THE LIFE AND WORK OF BERNARD W. BAIL, M.D.

by Lynda Share, Ph.D

Truth through interpretation is love, is comfort for despair, is security against terror, is growth in the face of death, is friendliness in the face of loneliness; it is, in short, the summing up of the most virtuous qualities developed by humanity in the course of history.

Bernard W. Bail
"To Practice One's Art" 
 

Genius is "a rare combination of unusual intelligence, remarkable insight, and amazing inventiveness...It is also about creative thought, courage, determination and a willingness to look at things from a new and surprising perspective" (Goodwin 2005).  In Roman mythology, genius is a guardian spirit of a person, place or institution (Encarta World English Dictionary).

These definitions portray the gifts of psychoanalyst Bernard Bail: a man with a deeply spiritual center, a man of letters and a man of science, who began with the study of literature and eventually devoted his life to psychoanalysis, specifically to the study of man's unconscious.  He felt there was nothing more important than to understand -- to know the truth of how we became who we are, how we live or do not live a life, and how we can heal often intolerable suffering.

Dr. Bail found the dream to be the sacred source of wisdom: a Rosetta stone of mental life, recording every aspect of a person's existence and encompassing a life in its entirety.  His intensive, empirical explorations into the dream over the course of five decades of psychoanalytic practice led to an innovative method of conducting psychoanalysis at the deepest layers of the mind and brought forth his remarkable discovery of psychological imprinting -- a discovery of the most fundamental aspect of man's humanness as well as man's inhumanity to man.

In 1942, Dr. Bail had planned to become a teacher.  But World War II changed everything.  Instead of flying to the Sorbonne, where he was to obtain a doctorate in French literature, he flew to Germany as a lead radar navigator of a B-24 Liberator Bomber.  He was shot down twice, the second time on his twenty-fifth mission.  Captured by the Nazis, he remained a prisoner of war until the liberation in May of 1945.

His war experience changed the trajectory of his life.  He decided to become a physician, a childhood interest inspired by his uncle who was a physician.  During World War II, this interest was rekindled as he endured the experience of being a prisoner of war and witnessed the ravages of war in his twenty-five bombing missions.  He decided that the capacity to heal human suffering was paramount, and as he was completing medical school he chose psychoanalysis as his specialty.  He had become particularly interested in how the mind affects the body, eventually concluding that they operate as one.

Like all mainstream psychoanalysts of the 1950s, Dr. Bail was trained as a Freudian.  However, he treated two terminally ill patients psychoanalytically, and in doing so, he put aside all existing rules and teachings of psychoanalytic institute practice that indicated one was never to analyze a dying patient.  His article, "To Practice One's Art," was one of the first -- if not the first -- published works in the psychoanalytic literature of an analysis conducted with a dying patient through to the very end of life.  Analyzing the dying patient is now an accepted aspect of the conduct of psychoanalysis.

In the early 1960s, Dr. Bail and several other Los Angeles analysts came to the conclusion that something was missing in the strict Oedipal analysis Freud's teachings prescribed.  Their patients were not improving in the way they had hoped.  In fact, their patient’s progress seemed superficial.  The analysts felt guilty; they should be helping more.

They began searching for alternative approaches to Classical psychoanalysis, and found new perspectives in the English School and Object Relations theory.  Pioneered by Melanie Klein (1975) and Ronald Fairbairn (1952), respectively, both theorists developed a view of mental life that included a complex internal world.  Melanie Klein located psychopathology in infancy, moving Freudian ideas of the Oedipal complex into earlier years of development.  Fairbairn, on the other hand, considered the infant's need and capacity to seek human contact -- what he called "object seeking" -- pivotal to mature development rather than the negotiation of instinctual drives, as Freud would have it.  Klein and Fairbairn were looked upon with great suspicion within the psychoanalytic community, which strictly adhered to Freudian principles.

By the mid 1960s Dr. Bail had become a central figure in establishing Object Relations theory and practice in Los Angeles.  In April of 1966, he invited and underwrote the initial stay in Los Angeles of one of the greater thinkers of Kleinian persuasion, Dr. Wilfred Bion.  In the years that came before, as well as during Dr. Bion's stay in Los Angeles, Dr. Bail underwrote the visits of other distinguished London analysts to teach and train analysts in Los Angeles.  Throughout the years, in countless supervisions with Dr. Bion and other Kleinian and Object Relations analysts, in weekly and monthly study groups and in conferences and lectures, an ever-expanding group of Los Angeles psychoanalysts explored new ways and methods of conducting psychoanalysis.  Dr. Bail himself spent twelve years in analysis with Dr. Bion until 1979, when Dr. Bion returned to England.

