"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 its history" (Bail, 1977, p. 64).

American Psychoanalytic Association Fall Meeting,Discussion Group, Infant Mental Life and the Dream in Psychoanalysis  Thursday, December 20, 2001, New York, Waldorf Astoria(Paper revised November, 2007)This paper serves as a brief introduction to the psychoanalytic theory and method of Bernard Bail.[1]  In addition to a presentation of his work, I will touch upon a few of the similarities and differences between Dr. Bail’s theory and method and other psychoanalytic theories, attempting to place his work within the context of some of the psychoanalytic literature.

Introduction

It began with Freud's dream.  The prodigious contributions to psychoanalytic theory and technique of Los Angeles psychoanalyst Bernard Bail, M.D., began with a detailed exploration of Freud's cornerstone of psychoanalysis.  By utilizing Freud's (1900) basic method of dream analysis as the central tool for psychoanalytic investigation and revising Freud’s wish-fulfillment theoretical approach, Bail began to bring a deeper and more expansive understanding to the mind and the human experience. Following the details of the patient's associations in a very systematic way, Bail has extended as well as revised the theoretical conclusions of Ronald Fairbairn, Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, and other Object Relations theorists.  He has broken entirely new theoretical ground regarding the nature of infancy, the formation of mental life, the understanding of resistance to change, and the fundamental task of psychoanalysis.  The outcome of this intensive endeavor has been the development of a new paradigm for psychoanalysis.  This paradigm takes up the origins of psychopathology – and more broadly the origins of human mental life – from a perspective that has not been addressed in any extant psychoanalytic theory.   Briefly stated: 

The unconscious of the mother determines
The baby’s being,
The person he or she is to become,
The life he or she is to lead,
In fact his or her very destiny. 

I will begin with Dr. Bail’s use of the dream, as it is the cornerstone of his method of analysis and the source of his discoveries about early mental life. I will then continue with an elaboration of his paradigm and his understanding of the analytic process.

Bail’s Exploration of the Dream:

Through his fifty years of psychoanalytic practice, Bail concluded that the dream is a Rosetta stone of unconscious mental life, recording every aspect of a person’s existence and encompassing a life in its entirety.   He came to this conclusion by working carefully with Freud’s (1900) systematic method of gathering detailed associations to the elements of the dream, but doing so without Freud’s assumption that each element would serve a disguising function and without an a priori theoretical conclusion regarding the dream’s latent meaning.   Thus he states:

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).

What emerged through this process was an enlarged understanding of the fundamental nature and content of the unconscious and therefore of the scope and use of the dream than had been evident in Freud’s drive-related Classical theory.  Thus Bail determined that the unconscious encompasses the entire range of human phenomena.  Along with wish-fulfilling phantasy, the unconscious contains representation 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. 

As he navigated more deeply into the dream, Bail repeatedly observed that adult patients were not living mentally in present time, but rather appeared to be unconsciously existing in their earliest experiences.  Further, he noted that the patient physically present in the room was often not the person mentally present in the session.  Instead, the dream material made clear that the patient was completely immersed inside the personality of another, such that the patient at that moment did not really exist. 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 their dreams began to 'wake the patient up' so they could begin to have their own minds and their own selves.

Bail saw 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 not himself, who unconsciously he is being (e.g., his mother, father, grandparent, or sibling). He also determined that the dream brings to each hour the ‘essential unconscious situation’ that must be illuminated in that hour for the patient to grow his mind and to move forward in life. Such a process brings 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 summary, Bail concluded that the dream enlightens us to the truth of our experience, the mental place in which we live, the human dilemmas we are to solve.   It serves as an invaluable tool for the development of human meaning and depth of personality, leading to the evolution of one’s distinct and integrated mind and self.   Through his intensive efforts, Bail came to the first of his two “controversial conclusions”:  “There simply is no analysis without dream analysis” (Bail, 2001a).

Bail’s Paradigm of Early Mental Life

From his deep explorations into the unconscious, Bail painstakingly evolved a paradigm encompassing the nature of early mental life and the origins of psychopathology. As an outgrowth of this paradigm came a deeper understanding of the analytic process, including the problem of resistance to change.  Bail’s 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 – a view consonant with Freud’s original concept of the self-preservative instinct (1905).

