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Insightful Observations . . . On Early Parental Love

It's about coming from a very loving family. When you go out into the world and you see what people don't have, you see how screwed up people can become when they have nothing that grounds them and gives them strength... See why I feel lucky?"
-- Cameron Diaz in Parade Magazine, Sunny Days Ahead (5/31/09)

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"If a mother has eight children, there are eight mothers."
-- Gabor Maté, M.D., in Scattered Minds, p. 57

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"No man searches more passionately for a dream woman than the child who grows up motherless."
-- Nandor Fodor in The Search For the Beloved (1949)

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"Our need for others has its roots in our earliest experiences and is bound up with our deepest feelings. This may be obvious, and yet a hundred years of otherwise creditable psychological thinking took it for granted that we begin life as individuals, who somehow at some later stage get in relationships with each other."
-- Josephine Klein in Our Need for Others and its Roots in Infancy

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"Anthropologist Ashley Montagu recently asked a room full of doctors and nurses how to determine lack of love from an x-ray. No one answered. He then explained that one can see dense lines in the bones caused by lack of growth that occurs when a child is unloved."
-- Bernie S. Siegel M. D. in Mothering, Spring, 1990

* * *

"The childhood shows the man
As morning shows the day."
--Milton, Paradise Regained (1674)

* * *

"The first real choice a human baby must make is whether to trust or mistrust other humans. This basic trust-versus-mistrust stage is the first building block upon which all later love relationships are formed."
-- Dr. Ken Magid and Carole McKelvey in High Risk: Children Without a Conscience

* * *

Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor's mind seeking some resolution it may never find.
-- Robert Anderson, from the film, "I Never Sang For my Father"

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Numerous scientific studies have documented and supported the risks and predictable negative behavioral outcomes that derive from inadequate maternal/infant bonding and attunement."
-- Robert Scaer, M.D., in The Trauma Spectrum

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"The. . . unquestioning love of our parents is so deeply rooted that hardly anything can destroy it, and certainly not insight into the truth. It is grounded in the natural need to love and be loved."
-- Dr. Alice Miller in Paths of Life

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"The prevention of substance abuse needs to begin in the crib - and even before then, in the social recognition that nothing is more important than the future of our culture than the way children develop."
-- Gabor Maté M.D. In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

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"In psychoanalysis we have learned to search psyches for the lost loves of later eras. Now it is time to search for the lost love of infancy."
-- Lawrence E. Hedges Ph.D. in In Search of the Lost Mother of Infancy

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"We do not need religion if we are loved well by our parents or caretakers."
-- Dianea Kohl in Tears Are Trust ...waiting to be felt.

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"What is now repressed cannot be forgiven. It can only make loving trust impossible. Therefore no true outgoing response can be made. The cap that fits her is made to fit God. He, too, demands, or seems to demand the right to reap where He did not sow. So long as the face, the word, and the fact of God's action are thus distorted in the direction of a demand and a hungry longing on the part of God, the schizoid elements in the personality will not budge. They remain as a persistent root of unbelief, doubt, and atheism, or at least agnosticism."
-- Frank Lake, M.D., in Clinical Theology, (1966),

* * *

"Mothering does not come naturally. Mothering the way you were mothered comes naturally."
-- Martha Welch, M.D. in Holding Therapy

* * *

"Give me the first six years of a child's life and you can have the rest."
-- Jesuit maxim

* * *

"Now the idea that our parents did not love us well or sufficiently is one that creates enormous resistance in people. Better to believe the fault lies within us, then at least we maintain the illusion that we can win their love if only we cut our hair, take a bath, become a doctor, marry the right person, earn more money, call home more often -- you fill in the blanks to fit the situation."
-- Bernie S. Siegel M. D. in Peace, Love and Healing

* * *

"In more than half of all persons who are given LSD in an ontologically satisfactory milieu, the experience of passing through the birth passages is vividly, and to the patient convincingly and conclusively re-lived. If this was particularly traumatic or prolonged, the pain re-experienced is considerable. Facts about the birth, previous unknown to the patient, such as a forceps delivery, a dry labor, persistent occipito-posterior position, face, arm and foot presentations, even being popped out into the lavatory pan, have been re-experienced...to be later confirmed by the family. A helpless rage, along with mortal anxiety, can be recalled as the mixed emotion experienced within the birth passages, when, being pressed violently up against unyielding tissues and bony structures, the first great claustrophobia was encountered. B>-- Frank Lake, M.D. Clinical Theology p. 167-8

