Before understanding the human psyche, he could look at those he loved and see beauty and goodness. As Ted looked more closely at these concepts, to see through them to their causes, they began to disappear. They vanished because he could see nothing behind them. There was no soul, God, or universal standards to give them substance.

Ted has gone blind, not by seeing too little, but by seeing too much. He is a highly sought-after therapist with the uncanny ability to see through people. All their moral pretenses and rationalizations are no match for him. Even hidden traumas that stand in the way of understanding do not cloud his vision. Ted can strip people bare and see straight to the core of anyone’s psychological makeup.

Trained by the best, Ted combined Jung’s understanding of the psyche with Freud’s understanding that sexual desires drive all humans. There is no false narrative he cannot see through. He once helped a woman dealing with the guilt of adultery by showing her that her subconscious had absorbed the social construct of monogamy. It was a false archetype that was causing her problems. She had done nothing wrong. She needed to correct her psyche, not find forgiveness.

He helped another man dealing with neurotic anxiety by showing him how his puritanical upbringing had formed his conscious mind. The longer the patient repressed his sexual urges, the more they pushed against his fictitious moral boundaries. This unconscious inner conflict caused him to feel as if he was in danger. Since he could not identify the threat, he lived with chronic and irrational fears.

Ted was proud that one publication once referred to him as “the therapist who deconstructs souls.” He wanted to eradicate the concept of the soul altogether because of its relation to the imaginary idea of God. This framework worked well for Ted for a while; he had risen to prominence and affluence, but then something began happening to him.

He began to look at his wife and kids differently. One day, he overheard his daughter singing, but all he could think about was how her voice patterns reflected her subconscious needs. For years, he felt he knew his family, but the idea of “them” began to take on new meaning.

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