As did other Object Relations theorists such as Fairbairn (1952), Bowlby (1958), Winnicott (1965), and Balint (1968), Bail concluded that the specific origin of psychopathology does not reside in the Oedipus complex; rather the origin ‘begins at the beginning,’ -- in the earliest mother-infant relationship. Through extended and detailed exploration of patients’ dreams, Bail observed that psychopathology emanates from the mother-fetal/mother-newborn, unconscious connection. This origin emerged gradually in dreams of patients deeply immersed in the analytic process over a long period of time.   Thus, 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 emerge.  

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 an eventual integrated mind and self is thereby lost. Simply put, the baby cannot evolve into his own unique being, occupied as he is with his mother’s experience of her “unbearable being.”

Thus, the baby has to abandon this potential for a true self because he must carry the burden of his mother’s unwanted self.  As noted above, 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 insure 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, day, weeks, or months of the infants life – analogous, in some respects but not others, in the animal kingdom to how animals imprint their young.[2]  As Bail poetically describes it, the baby, from the beginning of life, is imprinted with its ‘mother’s signature’ (2001a).  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. Thus, 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 extent of this observation -- that patients were continuously living their adult lives in their earliest traumatic shattering -- that led Bail to his second controversial conclusion:  there is no such entity as an adult analysis. He states:

“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 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 of our patients. However, all human beings carry unconscious, unresolved, and unwanted aspects to one degree or another.  It is a universal human phenomenon.   Depending on the extent of these aspects and the forcefulness of the projections, the baby’s mind will split[3]  or shatter to a greater or lesser degree, and the baby will, to a greater or lesser degree, carry its mother’s imprint.  (We focus on the mother here because imprinting is a process that takes place between a mother and her fetus and newborn. The biological situation of the fetus and the infant -- living inside the mother’s body for nine months  -- makes the mother the first and primary source of imprinting.  The father, siblings, and grandparents influence the infant and child later in their own right.  Also, father, siblings, grandparents, etc. reside in the unconscious of the mother). 

Very briefly, we notice of Bail’s understanding of the infant situation that it differs significantly from the basic premises of Freud and Klein.  Freud located the creation of psychopathology in the repression of the instincts while Bail centers the fundamental source of pathology in the 'repression' so-to-speak of a real Self and its profound consequences.  Melanie Klein (1975), sees the infant as born into a state of pathology, having to split its ego and object into good and bad from the beginning of life and projecting the bad into the environment, primarily into the mother, in order to cope with its innate destructive impulses. Klein considers hate, envy, jealousy, and greed the products of these destructive impulses.  Bail's work in dreams has demonstrated that the opposite is true. Hate emerges from an absence of love and primitive envy and jealousy come about as a result of the lack of a real mental connection between the mother and her infant. Such feelings may in fact represent the mother's unconscious struggles with these issues taken in by the infant and then “given back” to the mother.  

 Bail’s paradigm is closer in one particular respect to the work of Winnicott (1960).  Winnicott states that the baby cannot come into its own existence if environmental impingements disrupt the baby’s ‘going on being.’ Bail locates the particular form of the environmental impingement that is most disruptive to the baby and specifies its unconscious action.  Thus the mother’s projections into the mind of the baby not only interfere with the baby’s going on being, but also halt that being and imprint the baby’s mind with that of its mother. It is in this specific way that the baby cannot ‘be’.  

Bail observed that the infant who has lost touch with his own nascent being is a despairing infant.  As he describes it,

“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).

Resistance To Change

The problem of finding the nascent baby self long ago lost to the individual and initiating this ‘essential spark of life’ brings us to the issue of the origins of resistance to change. Thus, as Bail worked more and more deeply with the maternal imprint, he realized that it was this imprint that was the core problem in the issue of resistance to change.

To initiate a process of change at a very deep level of the personality, the maternal imprint must be overcome.  This is an extraordinarily difficult task because the imprint represents the infant’s tie to his mother, confused as it may be.  Thus, leaving the imprint is 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 because he must continue to live out this initial imprint.  The resistance is simply the patient’s way of assuring himself that he and his mother will survive and that he and she are still together, still united as one. Bail describes the painful process of confronting the imprint in the following way:

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 overwhelming 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 strivings for health on the one hand and a return to the maternal imprint on the other are 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 the past weeks or months.

The baby within the individual must begin to know and experience in a conscious and unconscious way this mother-infant imprint and how it has informed all of the patient’s life such that the patient may gain the courage to mount a fight for his 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

How do we help patients undertake such a daunting task? The question brings us to our final topic of this presentation, the psychoanalytic process and clinical method that was an outgrowth of Bail’s paradigm of early mental life. 

