What is the nature of mental or emotional illness? It can be considered a disturbance of the psychical cellular system, a reflection of the system’s distortions in the personality in all the ways (or diagnostic codes) known to the psychiatric and psychoanalytic professions. This is the accepted definition. Pathology enters the body and its various systems psychosomatically, disrupting the physical cellular system as well as the psychical and creating a dual disequalibrium. People in the field know this sort of psychopathology is very difficult to treat. The psychiatrist is usually attempting to contain disquieting symptoms either to the patient or to his or her environment, and has traditionally treated mental illness with drugs, thereby bypassing the underlying illness in the mind. Meanwhile, the underlying illness, which may have begun in the unconscious and spent a long time brooding there before passing into the body, is left intact. There are reasons for this. The aim of the physician is to alleviate or banish pain in whatever way possible and, by and large, in our culture there is a greater acceptance of the physical assault on the body then the mental. Our culture still does not approve of mental illness, which can only be treated, at root, by psychoanalysis and the pursuit of the patient's dreams. Illness does not appear from nothing, but we are too often content to treat the symptoms of our illness—to dull our pain with drugs rather than get to the truth of it.

The above facts concerning the etiology must be acknowledged. Our intention must be to “hold the fort against the Indians” at any cost. The question here is: if we accept this etiology, do we have the resolve or the desire to learn how to treat mental illness at its root, in the unconscious?

The Mother’s Signature

First and foremost, lies are what make a person ill, and the very first lie is the imprint of the mother—a lie in that it breaks up the integrity of the infant's wholeness. Lies are harmful to the person the way a crooked foundation threatens to wear away at a structure and eventually topple it. When the infant is imprinted, what happens is this: the projection of the mother’s unwanted, unconscious mental parts is placed into the baby's mind, either before or after birth. At some later time the person begins to put that unwritten message into action in his life—in his choices, in his likes and dislikes—and this determines what kind of person he will be, what face he will present to the world. An imprint can be anything from: “I am ugly and must remain a failure,” to “I will never love, that is be attached, to anyone except my mother,” or it can be “You must always take care of me before anyone,” or “You are never to learn anything, and you are never to receive any help from anyone who might want to help.”

The imprint is unconscious and so determines the fate of us all, since all human beings are born to mothers with minds, hearts, and experiences that they bring to the conception, delivery, and rearing of their children. Further lies or distortions add to the increasing complex, noxious psychical influences.

Let me explain. Children are told they are loved. Of course, they are also told they are hated either in action or verbally. The evidence is that, at least unconsciously, very few children are loved. Here is a lie that is nearly always overlooked: Yes, my mother loved me. When a mother or father tells children lies, consciously or unconsciously, these lies begin to mold the child's perceptions of himself and the external world. It is easy to see how a distorted vision of the real world will compel the child to constantly misread the world of reality.

Such children will misread people and what people say. Their touchstone will forever be the mother who bore them and to whom they are loyal even if this loyalty kills them. The child or infant in the adult will always respond non-verbally to these life giving and life saving figures in his life.... the mother. The more lies that are told to these children or adults, the more they will misinterpret reality. And later in life people of importance come forward with lies or half-truths. These adults who are weakened at their foundation will transfer to their leaders that unexamined loyalty and will go to the wall for them. Unscrupulous leaders, charismatic figures know this intuitively and misuse the weaknesses of these people who will give up everything for security. In these people's minds security is equivalent to survival.

It usually takes a long time to get to a person's imprint. There is much that has to be unearthed bit by bit. These bits, by which I mean the stuff of life, have to be carefully sifted and relayed to the patient and each bit of stuff has to be translated correctly. When this is done the patient will feel the truth of the interpretation in his gut as well as in his mind.

For example, a man who has a recent disability dreams that someone he does not know has stolen his mirror. He finds the man and complains. He wants his mirror back. The problem in reality is that, at this time, the patient’s wife has to leave him to take care of her mother in another city. He recognizes the necessity for his wife to take care of her mother, and knows that without his wife’s help her mother will die. Knowing this intellectually is fine but it does not respond to what is deep within him: the knowledge that his mother did not love him or his father. Until he got into psychoanalysis, he strove valiantly to make a life with friends and a variety of disciplines that supported him, but was never able to truly love or be loved.