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"The myth of happy childhood takes the place of the lost memory of the actual . . . experience."
-- Ernst Schactel

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"There is nothing which is more necessary and more precious in the experience of human childhood than parental love.... nothing more precious, because the parental love experienced in childhood is moral capital for the whole of life.... It is so precious, this experience, that it renders us capable of elevating ourselves to more sublime things--even divine things. It is thanks to the experience of parental love that our soul is capable of raising itself to the love of God.
--Valentin Tomberg

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". . . (M)ost females in history have been routinely tied up, genitally mutilated, beaten, raped and subjected to daily abuse (as for instance most Muslim women today still are), one can hardly be surprised that as mothers they are not able to be loving caretakers of their children."
--Lloyd deMause in The Psychology and Neurobiology of Violence

* * *

"Our national spotlight should clearly be on the crib -- not on the criminal -- if we are to change the future. Infants who do not receive a warm welcome into the world will seek their revenge."
-- Dr. Ken Magid and Cole McKelvey in High Risk: Children Without a Conscience

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"The childhood shows the man, as morning shows the day."
-- John Milton, Paradise Regained

* * *

"The stress of our lives and tension which emerges has much more relationship to our early histories than to our daily lives in the present. . . Even when one cries for a parent at a funeral, the agonizing quality of the grief derives from infancy, when love-loss was totally unbearable, much less from the present."
-- E. Michael Holden, M.D. in The Journal of Primal Therapy - Winter 1976

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"Give me other mothers and I will give you another world."
-- St Augustine

* * *

"In some women, the desire to maintain the fantasy of an idealized Good Mother, by becoming a mother, leads to compulsive pregnancies, but without the desire or ability to mother each child after it is born."
-- Jane Swigert in The Myth of the Bad Mother

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"Some women have children only to express how desperately they want to be loved as only babies are loved, and to try to wrest from the experience of giving birth the nurturance they never received from their mother."
-- Jane Swigert in The Myth of the Bad Mother

* * *

In referring to his mother:
"She shone for me like an Evening Star, I loved her, but at a distance."
-- Sir Winston Churchill

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"The need to believe in a good mother is a psychological necessity -- even if it means the total distortion of reality."
-- Jane Swigart in The Myth of the Bad Mother

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". . . the most painful disease I have every seen is that of an unloved child."
-- Dr. Bernie Seigel

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". . . addictive relationships . . . become that of two children in adult bodies, slugging it out, unaware that they are transferring all their anger and hurt about their parents onto their partner."
-- Charlotte D. Kasl, Ph.D. in Women, Sex and Addiction

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"Very often children create their image of a god or the Universe based on their relationship with their parents. Cruel parents, cruel gods."
-- Charlotte D. Kasl, Ph.D. in Women, Sex and Addiction.

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"Sexually addicted adults are essentially children hiding out in grown-up bodies, hungrily seeking parents to love them unconditionally."
-- Charlotte D. Kasl, Ph.D. in Women, Sex and Addiction.

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"For most people who come from dysfunctional families, the underlying goal of the psyche in choosing partners is often to address unfinished business left from childhood. We pick people like our parents and try to change them. . . If you accept that you can't change a cold person and give up trying, two things will happen. You will feel the grief for the loss of the father who was cold, and you will be free to choose a more loving partner."
- - Charlotte D. Kasl, Ph.D. in Women, Sex and Addiction.

* * *

"More typically, in healthy relationships, sex improves with time and shared experiences. Addictive sex, on the other hand, wanes with increased knowledge of the other person, because it no longer provides escape from buried feelings."
-- Charlotte D. Kasl, Ph.D. in Women, Sex and Addiction.

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"In the ordinary course of events, a child takes in love with his mothers' milk."
-- Anthony Storr

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"Our early lessons in love and our developmental history shape the expectations we bring into marriage."
-- Judith Viorst

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"...the young child's hunger for his mother's love and presence is as great as his hunger for food."

