The very first lie is when the mother’s unconscious projection splits the baby’s mind and he feels “it is my fault”. This splitting is usually accompanied by some horrendous feelings: head pain of almost unmanageable proportions and feelings that one’s life force is being drained away so that the infant wishes that death would come for this suffering is unbearable - certainly unbearable for a very long time.

We all deal with this event by splitting it off, and the pain no longer exists in the baby’s mind. It is somewhere out there in the farthest reaches of the unconscious. Subsequently, if that baby grows up and decides to undertake a psychoanalysis, it is this pain which has not lost it’s original strength that emerges as a bulwark to any threat that comes near exposing it.

There is no greater threat than inexorable interpretations that draw in closer and closer to the original relationship with the mother. The first and ultimately fateful experience determines the unseen and the unknown to the adult. The winding and apparently disconnected years and experiences that make up his life, even a non-life, have been set in motion by this early splitting. Here, even a non-life is a life.

In our work we always deal with people who eventually come to see that they have been living non-lives. Whatever external adjustment they have made to accommodate the crippling of the first event, whether one be a professional or blue collar worker, wife, mother, father, husband, it is only a matter of time before the real truth emerges.

It is the real truth that will cause the most hated attacks and complaints about the analysis. However, when an analysis is without this fire then it is only an exercise for the intellect. Such a course will bring one a degree of knowledge but not complete the full circle. It is not about the individual that I speak, rather, I speak about the consequence of this “it is my fault” belief which is the beginning of a life of guilt and a variety of maneuvers to escape from it.

Soon we see that masochism, which satisfies the guilt, becomes a fashionable way of life. If one must ask what entity enjoys the widest usage, it is child abuse and that masochism is the manner in which the results are played out.

I think we would agree that we all impinge upon each other, you upon me and me upon you; a neighborhood on its occupants stretching out to the workplace, to the suburbs and outward. TV and radio are enormous disseminators. We are impinged upon by world events and by people all over the world. Of course, what is it that impinges? The answer is feelings. Who has watched the atrocities on TV in Vietnam, in Africa, in Germany and has been left unmoved?

Feelings do not need a computer or a telephone. They transmit immediately. Therefore, if we are to a lesser or a greater degree masochistic – and I argue that we are - our lives, when dissected by the laser scalpel of analysis, never fail to find masochism as the greatest source of unhappiness.

But we are given some relief. We are allowed to go to a movie or a dance. We are allowed to have sex. We are allowed to go on vacation, to buy a new dress or suit. But it is the relief of a moment in the fabric of a billion moments of life.

This past age of Christ, the millennium of the fish, is all about suffering. It is all about accepting the fact that we are guilty and must spend our lives expiating. There is not a religion in the world that would give it up. No church in the world would last long if it did not preach that salvation is through suffering. It is also the biggest lie in the world and a deep one for it has captured the minds and hearts of the world.

When a country is plunged into war for wanton reasons and the leaders of the country ask for sacrifice, the people submit, pray and pay. We have been relieved by paying because it has been ground into our minds that it is the only way. It is not. I am declaring the beginning of the idea that we for thousands of years have been scammed. We have been told that God wants it so. I have seen no proof of that, and I doubt that you have. But I have the proof that comes from the many people who have been courageous enough to undergo analysis that this God is ultimately a human God in disguise. The highest authority does not require suffering and expiation. We have to begin to live that truth and deny all that supports the old system – a failure like so many old systems.

I have found that in this work one can come to a nodal point. It sums up the entire meaning of that person’s life. Then one has the choice, the only real choice, to climb that mountain and feel the freedom. I have found that the only way to this experience is through the unconscious and that the unconscious is the only way to the soul.

I have found that when this is accomplished, and it can be by anyone who really wants it, the person will find the divinity in themselves – and one will see glimpses of divinity in all the souls inhabiting the earth that were and are and will be.

Philosophers and scientists talk about the first cause. Scientists especially are wary of feelings, and philosophers love the intellectual. But the greatest discourse will come when the heart leads. As someone – a French woman has said – “the heart has reasons of its own”. It has its own mathematics.

Those who pursue the search for their souls will come into the dazzling truth of the unconscious and will understand what the first cause is.

Can we begin to imagine a society, a country, a world with that vision?

Copyright © Bernard W. Bail, M.D. 2005
September 11, 2003
(WB2005)