But in 1979, something was still amiss.  With twenty years of analysis and supervision from all perspectives available at the time -- Freudian, Kleinian and Object Relations -- Dr. Bail felt his work with his patients had not reached the deeper layers of the mind, and thus had not led to profound change.  Neither had his own analysis.  With great sadness about the dissatisfying outcome of this all-encompassing, passionate, and challenging endeavor, Dr. Bail decided he must go out on his own and begin anew.

Courageously, he set aside all of what he had learned at the Institute, preserving only his love of the dream, which he feels he inherited from Freud via his (Dr. Bail's) Classical analyst, Carel van der Heide.  As did Freud, Bail developed a conviction that the unconscious was the core of mental life -- the wellspring of human feeling, motivation, and action -- and the dream was the only way to truly access this depth of being.

Freud had begun his explorations into the mind by simply listening to his patients.  But then he felt that, in order to be accepted by the scientific community, he must frame what he listened to within the context of the science of his time: Newtonian physics -- energy theory (Holt 1973).  As a result, the brilliance of Freud's discoveries could not fully manifest.  Freud's theory of dream analysis (1900) required a narrow interpretation of each dream, largely confined to drive discharge manifest as sexual and aggressive wish fulfillment.  Such confinement clouded the process of discovery and precluded the unearthing of the immense richness of unconscious understanding of the whole human entity -- from the very beginning of life to the very end and everything in between.

THE DREAM

Dr. Bail decided to begin as Freud initially did, by simply listening to his patients.  Also like Freud (1900), he systematically gathered detailed associations to elements of the patient's dream, but did so without Freud's assumption that each element served a disguising function.  Thus he simply listened to his patients' thoughts, their dreams, and their associations to the individual elements of their dreams.  In other words, he approached his patients empirically, without any a priori theoretical framework regarding their dreams' latent meanings.

There are no preconceived meanings or symbols, but each word, each dream element, each association is taken as new  and fresh as if one knew nothing at all, as if one were a newborn baby.  These disparate associations are then considered in relation to each other, and seem to reveal a coherent story that the patient's unconscious is trying to tell. (Bail 1993, personal communication)

As he worked in this method, he viewed the dream as his "North Star," addressing with patients largely what emerged from their dreams.  Doing so, he found himself seeing and understanding things that had never been touched upon in other theories, and he began to make interpretations of whatever he heard and saw to his patients, even though he did not know how such interpretations could be conceptualized psychoanalytically.  He came to his understandings entirely through experience, person-by-person, dream-by-dream.

He found that every aspect of a dream is important and is integral to the meaning of the dream.  Nothing can be ignored or discarded.  All the parts of a dream must fit together and must illuminate the state of mind of the patient.  He began to track the effects of the analyst's interpretive efforts on the patients.  Abundant evidence accumulated over the years that the unconscious itself is very precise, illuminating one or several specific issues that must be addressed at any given time.  Failure to understand the precise meaning or meanings presented in any given dream emerged as a disorganizing experience for the patient, just as a baby experiences its mother's failure to understand her infant's cry of distress.

Dr. Bail also pursued an unconventional method of working with patients in this process of discovery: he encouraged them to examine everything he (Dr. Bail) said.  If something seemed a mistake, the patient was encouraged to voice this.

I did not ask the patient to trust me or to have faith.  I merely
would say, "Think of what I am showing you, see if it doesn't  make sense in the light of what you have told me...keep your skepticism; examine everything I say.  I have no objections to  that.  If you find a mistake in what I say, tell me and then we both  will look at it.  The only way to get a true picture of your life is if  we understand it from the beginning and build it brick by brick.  It is important that I understand it, but it is much more important  that you do." (Bail 1999)

As Dr. Bail describes it, he spent days and weeks struggling over the correctness of interpretations.  In the past, he had spent months, even years, agonizing over aspects of theory from the different analytic perspectives.  Which perspective gave the most accurate understanding of the patient's mind?  Which perspective seemed most true to the patient's being?  Most often interpretations of the dreams from the extant theories were not entirely sufficient and lacked a deep conviction for the patient.

