Several days ago I watched a Nova episode on the life of Einstein. The one scene that stayed with me was of him talking with his friend, the bell tower of the town church visible in the distance, the big clock ticking and the hand moving slowly. The sunlight shines brightly on the tower.

Suddenly he stops talking, obviously lost in a thought—a realization—doesn’t finish his conversation and hurries away. He had been struck by the realization that light was the constant in the formula with which he was grappling.

Patient History

The patient is a fifty-year-old woman, divorced, with a twenty-five-year-old son who is independent. She comes from New York, the youngest of three children: an elder brother followed by a sister and then herself. The brother was an accountant with a leading, worldwide firm, and helped the patient get a job with this same firm. Her major had been in business, and she had also earned an MBA from a good Eastern university. She came to Los Angeles to get away from family and in-laws after her divorce became final some ten years ago; she wanted to make a fresh start. This she has done so well that she is a mid-level manager with ambitions to go higher.

Her parents are elderly and live in a retirement home; her sister is a married homemaker; her brother, the eldest sibling, is a more distant figure. She is an ideal candidate for psychoanalysis in that she is unmarried, has no current romantic interest, and has no real obligations to family. She helps out monetarily with the care of her parents, with whom she talks frequently by phone, and whom she visits often enough to satisfy her conscience.

In addition to business she had majored in the humanities, and over the years developed a great interest in psychoanalysis. She had a prior analytic experience in New York but was left restless and enquiring by it.

Several years ago she came to see me, having heard about my work from a former patient. We began a four-times-a-week analysis which has been going on for more than five years. Her major complaint was a restlessness and a boredom in life. She had no symptoms that bothered her except this pervasive ennui.

Now as time has gone by and as she has learned more about herself, she has developed a broader and deeper interest in analysis, so much so that she began attending various analytic meetings that were open to the public. At the time of this session she had just come back from a national analytic meeting in the East that I had also attended.

She is dark haired and dark eyed, a middling attractive woman. At the time of this session she has just come back from this national meeting.

Session

The Dream:

Patient: I had a dream that I am at a seminar…but I am very tired and want to rest. Can I?

Dr. B.: Are you tired in the dream or in reality?

Patient: I’m tired now and I was tired in the dream, too.

Associations

It is so short a dream, a snippet, and I am tired. Maybe it is jet lag and maybe it is the sinus infection. It is serious because the doctor called me and put me on antibiotics. His lab said this was a very serious bug. It rots the lungs and kills you.

Dr. B.: It seems to me this really would be the source of your fatigue. So, why so many sinus infections? I recall two or three in the past six months.

Patient: (She nodded as if to acknowledge the question.) I don’t know.

Dr. B.: Okay, tell me about the seminar [in your dream]. We will come back to the sinus problem later.

Patient: I don’t know. It is a huge place and the lecture seems complex and the information is a burden. I just wanted to close my eyes and sleep. I suppose it’s like some of the seminars that were at the national conference. The material was not intelligible. I was angry, overwhelmed.

Dr. B.: I told you no one expected you to be an analyst and comprehend. I advised you to listen and let it flow through you. I would be as nonplussed if I were at a conference full of accountants.

Patient: I was angry at how you abandoned me and the way my good friend S. abandoned me, and then to have to pick up the lunch check with that jerk Dr. M. What made me think there was anything there? And then he insulted me by saying he was really looking for a younger woman with whom he could have a family.

Dr. B.: Well, I want to remind you that when this man came up earlier in your dreams, your associations indicated he was not suitable. You apparently didn’t listen.

Patient: S. abandoned me. No one loves me. You abandoned me or didn’t even care if I were alive. I was miserable, like a child with my nose pressed up against a window looking in. I was an outsider. It’s the way you made me feel.

Dr. B.: What did S. do or I do, exactly? I thought you said S. was your friend.

Patient: She didn’t act like a friend during the national conference. She was late when she made plans with me, or she didn’t show up. It was rude and inconsiderate. I got the feeling that I was not valued and that I could be treated in any way she wanted, with no consequence to her. I feel I was trying to be accommodating to her and to you and the people around you, and I got nothing.

Dr. B: Did I make a plan with you that I broke?

Patient: No.

Dr. B.: Did I go over the program with you for one hour from 10:00 to 11:00 p.m. in the lobby and explain to you what every seminar was about, and which ones I thought you might understand and like?