* * *

"You show me a murderer and I'll show you a person who's been failed in the supreme need for love -- who never learned how to love. . . ."
-- Ashley Montagu in Touch the Future

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"Who commits rape?" Rapists are ". . . not interested in sex at all. It is a crime of violence. And what is the violence about? Rejection by the mother, and they hate women."
-- Ashley Montagu in Touch the Future

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(T)he "'Casanova syndrome,' which compels a man to try to show himself that he is lovable by making up in numbers of conquests what is missing in the special quality of love that should have been found in his mother, the kind that assures one of one's existence and one's worth."
-- Jean Liedloff in The Continuum Concept

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"Every case of psychotherapy, to a greater or lesser extent, is a problem of a failure to love."
-- Paul Fleischman, M.D.

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"The first real choice a human baby must make is whether to trust or mistrust other humans. This basic trust-versus-mistrust stage is the first building block upon which all later love relationships are formed."
--Dr. Ken Magid and Carole A. McKelvey in High Risk

* * *

". . . the rage of psychopaths is that born of unfulfilled needs as infants. Incomprehensible pain is forever locked in their souls, because of the abandonment they felt as infants."
-- Dr. Ken Magid and Carole A. McKelvey in High Risk

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"And aside from the deep concern with childhood that we find in some of the most important passages in the Iliad, and that I would characterize as the therapeutic meditations of a remarkable mind in an infanticidal period, we know of at least one Greek baby of astounding ugliness who, despite all the cultural injunctions to the contrary, was permitted by his parents to live. His name was Socrates, and it is most interesting to observe that his mother was a midwife, who must have seen a good many children consigned to a lonely death on a hillside outside the city walls."
-- Henry Ebel

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"According to Diogenes Laertius, the pre-Socratic philosopher Thales, who acted as a benevolent guardian for his nephew, was asked why he had no children of his own. He replied: “Because I love children.”
-- Henry Ebel

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"The expectation that her search for love will be rewarded at last by her own love-needy infant is the tragedy of many a woman. And of course, it is a looming factor in the quality of deprivation suffered by the child. . . What could be more pathetic than a child crying for want of mothering and the mother striking out at it because it is not mothering her in answer to her longing?"
-- Jean Liedloff in The Continuum Concept

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"If I had been loved and cared for differently, I would have been a different person."
-- Marlon Brando in Songs My Mother Taught Me

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"Ninety percent of the people I meet are dealing with issues they can't overcome because of bad parenting. That's the truth. There's that side of you that says, `Time to get over the hurt and move on,' ... It's hard to do. So you just hang on to the emotion that this one didn't love me, or why didn't that relationship last? That stuff stays with you forever. You want to say, `Get over yourself! Come on! Time to grow up!' Some people are able to do that, but a lot of us remain victims of it. So I was fortunate with my parents."'
-- Leonardo Dicaprio in Parade Magazine, Oct 5, 2008

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"When people ask me what to do, I tell them to just give the child all the love that they can. Don't worry so much about anything else. And when it comes to discipline: never, never physically assault the child in any way, and certainly don't assault them with words, which can be just as cruel as physical punishment."
-- Ashley Montagu in Touch the Future

* * *

"Our national spotlight should clearly be on the crib -- not on the criminal -- if we are to change the future. Infants who do not receive a warm welcome into the world will seek their revenge."
-- Dr. Ken Magid and Carole A. McKelvey in High Risk

* * *

"The trauma that causes neurosis is lack of love and attention from parents."
-- Thomas A. Stone in Cure By Crying

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"Marriage in civilized life has become a double contract in many cases; one clause might read '. . .and I'll be your mother if you'll be my mother.'"
-- Jean Liedloff in The Continuum Concept

* * *

"Each generation begins anew with fresh, eager, trusting faces of babies, ready to love and create a new world. And each generation of parents tortures, abuses, neglects and dominates its children until they become emotionally crippled adults who repeat in nearly exact detail the social violence and domination that existed in previous decades."
-- Lloyd deMause in The Psychogenic Theory of History











































Insightful Observations . . . On the Significance of Early Trauma

"Almost half of all cigarettes sold in the United States (44 percent) are consumed by people with mental illness. This is because so many people who have mental illnesses smoke (50 to 80 percent, compared with less than 20 percent of the general population) and because they smoke so many cigarettes a day -- often three packs. Furthermore, smokers with mental illness are much more likely to smoke their cigarettes right down to the filters."
--Steven A. Shroeder, in A Hidden Epidemic

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"I have never known a patient to portray his parents more negatively than he actually experienced them in childhood, but always more positively -- because idealization of his parents was essential for survival."
-- Alice Miller