He also realized that to reach the patient, he must let go of a method of working analytically that was considered a foundational element of Classical analytic practice: the analyst's silence stance.  Such a stance was considered an essential aspect of analytic technique designed to prevent a disturbance in the flow of the unconscious.  Patients were left for days, even weeks with barely a response from the analyst.  Bail began to see that such a stance was analogous to leaving a baby rather endlessly without a response from the mother -- an untenable situation.  He began to ask his patients questions to find out more about their thoughts and associations.  Bail found that posing questions did not impede the flow of the unconscious.  On the contrary, it provided him with a deeper understanding of the patient's suffering and helped him to make more precise interpretations -- a process that yielded a sense of unity and integration to the mind.

What emerged through this process of discovery was a broadened understanding of the fundamental nature and content of the unconscious, and therefore of the scope and use of the dream in psychoanalysis, than had been evident in Freud’s drive-related Classical theory.  Dr. Bail determined that the unconscious encompasses the entire range of human phenomena.  Along with wish fulfilling fantasy, the unconscious contains representations of reality: not only distortion based upon projection, but actual and accurate intuitions about self and other – intuitions that require validation by the analyst for the patient to begin to know his own mind.

Through his depth work in the dream as well as from his observations and experiences of patients in the consulting room, it came upon him that patients were largely dealing with issues from their infancies.  “When one went layer by layer through to the source of what appeared as an adult problem, one consistently landed in earliest infancy” (Bail 2001a).  As he continued to navigate more deeply into the dream, Dr. Bail saw that the unconscious goes as far back in development as earliest infancy – even prenatal time – as patients’ dreams began to reveal experiences in the womb and from their first hours, days and weeks of life.  He realized that adult patients were not just dealing with issues from their infancies, but were in fact unconsciously living mentally in these earliest experiences, as if their internal worlds continued to exist in that very early time and space.

As he described it, the patient “was a baby who could talk, but who was still a baby in all emotional respects” (Bail 1999).  In addition, he noted, to his surprise, that the patient physically present in the room was often not the person mentally present in the analytic session.  Instead, the dream material made clear that the patient was completely immersed inside the personality of another, so much so that the patient did not really exist.  Thus, all interpretations given to the patient physically in the room would be to no avail because mentally the patient simply wasn’t there.

The first task at hand then became how to bring the patient, body and mind, back into the room – back to a self in current time and space.  This was often a formidable task, as most patients (most human beings, actually) live their entire lives without a real, present self.

Asleep to themselves, often for a lifetime, Bail’s interpretations of patients’ dreams began to “wake the patient up” so they could begin to develop their own minds and their own selves.

Dr. Bail concluded that the dream locates where in unconscious time and space the patient is mentally living (such as in his infancy or early childhood), and, when unconsciously not himself, who he is being (his mother, father, grandparent, sibling, etc.).  It also became clear to Dr. Bail that the particular dream or dreams the patient would bring to any given analytic session depicted the essential unconscious situation that must be illuminated at that moment in time for the patient to “grow his mind” and to “move forward in life.”  Most significantly in this process, the unconscious through the dream would bring forth the truth of the patient’s life, representing the key to the individual’s sense of reality, unity and integration.  Thus, the dream in all its various aspects “finds the patient,” and finding the patient brings hope.

In the course of this work, Dr. Bail began to understand the process of interpretation and the nature of the analytic dyad in a new way, leaving behind long-held truths put forth in the Classical theory in which he was trained. 

Dr. Bail, among other contemporary theorists (Kohut 1971, 1977; Stolorow and Atwood 1992; Renik 1993), observed that the analyst and patient were part of a two-person field and that a mental exchange between the members of that field continuously took place.  There isn’t a blank screen with a “neutral analyst” and an “ill patient,” as had been the thinking of Classical theory.  Bail’s understandings regarding this dyad, however, extended deeply into the unconscious nature of the field, to the unconscious connection between mother and infant – in other words, how the unconscious is passed to unconscious – mother to fetus and infant, analyst to patient, and vice versa.

