparation for a post about the New Feminine Mystique. In my reading I found that Freud longed to understand women but never succeeded. He once said:

The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is, what does a woman want?

Well, Dr. Freud, I have an answer for you, but this isn't quite the time for that yet. I'd just like to say that it doesn't require that a man knows know to do the Vulcan Mind Meld, but it does have to do with his willingness to let a woman do that to him.

Stay tuned for the next installment...

Update: Clicking the above sentence will take you to my answer to Freud.