Patient: True, you did.

Dr. B.: So you agree that I did explain everything in detail.

Patient: Yes, you explained the sessions.

Dr. B.: Then why are you lumping me in with S. or Dr. M.?

Patient: I thought of her as a friend or older sister who looks out for you. I guess I saw her as if she were a mother to me, even though we are close in age.

Interpretations

Dr. B.: I think you put your finger on it when you say “older sister” or “mother.” Perhaps this experience [at the conference] revived for you earlier experiences with your siblings or your mother that uncannily resembled emotionally this event. You felt I was not your mother who took care of you personally and would get everyone in line so that you would not feel the loneliness. It seems that my spending one hour with you was apparently a meaningless exercise that you seem to have dismissed entirely.

I saw no discrimination, myself, concerning you, and you were welcome to come over any time wherever I was and whoever was with me. And then, I think, if you recall a dinner we had with other people, all of them were quite respectful of you and very much wanted your opinion of the conference or whatever else.

Patient: Maybe, but I was so disappointed in you. You looked old and frail. I could not believe I had thought you could conquer worlds or protect me.

Dr. B.: I am old, not frail, though I cannot help how people view me. But I think you are talking about idealization. It is what children do with their mothers and fathers and later with other people. The problem is when the clay feet show, there is a terrible rage because they feel they have been misled.

As far as I know, I have not misled you about my age. As a matter of fact, you should have an accurate idea of my physical being since you see me four times a week.

And your feelings concerning S. indicate, by your reaction, that there must have been a time when your idealization of mother came tumbling down, and older sister or brother came tumbling down.

So altogether I think it is wonderful that this idealization does not exist, and I hope it does not exist, in relation to S. or to me, because idealization distorts reality.

Patient: I wanted S. to be the type of friend I thought she was. I wanted you and your colleagues to be my friends but you all held your boundaries and didn’t really socialize with me or invite me into your group. I had no choice but to understand I was not a part of your group and would never be. I was an outsider.

Dr. B.: I think, in terms of what I have already said, that this feeling is a misperception, and I believe it really was how you felt about your mother and family grouping and your denial of what you must have felt: that you were an outsider. And all of these feelings about being an outsider were put on S., on me, and on whatever group of people was around me. After all, it would be absurd to hold analytic boundaries at a conference or social gathering, and I would hope you would grant me the ability to know the difference. In relation to your concerns about this group, it is true that it would be unlikely that you would be a member of an analytic group since you are not by profession a psychoanalyst.

But I think that denying the truth and seeing an idealization come down is painful and enraging.

Patient: I have spent my life in denial.

Dr. B.: I want to go back and say something about your sinus infection, because that is very important not only physically but also emotionally.

You know that animals depend on their noses for survival. We have long ago lost that capacity, though we have an ancient part of our brain called the rhinencephalon which has to do with the nose. For an animal to lose his acute sense of smell is to put him in danger of losing his life. We humans have substituted our intelligence and our intuition for that quality. I would say having a sinus infection tells me you have lost your way, and that what you see and believe is not really how it is.

Patient: I feel like everything I know has been stripped away, and I have no idea what to do with this person I am becoming, who has no denial or protection. What do I have then?

Dr. B.: The truth and your experience at your current age, not your experience as a fetus or baby. You have the ability to see and know the truth of a situation. If you know that, you will not be denying a part of yourself, and consequently pushing that part into anyone else. You will have no reason to deny what you see, so that your reactions and decisions will be very different. Your physical body will no longer have to suffer from the emotional strain of too much denial and projection. You will become more of your true self.

Your imprint compels you to split off and deny the truth about your mother’s unconscious feelings for you. You had to survive and be fed and be nurtured by this mother. Denial saved your life. These mechanisms that were once useful are now stripped away, and you are vulnerable to aggressive bacteria—the deadly feelings now deadly bacteria—that see no defense mechanisms in you. So thank God for this experience at the conference, for what is revealed is another facet of the imprint. You were reliving the pain of being a fetus/baby and having to deny your mother’s feelings, her unconscious feelings, about you. You thought that S. and I didn’t love you, but you were really feeling all over again the feelings you had as a fetus.

Patient: This combination of stripping away my denial and projection is very powerful. With both of them taken away, how will I function, how will I survive this world?