Thus Dr. Bail found that the dream is not just the analyst’s royal road to the patient’s unconscious; the dream is also the patient’s royal road to the unconscious of the analyst.  The infant will constantly “search” the unconscious of his mother to try to locate the mother’s central unconscious anxieties now housed within him.  In whatever way he can, the baby will try to bring these anxieties to light, calling them to the mother’s attention.  Similarly, within the analytic process, the patient will search the analyst’s unconscious, continually trying to address the unconscious anxieties projected by the analyst into the patient.  The analyst must address and acknowledge these “analyst projections” along with maternal and paternal projections as they arise during treatment.

Acknowledging a patient’s unconscious findings confirms them, and develops the patient’s capacity for intuition, which is an essential part of the patient’s authentic self.  These acknowledgments are not handled by way of the analyst’s self-disclosure.  Rather, they are addressed through interpretation of the patient’s unconscious perceptions as revealed in the patient’s dreams.  The dream is of real value here in that it provides a graphic portrayal of these perceptions and can directly address the patient’s unconscious reading of the analyst’s unconscious.

At times, very painful, unflattering observations of the analyst may appear in the patient’s unconscious.  The fact that the analyst interprets these unconscious perceptions in the same manner as he would any other unconscious perception means that the analyst can be relied upon to tell the truth, regardless of the nature of that truth.  The patient experiences, often for the first time, that what does not belong to his mental space is graciously acknowledged and thereby removed.  This allows for a true “mental space” in which the patient’s own mental development can occur.  The process can be truly transformative and liberating for the patient – a relationship above all ego-saving considerations, devoted only to the patient’s growth.

Finally, Dr. Bail found, to his surprise, that, as analysis progressed and the patient’s day-to-day problems had been addressed, a pathway seemed to open:  patients began dreaming about spirituality.  Spiritual figures emerged in dreams along with a wish on the patient’s part to engage in a higher consciousness.  In a certain sense, analysis appeared as a rediscovery of the ancient wisdom of the shamans, who saw illness as a manifestation of the separation of the soul from the body, and cure as an attempt to reunite these two elements (Ellenberger 1970).  Dr. Bail’s patients’ dreams seemed to reflect such a process.  He began to feel that psychoanalysis was in part a spiritual endeavor.

In summary, from his fifty years of psychoanalytic practice – working with hundreds of patients and supervisees and listening in great detail to thousands of dreams – Dr. Bail determined that the dream serves as a beacon, bringing us the truth of our experience, the mental place in which we live, the human conflicts we are to resolve, and the means by which we can evolve as human beings.  Thus, the dream provides an invaluable tool for the development of human meaning and depth of personality, leading to the evolution of the individual’s own distinct and integrated mind and self.  Through his intensive effort, Dr. Bail came to the first of two controversial conclusions:  There simply is no analysis without dream analysis (Bail 2001a).

THE PARADIGM

From his deep explorations into the unconscious, Dr. Bail painstakingly evolved a paradigm encompassing the nature of early mental life and the infantile origin of psychopathology.  His paradigm begins with two basic understandings of human development.  First, the baby comes into the world with a potential for wholeness and integration.  And second, the central concern of the infant and the motivating force in the infant’s development is that of survival.

Patients’ dreams were confirming certain aspects of what Object Relations theorists were describing (Fairbairn 1952; Bowlby 1958, 1973; Winnicott 1965; Balint 1968).  Psychopathology does not, as Freud described, begin at the age of two or three and does not center in the love triangle of mother, father, and child; rather, psychopathology “begins at the beginning” – in the earliest mother-infant relationship.

Through extended and detailed exploration of patients’ dreams, Dr. Bail located the specific unconscious origin of psychopathology.  This origin emerged gradually in dreams of patients deeply immersed in the analytic process over a long period of time.  Thus, psychopathology emanates from the unconscious connection between mother/embryo and mother/fetus as well as mother and newborn.  What is unconscious, unwanted, and unbearably painful in the mother’s inner life is unknowingly projected into her baby’s nascent being.  And it is this painful content that the baby must carry and live out such that who he or she was supposed to become – the “spark of life” that was to be his or hers – cannot exist.

In essence, the baby must “take care of” his mother’s unconscious – hold it within his mind.  A mental connection between the infant and his mother that would lead to the unfolding of the infant’s own “spark of life,” and eventual integrated mind and an authentic self, is lost.  Simply put, the baby cannot evolve into his own being, occupied as he is with what his mother experiences as her “unbearable being.”