Thus, we return to the dream. What began as a tool for discovery of the origins and processes of psychopathology became Bail’s vehicle of cure.  For it was through the dream that he could precisely locate the infantile trauma and pathological identifications comprising the maternal imprint as well as the nascent baby self that is occupied by these identifications.   Through the dream he could portray to the patient, from the patient’s own unconscious content, the back and forth movement – the patient’s attempts at growth and his return to the maternal imprint. The unconscious made conscious to the patient allows the healthier adult aspects of the patient to process the infantile.

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 to the patient his many pathological identifications.  This ongoing detailed work in the unconscious prepares the patient for the upheaval that he must go through in order to experience a true transformation in his personality. 

In the course of this work, Bail began to understand the process of interpretation and the nature of analytic dyad in a new way (new in terms of the Classical theory from which he was trained).  Through systematic investigation of his own patients’ dreams and through those of his supervisees, Bail began to track the effects on the patients of the analyst’s interpretive efforts.  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.  Making precise interpretations became important.   Failure to understand the precise meaning or meanings presented in a given hour (dream) becomes a disorganizing experience for the patient, just as a baby experiences its mother’s failure to understand her infants cry of distress.

Bail also came to an enlarged understanding of the nature of the analytic dyad.  Thus, akin to Self-Psychology (Kohut, 1977) and Intersubjectivity (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992;  Renik, 1993) Bail 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 wasn’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 infant, analyst to patient, and vise versa.

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 these 'analyst projections' along with maternal and paternal projections as they arise in the treatment.  The patient's unconscious, intuitive grasp of the analyst's being must then be acknowledged, just as the patient's unconscious intuitive grasp of his own, his parents', his spouse's etc., beings must be known for him to develop a foundation of self and mind based on truth.  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 the patient’s unconscious perceptions of the analyst. The patient will in fact present a dream of the analyst's projected unconscious anxieties in an effort to receive such an interpretation.  Through the interpretation, projections belonging to the analyst can be removed from the patient's mind. This relieves the patient of the burden he carries -- the unacknowledged and problematic unconscious aspects of the analyst.  The experience allows for a true 'mental space' in which the patient's own mental development can occur.

In this process, at times very painful, unflattering observations of the analyst appear in the unconscious of the patient.  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 of the patient's experience, regardless of the nature of that truth.  The patient has the experience, often for the first time, of that which does not belong to his mental space being graciously acknowledged and thereby removed.  The process can be a truly transformative experience for the patient  -- a relationship fully on the side of the patient's growth above all other ego-saving considerations.

The capacity of the patient's unconscious to 'know' that of the analyst, expands our understanding of a particular form of 'resistance' in psychoanalysis.  Thus, from Bail's point of view, some resistance may represent a protection against intrusions into the patient from the analyst's unconscious.  It serves as a complaint, much as a baby's persistent cry to a mother.  This particular form of resistance is 'on the side of life,' so to speak, representing a healthy aspect of the patient. 

With the letting go of the parental imprints, and removal of any analyst imprints along the way, the patient can begin the discovery of his own mind. As Bail describes it, “With this relinquishment will come all of the passion, the wild surmise of discovery no less than when Cortez contemplated the Pacific” (2001b, p. 7).

Conclusion

In conclusion, over the past fifty years, Bernard Bail has evolved a theory of early mental life and a method of treatment that locates the origins of mental development and psychopathology in the earliest fetal-mother/infant-mother unconscious connection and its treatment in the foundation of the unconscious within psychoanalysis: the dream.  This theory and method bring a deep understanding to the nature of the human condition as we sadly know it today, and inspires hope for the future in its focus on the task of bringing the ‘spark of one’s nascent essential self’ back to life.

In March of 2006, Dr. Bail’s analytic theory was given validation by new scientific theory and its accompanying data.  The work of evolutionary biologist, David Haig (Zimmer, 2006), at Harvard University, demonstrated that the mother’s unconscious can turn on and off the genes of its fetus and newborn.  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 to her fetus. (Zimmer, 2006).  The implications of Dr. Haig’s scientific work – that the unconscious can determine the manifestation of the individual’s biology – is revolutionary and, for the first time, 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, supported by the evidence from newly emerging scientific data, may eventually change our understanding of the internal universe, with the hope that a better understanding of our inner world will bring a better life for the individual and the possibility of a better world for mankind. 

Copyright.  Lynda Share, Ph.D. 2001/2007

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Website: holisticpsychoanalysis.com

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