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About Bernard Bail, M.D.

DR. BERNARD BAIL is a physician, a psychoanalyst and a training analyst who lives and practices in Beverly Hills, California. He has worked with both patients and analysts for over fifty years. Dr. Bail is a member of the International Psychoanalytical Association and the American Psychoanalytic Association where he chairs the ongoing discussion group “Infant Mental Life and the Dream in Psychoanalysis.” Through his intensive work in the unconscious via the dream, Dr. Bail developed a new paradigm for psychoanalysis centered at the beginning of human life, which he describes in his book, The Mother’s Signature: A Journal of Dreams.

For his military service during World War II, Dr. Bail received the Distinguished Service Cross, three Distinguished Flying Crosses, five Air Medals, five Battle Stars in the European Theater of Operations, a Purple Heart, a Prisoner of War Medal, and the 44th Bomb Group Presidential Citation. In addition, the French government awarded Dr. Bail the French Legion of Honor, the highest military honor bestowed by France.

 

Media Room

March 2008 Southern California Physician Magazine

Bernard Bail, MD
LACMA member since 1956

In December, Bernard Bail. MD, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in Beverly Hill-published The Mother's Signature, his book detailing his unorthodox hypothesis that a child's mind is initially influenced by the state of mind of his or her mother.

"It's a book about my research," Dr. Bail says, explaining that it follows in the vein of a 2001 essay he wrote on the subject. He continues: "In the mother's unconscious mind, she projects whatever she does not like, whatever she can't bear, unconsciously into the fetus she's earning. The fetus has—what I've seen, in the dreams of my patients—a shock reaction, with fear and anxiety ensuing. All the consequences of that, what I call the 'big bang' that goes off in the fetal state, has great repercussions for one's life."

The book contains essays by Dr. Bail and colleagues, as well as a series of case histories. Regarding the mechanism affecting fetal psychology, Dr. Bail draws an analogy from the finding that mothers can affect fetal gene expression(1), though he shies from embracing that explanation, preferring to label it "projection."

Dr. Bail breaks with the ideas of Freud, which he describes as "superficial." Instead, he describes psychoanalysis as a "pluralistic"(2) field, rather than a science, in which no one explanation can be right, and several point to the truth.

The Mother's Signature follows Dr. Bail's 2007 Irmgard's Flute. After being shot down in 1945, then Air Force Lt. Bail was a German prisoner of war, and became haunted by his love for two markedly different women, one on either side of the battle lines.

1) I do not shy away from “gene expression” but use a term within the perimeters of the science I pursue; i.e. psychoanalysis.  Gene expression may be the physical representation of projection from the mother to her fetus. 

2) Pluralistic theories indicate there is no agreed upon single truth in a discipline; e.g. the Big Bang  theory is singular and accepted by all scientists.  Prior to this acceptance there were a number of theories held by different scientists; i.e. pluralistic.

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