The baby has to abandon this potential for an authentic self because he must carry the burden of his mother’s unwanted self.  This is the case because, first and foremost, a baby will attempt to survive,   In order to do this, he must save his mother.  Thus, omnipotently he will try to rescue her by abandoning his own baby self and becoming her.  Only by “becoming his mother” and thus mothering her does he feel he can ensure his mother’s survival, and, consequently, his own.

The forceful projections from the mother’s unconscious split or shatter to various degrees the nascent mind of the infant and form an initial imprint on the infant’s being in the womb and in the earliest minutes, days, weeks, or months of the infant’s life – analogous, in some respect but not all, in the animal kingdom to how animals imprint their young. (1)

According to Dr. Bail, this imprint or signature – traumatic in nature and filled with the mother’s great emotional pain and suffering – serves as the template for all future repetition compulsion.  The baby is forced to repeat the imprinted trauma throughout his entire life.  He cannot do otherwise.  The past becomes his present, his future, his destiny.  His life is his initial imprinting by his mother.  It was the significance of this observation – that patients were continuously living their adult lives in their earliest traumatic shattering – which led Dr. Bail to his second controversial conclusion: There is no such entity as an adult analysis (Bail 2001a).

The adult of the patient before us – adult qualities, adult  functions – do not need analyzing.  It is rather when adult  function is impaired that analysis is required….and wherever  adult function is impaired, there infantile trauma has been.   All emotional illness has its origins in infancy in the womb  and in the earliest hours, weeks and months with mother and   then with other family members…and one is simply and  constantly analyzing the infant in the adult. (Bail 2001a)

It may seem as if this description is limited to the experience of the most disturbed individuals.  However, all human beings carry unconscious, unresolved, and unwanted aspects to one degree or another.  Imprinting is a universal human phenomenon.  Depending on the extent of the unwanted content and the forcefulness of the projections, the baby’s mind will split or shatter to a greater or lesser degree, and the baby will, to a greater or lesser degree, carry its mother’s imprint.  (Splitting here refers to a split into the nascent baby Self and the False Parent-Self)  The biological reality of the fetus living inside the mother’s body for nine months makes the mother the first and primary source of imprinting.  The mother’s unconscious also holds the father, siblings, grandparents, who will influence the infant and child in their own right later.

Dr. Bail observed that the infant who has lost touch with his own nascent being is a despairing infant.

The infant is in despair because he “knows” – in a way that babies “know” – that the self he is supposed to be – the “spark of real life” that is his – cannot exist.  Thus, it is this despairing  infant we must reach if his dejection is to be overcome and the spark of his essential being brought to life. (Bail 1999, personal communication)

To reiterate: the transfer of painful feelings from the mother to the fetus, newborn and infant is entirely outside the mother’s conscious awareness.  The mother, as well as the father and other family members, most often consciously provide loving feelings for the newly emerging baby.  But it is the unconscious projections that are the source of pathology, creating many difficulties and often much suffering in life for the vulnerable recipient of these projections.  It is this source of pathology that psychoanalysts must address when patients come to us to heal their suffering, thus the specific focus on the imprinting process.  There are also many mothers and fathers who are generally healthy individuals.  Their imprints encompass less of the baby’s nascent being than more disturbed parents, and the children of these healthier parents will have a better opportunity to flourish as they grow.

THE STRUGGLE

In order to find the nascent baby self lost long ago, in order to initiate this “essential spark of life,” analysis first has to overcome the patient’s resistance to change.  And in order to overcome this resistance, the maternal imprint must be overcome.  This is an extraordinarily difficult task because the imprint represents the infant’s tie to his mother.  Thus, overcoming the imprint is like leaving one’s mother, and to the baby within the patient, leaving one’s mother is tantamount to death.  Thus, movement toward growth and change is terrifying.  The individual will engage in self-destructive acts or will try to throw away his chances for health and a sense of well being because he must continue to live out this initial imprint.  This is the way he assures himself and his mother that he and she will survive and that he and she are still together, still united as one.

 The individual must go through a transformation – a process of integrating his mind, originally split by the many maternal projections.  To comprehend the difficulties of undertaking such a process, we must revisit the emotional experience the baby endures when his mind is so forcibly split.  The sense of pain the infant feels can only be compared to the splitting of the atom, a splitting undeniably accompanied by tremendous heat, noise, chaos, etc. – an overwhelmingly explosive, fragmenting, and shattering experience.

