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    The Mother's Signature: A Journal of Dreams
    The Mother's Signature: A Journal of Dreams
    The Mother's Signature: A Journal of Dreams
    Ebook346 pages5 hours

    The Mother's Signature: A Journal of Dreams

    By Dr. Bernard W. Bail, M.D.

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    About this ebook

    In The Mother’s Signature, Dr. Bernard W. Bail, M.D. describes with amazing clarity and insight his discovery, gleaned through sixty years as a psychoanalyst, of how our unconscious through our dreams reveals the process by which we become who we are.

    Using his groundbreaking psychoanalytic method as a time machine allows Dr. Bail to travel to the very beginning of mental and physical life. The dreams of his patients have led him to explore the mother’s unconscious impact upon her embryo, fetus, and infant. What Dr. Bail has discovered is that the mother’s unintended projections of her unconscious feelings into her infant’s nascent being become the seeds that determine the destiny of the child from birth until death.

    “Our unconscious is our universe, and we have to accord it a vastness we may not always be able to comprehend as perhaps we cannot always comprehend the vastness of our physical universe.”

    - Bernard W. Bail, M.D.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateJun 17, 2015
    ISBN9781483556048
    The Mother's Signature: A Journal of Dreams

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      The Mother's Signature - Dr. Bernard W. Bail, M.D.

      mankind.

      PART ONE

      Bernard W. Bail and Holistic Psychoanalysis

      It is my opinion that everything must be based upon an extremely simple idea. And it is my opinion that this idea, once we have finally discovered it, will be so compelling, so beautiful, that we will say to one another, yes, how could it have been any different.

      —JOHN WHEELER, THEORETICAL PHYSICIST

      CHAPTER 1

      The Mother’s Signature

      For each thing manifests its mother, which thus gives the essence and the will to the form.

      —JACOB BOEHME,

      The Signature of All Things

      All sciences strive to find the origin of the problem they’re investigating. We always turn to origins—it is in our nature. There is no doubt in my mind that with man’s very first breath he wondered about the origin of the world about him: the sun, moon, planets, oceans, mountains, trees, and meadows. The when, how, why. It is the why that most stirs the imagination toward the inner world, evoking daunting possibilities of forces greater than mankind, more daunting than some care to think.

      No sooner was psychoanalysis discovered than the thrust of exploration ran progressively toward origins. In a little while the child came into view as a proper vehicle for investigation and study. Analysts examined and thought about infancy, just as the physical scientists scraped away at the physical universe, picking and poking in the incessant endeavor to discover the where, when, how, and why.

      By now countless theories about mental functioning and personality development, and about childhood and infancy, have been set forth. Tools from many physical disciplines have been brought into the field of analysis, aiding us as we investigate the infant in all the physical and physiological ways possible. But, as analysts, we have to have faith in the tools of our profession. We must have the conviction of there being an unconscious and a conscious, and there being entities called dreams which can lead us to all the answers we want to know. If we pursue with purity the method of dream analysis discovered by Freud¹, we find that the dream is the Rosetta stone of inner mental life—or so my experience has taught me.

      My experience has also taught me that all emotional illness is based upon the relationship between mother and infant, from the moment of conception—and even before the infant is conceived, for the mother already has a plan, albeit unconscious, that she will execute upon her future child. This is beyond the conscious fantasies she may harbor, the way all of us harbor dreams of the future. What the unsuspecting woman does not know is that the plan was already executed upon her. She has no choice other than to pass it on to her children. This process has such fixity that one may say it has a genetic quality. One can do nothing about it psychologically. Even so, I have found that analyzing even that which appears to be instinctual will yield to psychoanalytic exploration.

      Since all analysts begin learning their profession by dealing with the adult, there is often a reluctance and fear on the student’s part in dealing with children, unless one is doing a child analysis course. Specialization in this area requires additional years of training, and few analysts are willing to spend extra time in this area. I do not think specialization is necessary, however, for in view of my work I have come to the conclusion that there is no such entity as adult analysis.

      The adult part of the patient before us does not need analyzing. An adult can get dressed, drive a car, shop for food, do work, and so on. Wherever adult function is impaired, there infantile trauma has been. Pathological mechanisms rush to the wounded site the way leukocytes rush to a wound. Only we do not see the blood, the swelling, or the heat, for this process all takes place in the mind, which is so vast as to be capable of containing and even concealing much trauma and pathology. Of course, if the damage is too great, symptoms will emerge that the defense mechanisms no longer can contain. All emotional illness has its origin in infancy, and all illnesses can be traced to the infant’s relationship with first the mother and then the other members of the family.

      It follows then that there is no such thing as an adult analysis, for adult qualities and functions do not need analysis in the main. One is simply, and constantly, analyzing the infant in the adult— though there is no doubt that analyzing infantile expressions of pathology in the person will always improve adult functioning. To talk about these issues intellectually with the patient is of no use, for only when the infantile core, which is the emotional core, is available can something be done through interpretations.

      As a matter of survival, all infants have to ensure that their mothers will live. It has become clearer and clearer to me that babies’ minds have to split almost at birth, maybe even before, in order to accommodate a mother who is beset by emotional disturbances—and, of course, who among us is not beset by emotional disturbances. To ensure the survival of the mother, the infant has to become his or her mother. Then the infant knows that he or she will live. All of this is unconscious in the baby’s mind, and though the infant feels that a big problem has been solved, which it has not been, the infant will indeed live. The consequences that follow will trail the infant all the rest of its life, for he or she will have a life-long identification of being the mother. The mind will be split, and the entity the baby was supposed to be will never come into existence.

      If there is not too much damage in early infantile life, one can live out one’s life relatively well or less well, depending on the vicissitudes given one. However, when the damage is too great, the infant is forced to give up its own pristine potential self in order to survive. The task of analysis is for us to reach that well-defended and often hidden part and begin to set it free. This is not easily done. The patient will resist the analysis in a myriad of ways. And the sicker the patient is—that is, the greater the split—the greater the identification with the mother will be. It is sometimes so great that the patient is, for all practical purposes, the mother, and there is no

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