Now with much work having already been done and after hearing his associations, one of which was “Mirror, mirror on the wall,” it was not too difficult to say, “Then, yes, who is the fairest of them all? Certainly not you.” When he needed somebody at his side, his wife was not there. Even though intellectually he knew that she loved him, emotionally he felt abandoned. Infancy with all its pain and helplessness was rearing its head, giving away the mirror—that is, the one inside himself—so that he would not see the truth. And, understandably, what child wants to understand that truth when his life depends on a person who does not regard him as the beloved? The patient's pain was sharp and deep. The nature of his imprint was such that he could not be loved by anyone. It was crucial to tell the patient the truth of his life; without this truth, he could never form a true foundation where he can properly love any woman or let a woman truly love him

Mankind has held and still holds a fiction in its belief that the place we come from (Eden) is pure and the place we go to is a better place than where we are, where we suffer to a lesser or greater degree. There is no doubt in my mind that this lie and others are the main cause of emotional illness, and contribute to it as life goes on. If we accept that we come from a place of divinity, a place of absolute purity, it is clear that the infant receives its first blemish when it receives the mother’s unconscious message. It is how all of us “leave Eden.” All further insults to the person mental, emotional or physical will fall in line with this initial trauma, this imprint.

The Truth is the Cure

Fundamentally, the cure is rather simple. It is telling the truth, knowing the truth and living the truth. It is telling the truth to the afflicted person in a way that allows him or her to assimilate the truth gradually. It is only gradually that the organism, or individual, can come to see the profound complication of his/her mother’s imprint and the distortion on the personality perpetrated by it. Like a pebble thrown into still water, the circles fan out endlessly. The organism resists the truth at first, since it experiences the correction as a foreign body.

The more ill the person, the more intense are the imperceptions and the more intense the negation of the interpretation. This is another way of talking about resistance. When discussing truth, the philosophical buff will say “Whose truth?” Close investigation will tell any scientific investigator that there is no moral relativism in the unconscious, just as there is no question about E equals MC squared or 2 plus 2 equals 4. The imprint is not the truth. The patient feels it is the truth and lives as if it were something to die for. The imprint is the lie that the mother unconsciously puts into the child.

The whole issue of moral relativism springs from the intellect, and it is the intellect’s clever way of rationalizing whatever it wishes to rationalize. We in psychology know that rationalization is another face of lying. In the reservoir of the unconscious, there is one truth, the real truth, and there is no hedging of that. It is this fact that makes the unconscious so hated and feared an entity. Depending on your point of view, it is both dreadful and awesomely beautiful, and so it has been seen by the great sages and poets of mankind.

Social Implications

When lies are disseminated by other members of the family, by teachers, by the media, by inaccurate “historical” truths, by the officials governing our cities, states, and countries, they aggravate the existing state of psychic pathology. It is clear to me that anyone who knowingly puts forward untruths or ambiguities that nourish these programs is adding to the emotional illness of a population. As it is true of the individual, so it is true of the state, multiplied to the nth power. The mass unconscious is riddled with illness and confusion, with paranoia and doubt...in a word, with all the conditions that afflict the individual about his or her future. Unscrupulous leaders take advantage of these states of mind. We hear political leaders say, “Let's put (whatever atrocity one wishes to mention) behind us and get on with it.” I can attest that is not possible, not at all. If it were, all mental illness would be amenable to a similar remark.

Traumas—or lies, as enacted upon the mind—rest in the unconscious like radioactive seeds from which all destructive renderings upon self and upon others emanate. These have to be released and aired and whipped off the table by hard analytical work, and so it must be with other worldly catastrophes—injuries of war, genocide, etc. The laws of karma—a universal accounting law—hold sway, no matter what any one individual or group decides. One only has to look for this leveling that happens in every individual's life and in the global political realm.

Simply put, in the end the cure is telling the truth, adopting the truth, and living the truth. When a person does not do this, there will be dislocations. When the national or international body politic does not live by the truth, these dislocations in the mass unconscious will have repercussions like those in the individual mind. If leaders wish to engage in war under false pretense, there will be greater dislocation in the world body. Guilt will accrue and weigh down the mass unconscious in illness, depression, guilt, and paranoia.

One is told to forget and move on. The fallacy is that one cannot forget and move on. Try to tell that to a person who is emotionally afflicted. It does not work, and so it will never work in the larger segments of mankind. Every lie, every distortion, every ambiguity has to be exposed and acknowledged, and paid for emotionally. This is the universal law of karma, the law of action and consequence. Insofar as mankind forgets it, it will have to pay for its indiscretion in forgetting. In a word, what is true for the individual is equally true for the nation and the world.

Social justice for me is, then, based on the constant adherence to and love for the truth. It is the knowledge that the truth brings the greatest rewards for one and all.