As the years go by, this baby-self now living within a grown-up person remains, with the shattered effects of his infantile experience within him.  If he wishes to integrate, he now has to undergo this catastrophic experience yet again, because the process of reintegrating a split mind creates the same nuclear force, as did the original experience.  This is one reason for the great fear of integration and transformation – the reason the individual may prefer to go through life covering the shattered effects inside.  For those who wish to proceed with integration, the process is long and must go deeply, to the very core of human existence. (Bail 1999, personal communication)

The day-to-day struggle between striving for health and returning to the maternal imprint is profound.  At the height of the struggle, one often sees, hears, and feels the presence of the maternal imprint so vividly in the consulting room that one can hardly find a single speck of the authentic self that had begun to emerge in earlier weeks or months of analysis.

The baby within the adult patient must begin to know and experience in an unconscious as well as conscious way the mother-infant imprint and how it has informed all of the patient’s life such that the patient may gain courage to mount a fight for his or her own mind and self and to face a “death” of the parental imprint.  Only if the patient lets go of the maternal imprint will he or she be able to overcome despair, light the spark, and experience his or her own true life.

THE ANALYTIC PROCESS

It began with the dream, and to the dream we must return.  What began as a tool for the discovery of the origins and processes of psychopathology became Dr. Bail’s vehicle of cure.  For it was through the patient’s dream that Dr. Bail could precisely locate the infantile trauma and pathological identifications comprising the maternal imprint, as well as the nascent baby self occupied by these identifications.

Through the interpretation of a patient’s dreams, which contain the patient’s own unconscious knowledge, Dr. Bail could portray the back and forth movement – the patient’s attempts at growth and subsequent return to the maternal imprint.  The unconscious thus made conscious allows the healthier adult aspects of the patient to process the traumatized infantile aspects.

Bail found it important not to try to fight the fierce resistance to change, but instead to begin talking to the healthy aspect of the baby in the individual, no matter how limited that healthy aspect may be, facilitating its growth and expansion, while disclosing a myriad of pathological identifications to the patient.  This ongoing detailed work in the unconscious prepares the patient for the upheaval that must occur in order to experience a true transformation.

THE IMPLICATIONS

Many individuals before Freud addressed significant elements of the unconscious and dream theory, but it was Freud who became the “discoverer” of dream analysis.  We could say similarly of Dr. Bail.  Many analysts and theorists contributed elements seen in Bail’s understanding of dream theory and technique, and many expanded the theoretical conclusion of the dream beyond Freud’s wish fulfillment.  So then why do I say that Dr. Bail has “an exceptional position” in psychoanalysis – a position that derived from his unique analytic understanding of dreams and the unconscious?

Dr. Bail is the only psychoanalyst since Freud that I can find to date within mainstream psychoanalysis who has brought a contemporary, systematic, and comprehensive approach to the analytic endeavor centered in the dream.  Thus, he retained the unconscious and the dream as the central focus of analytic work, with a rigorous application of Freud’s technique of following details of patients’ associations, while at the same time widening and deepening the scope of the dream – and therefore of unconscious meaning – to the entire breadth and depth of the human experience.  His exploration into the nucleus of the unconscious via the dream led to a deeper appreciation of the role of the beginning of mental life and the specific nature of the mother-fetal, mother-infant tie that forms the universal core of psychopathology.  His work demonstrates the importance of women – of mothers – to the human experience, a far greater influence on the nature of humankind than had been previously considered (see Bail, “A Call to a Feminine Paradigm,” 2001b).

Dr. Bail’s consistent focus on the dream led to the unfolding of spirituality through the unconscious.  His discoveries did not come from a preformed theory, rather the reverse: his theory of psychopathology is an outgrowth of a systematic method of working in the unconscious applied to each patient and in particular to each patient’s dreams.  Thus, like Freud, he refined a clinically meaningful procedure to treat patients as well as to understand the nature of mental life and the human struggles facing all of humankind.

Dr. Bail’s discovery of a psychological form of imprinting, which derived from his work in the dream, has manifold implications for the entire life of an individual.  The way we choose to live, who we are, and how we die goes back directly to the maternal imprint.  Overcoming our individual imprints may be the most challenging and rewarding venture in life, one that brings to our existence a profound experience of love that gradually manifests in the flowering of a true self- a sense of unity and integration, a spiritual center, an experience of harmony and internal peace.