Dr. B.: You will finally see the truth of things. You will make your decisions based on truth and right thinking, and your life will get better and cleaner and clearer. You will become who you were meant to be, and as an adult, not as an infant who has not developed naturally any skills of life.

A few weeks later the patient, during a lull in the session, quietly said, “I know my mother didn’t love me.” Obviously she had worked this issue through emotionally and had come to terms with it.

Commentary

This is an extraordinary session encompassing many critical issues, among them an idealization of the analyst and others based on the family constellation. This breakthrough happened because the patient varied her life to include attendance at an important psychoanalytic conference. I do believe we would have come to the same point, though, even if the patient had lived her life without this particular event and its aftermath. It is in the nature of transference that it seeks a repetition, and a situation such as the events at the conference would inevitably have occurred somewhere, sometime, with some other individual(s) as subject(s) of the patient’s idealization.

A life-threatening infection brought the realization of how psychosomatic illness occurs, and that it indicated a foundation of denial and idealization. It was a great move forward for the patient to voice her disappointment with me. An idealization was broken, and the importance of this event must be recognized in terms of letting out a walled off (split off) part of the wound—incandescent with heat and rage from the beginning of the patient’s life. Indeed, this is why all negative reactions (which analysts call the negative transference) must come into the analysis, so that the truth of the patient’s life might be revealed, and further, so that she or he may be spared a serious psychosomatic or somatic illness.

What is seen also is the tremendous letdown upon the destruction of an idealization, the enormous fatigue, which is understandable when considering how much energy is involved in maintaining a pathologic structure. This energy, once freed, will now be available for more positive pursuits in life. It is also instructive to note how the patient wants to sleep at the beginning of the session, and complains about how is she to live her life now that she can no longer rely upon her denial and the self-protection that goes with it.

This denial of the imprint is why mankind hates change and is wary of anyone proposing serious change. Always the split-off part is sniffing the wind to see if there is any danger to the existence of the imprint—an event which was an unimaginable shock, accompanied by fear, dread, and eventually rage. The split-off part protects the imprint at all costs; the imprint is so strong it can take over a person’s existence if help is not sought. The imprint trauma therefore must be revisited again and again by both patient and analyst for any real health to ensue.

A human being’s first denial is refusal to recognize that the imprint has even occurred: “This can’t be happening, my mother would never do this to me.” All subsequent denials reinforce the first. Denial and other mechanisms of defense are designed to distance us from the initial shock of that first event: the unconscious imprint of the mother upon her unborn child.

Note that anything short of uncovering and analyzing the imprint leaves the patient open to all kinds of illness, as if there had been no analysis at all. Illnesses and other problems may be impossible to eradicate without first uncovering and dismantling the “root”—the patient’s initial denial of the imprint.

Finally, I wish to acknowledge the courage of this patient who, despite her great fear and complaining, continues to press on. It is admirable!

Epilogue

When one traces the inferences of the mother’s imprint, the following story unfolds.

The moment of imprinting during the fetal phase is a momentous experience. For some people, the impact is tempered enough by love that it does not cause serious damage later in life.

For those not so fortunate (and that is most people), the imprint experience is so paralyzing and shocking that the aftermath is full of terror and results in an injured organism now filled with unimaginable fear. This dreadful experience has to be split off (the origin of splitting) in order for the future human being to survive.

People eventually develop many defense mechanisms to make life as tolerable as possible, and any analysis that can define these mechanisms is helpful. But the bottommost layer of the personality, with its earliest trauma of the imprint, fights to repress and suppress this information. There is an ongoing contest between that which seeks to know—the human being fighting for self-knowledge and authenticity—and that which fights to repress or suppress knowledge and protect itself—the imprint. Certainly it is the analyst who has to put the struggle and the consequences before the patient, and the patient must choose. The question put to the patient is, do you wish to become the master of your trauma, with all the consequences of that mastery, or do you want the trauma to master you, with all the consequences of that event?

The now familiar and accepted scientific equation E=MC²—the transference of energy into matter and the reverse—is also the core of my idea about illness.

The initial assault (the imprint) now has caused an accumulation of fear and dread. It is locked away in the unconscious but it is not quiet, it is not inert. There is no such thing in the universe. I imagine movement whirling around and around, gathering intensity and needing to find an egress from its confinement.