Imprinting has implications for humankind as a whole.  It explains all that seems inexplicably horrible and horribly inexplicable about us, our societies, our world.  Throughout human history, our compelling need to reenact the internal violence we experienced as infants is reflected on a larger scale in the violent world disorder: hatred between groups, war between nations, bloodshed of all manner.  Working to overcome our imprints may begin a very long and arduous process of manifesting a more solid foundation within and between countries and regions of the world – a foundation based upon truth, brotherhood, and a sense of unity among all of humankind.  This would lead to a world motivated by love rather than hate, a world united in understanding.  But obviously, this is a vision for the future.

In March of 2006, Dr. Bail’s analytic theory was given validation by a new scientific theory and its accompanying date.  The work of evolutionary biologist David Haig (Zimmer 2006) at Harvard University demonstrated that the mother can unconsciously turn on and off the genes of her fetus.  His theory is presented in the context of understanding the difficulties in pregnancy – what he terms “the silent struggle” – in which the mother and her unborn child engage in an unconscious struggle over the nutrients the mother will provide her fetus.  The implications of Dr. Haig’s scientific work – that the mother’s unconscious can determine the manifestation of the individual’s biology – is revolutionary and brings scientific validation to an integrated psychoanalytic theory.

We might speculate that just as cosmologists changed our view of the workings of the external universe, the understanding of psychological imprinting, accompanied by the evidence from newly emerging scientific data, may eventually change our understanding of the workings of the internal universe, with the hope that a better understanding of our inner world will bring hope for a better life for the individual and better world for humankind.

Let us go there.  Together.  Step by step.  Dream by dream.

Lynda Share, Ph. D., is a fellow of the International Psychoanalytical Association and the author of If Someone Speaks, It Gets Lighter: Dreams and the Reconstruction of Infant Trauma (The Analytic Press, 1994).  Dr. Share is in private psychoanalytic practice in Beverly Hills, California, and has taught and lectured on dream analysis at institutes in the U.S. and abroad.

Footnotes:

(1) Imprinting was initially articulated by Konrad Lorenz (1952/1997), an ethologist who discovered that many birds and mammals are born with an innate “following response,” that is, a response to follow the first moving object seen – usually the primary caretaker, the mother.  During this “critical period” of development at the beginning of life, the newly born or newly hatched will follow what it sees so closely that it takes on all the caretaker’s characteristics and thus “becomes” that which it follows.

            John Bowlby (1973) applied the ethological concept of imprinting to humans.  He theorized that human infants are “hardwired” to “follow” their mothers, that is, the human infant is biologically programmed to attach to its mother (and become like its mother) at the very beginning of life.  Such attachments, or “following response,” is a behavioral manifestation that helps to ensure the infant’s survival.

            Dr. Bail’s psychoanalytic concept of imprinting originates from a different perspective and an entirely different emotional experience than Bowlby’s concept (Williams 2002).  According to Dr. Bail, human imprinting is not a behavioral response on the part of the newborn.  The infant does not just “follow” the mother.  Rather, from Dr. Bail’s psychoanalytic explorations, imprinting is a deeply unconscious process that originates within the mother, such that unwanted aspects of her unconscious are projected into the baby.  Thus, for the baby, imprinting is not a “reaching toward” another human being.  It is rather an imposition from without that dismantles to one degree or another the baby’s nascent being.  Rooted in trauma, imprinting is not a “natural process,” not a force for life.  The baby must “become” its mother, not because he “naturally follows her” but because he must carry and live out very specific aspects of her unconscious (and thereby feels he is rescuing her from immense suffering) in order to ensure her survival as well as his own.

In addition to personal communications, source material for the Foreword includes the following: 

Written by Bernard W. Bail, M.D.:

A History of Object Relations in Los Angeles (videocassette 1990);

When Bion Left Los Angeles (1999);

The Mother’s Signature (2001b/a);

Psychoanalysis: A Call to a Feminine Paradigm (2001b);

Toward a Unitary Theory of Body and Mind (2002);

Bernard W. Bail, M.D.: A Biographical Sketch (2005 unpublished data);

Written by Lynda Share, Ph.D.:

The Psychoanalytic Theory and Method of Bernard W. Bail, M.D.: An Overview (2001)

Written by Susan L. Williams, Ph.D.:

A Psychoanalytic Concept of Imprinting and its Distinctions (2002)