At some point, this miasma of fear and dread will exit, but if not accompanied by understanding (light or enlightenment), this emergence will be in the form of emotional or physical symptoms. The DSM IV names all the emotional symptoms, and any medical textbook names all the physical diagnoses.

Secondly, it might emerge as a psychosomatic symptom as in the case described above. It could take the form of any psychosomatic symptom, which can be ascertained from any medical textbook.

Finally, the intensity of the pent-up particles of fear and dread and rage can be seen in any physical illness to which human beings are prey. I’m told that by the time a cancer is detected, it is already five years old. Of course, according to my theory it is much older but confined in the unconscious, split off, isolated, gathering intensity and potential pathologic manifestation.

To further study this story we have the constant of Light, as in enlightenment, or the Dark, the shadow. In Einstein’s equation the speed of light is the constant. The shadow side has symbolically a great gate in front of it, which is guarded by denial. Denial is the first defense that the defenseless organism has: “It can’t be!” Yet in order to survive, the organism has to maintain its denial for a long time—perhaps forever. But not without risk. If we are using the Einstein equation, we know the risk is that transformation is always accompanied by a big bang. I would say in the human being there is this big bang, but through denial, the person does not hear it, see it, feel it.

With denial comes idealization. All analysts know that idealization is a precarious state of being, for when it breaks down there is an explosion of rage in an individual as well as in a people, a culture, as we have seen throughout history whenever a charismatic leader reveals feet of clay and is toppled from power, often through very violent means. It is a wise analyst who takes care to analyze any tendency to be idealized by his or her analysand.

Lies of any kind are dangerous. They put you in the shadow, near the gates of denial, and that is where all illnesses begin and end.

It must also be understood, however, that there are many factors involved in the final outbreak of an illness: one’s inheritance, that is, DNA; one’s environment; the quality of love of one’s parents and family, and so forth. I also wish to point out that when speaking of “the imprint,” there is no “one” imprint. Everyone’s experience, everyone’s parentage, is completely individual. Each person’s imprint is as unique as each person’s fingerprint, and the illness or malaise resulting from an imprint will also vary between individuals.

It behooves us all, in the interest of our well-being and the well-being of the planet, to live in the light, according to the light—that is, to live in truth fully. An imprint and its constellation of woes cannot survive without denial, and denial cannot survive in the light of truth. Enlightenment, truth and love are equivalent states of mind and being.

To sum this up, my theory is in accord with scientific thinking, as it exists in the physical realm. It is simple and economic and explains much that has not been understood heretofore.

Addendum

I do not believe that our future lies in space, since we already believe we know what that future is: a facsimile of life on earth, as depicted in countless movies and TV shows over the past few decades.

Our future lies in exploring the unconscious, where all knowledge of humanity lies from the beginning to now. This effort has hardly begun.

The hunger for idealization is great in all people. If mothers and fathers do not suffice, there are others—politicians, artists, actors, old institutions—that attempt to satisfy this need and intensify it. Nations attempt to use this need for their own ends, which are nearly always not in the best interests of the people. To refrain from idealization is to come face to face with one’s own self, just as one is, and to appreciate one’s minute role in the face of eternity.

There is one kind of idealization that does not fit in with the preceding, and that is idealization of the divine. Fundamentally, it is you and God, and if anything deserves to be “idealized,” it is the divine. Since it is by nature already ideal—perfect—however you apprehend it, it is right, it is as it should be. The cosmic fingerprint of the divine does not change, no matter how we name it. Everything in the physical universe is always changing: the stars, the planets, the earth. But the divine never changes.

Lastly I thought to share with you a patient’s dream, which I found to be extraordinarily poignant. In the dream she was waiting in line with a man whose face she could not see. She was waiting to buy a ticket. The line was terribly long but kept moving quickly. At one point during the session she said with assuredness, “I’m waiting in line for love.”

As far as I know, love is what the divine is all about, and nothing else. So when we hear “It’s God’s will,” if it has to do with any violence, any killing or torture, any deprivation of others, that is a very private God lodging in a very cruel conscience. That is not the God of man or of all creation.

If it is not Love, it cannot be God.

September 2007

Bibliography

Bail, Bernard W. (2007) The Mother’s Signature – A Journal of Dreams, Beverly Hills: The Masters Publishing Co., LLC

Nova (Television Series) (2004), Einstein Revealed, Andrew Sachs