* * *

"An eleven-month-old must sense a cataclysmic rupture in the order of things when he is given over to strangers and his mother abruptly disappears from his life. These sorts of experiences can also leave a deep impression in the psyche and create alterations in brain physiology that may... but do not necessarily, last a lifetime."
--Gabor Maté In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

* * *

"ADHD and addictive tendentcies both arise out of stressful early childhood experience....although there is likely some genetic predisposition toward ADHD, a predisposition is far from the same predetermination. Two children with similar predispositions will not automatically develop in the same way -- once more, the environment is decisive."
-- Gabor Maté in In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

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"You never cry for anyone else, you always cry for yourself."
-- Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

* * *

"As we have seen, those who underwent persecutory experiences in the first year have many ways of defending against the emerence into adult consciousness of their infantile 'descent' into hell. These defences may break down in adolescence or middle life, but most commonly they take from forty to sixty years before they break down. When they do become de-repressed and emerge into consciousness, we encounter the persecuted infant exactly in the state of terror in which it was `put down'. And we see, in retrospect, that the paranoid or otherwise distorted personality pattern which has made this man or woman so difficult to live with over the years has all along been a defensive position based on unforgettable, unrecallable, 'memories' of this infantile descent into hell."
--Frank Lake, M.D., Clinical Theology

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"There is no 'evil' in history, only psychopathology, fully explainable by routine child abuse in societies."
-- Lloyd deMause

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"The basic point is that ADHD and addictive tendencies both arise out of stressful early childhood experience...although there is likely some genetic predisposition toward ADHD, a predisposition is far from the same as predetermination. Two children with similar predispositions will not automatically develop in the same way - once more, the environment is decisive."
--Gabor Maté, M.D., in In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

* * *

"T(he paranoid person)..."is more certain of the truth of this experience than he is of any other thing. There is no reason why we should attempt to dissuade him, since, in fact, we recognise that it does represent faithfully an actual section of his infantile experience....(However), to his sane judgment any such notion as the persecutoriness of his own actually loving mother is absurd."
-- Frank Lake, M.D. in Clinical Theology (1966)

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(In paranoia) "Powerful feelings invade the mind, whether of absolute terror, hate, jealously or longing, with the all-or-nothing quality of the original infantile experience. To defend against these overwhelming weaknesses, the ego may regress to even earlier experiences of absolute blessedness, power, vigour and ... of 'overwhelming well-being.' At one moment the patient is in ecstasy, exaltered by a supernatural sense of having absolute insight into all the ultimate problems of being. At the next he may feel gripped by 'demonic' opponents and damnation. We know that these actually represent the two states of infantile 'well-being' and infantile 'ill-being' as they occurred within the first six months of life. Under LSD they are relived in this context."
-- Frank Lake, M.D. in Clinical Theology (1966)

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"There, however, the psychotic attack is secondary to an acute febrile or exhaustive illness or operation, the paranoid episode often comes to an end as convalescence brings returning strength.
(The) association of short-lived psychotic episodes,...with a new orientation to life and with religious conversion cannot be everlooked in pastoral care. Anton Boisen, who himself experienced a liberating crisis in his spiritual life within a psychotic episode, has written movingly of this strange potentiality. I have myself been in close contact with several patients during psychotic episodes which became, for them, times of transformation of personality in an entirely beneficial sense. What seemed to be a disintegrating and shattering loss of sanity proved to be part of a more massive integration of hitherto repressed and unacceptable memorial of infantile terrors of psychotic intensity."
-- Frank Lake, M.D. in Clinical Theology (1966)

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"The uncanny passivity of the (hospitalized) paranoid patient, in accepting as inevitable and without hope of redress these 'persecutory' acts (which if they were now 'true' is indicative of the entirely passive state of affairs in the infantile situation, of which the whole paranoid illness is an expression."
-- Frank Lake, M.D. in Clinical Theology (1966)

* * *

"It comes to know the quality of its own worth from the eyes and the voice of mother. Contempt, disgust, fear, or mere disinterestedness, when written in the countenance of the mother as she faces her baby, cannot fail to produce in it the awful realisation that in the very place where peace and love should be found, there is a thrusting away into outer darkness. There is no other place of peaceful abiding open. To turn to father as a substitute for the disgrace of being unloved by mother is to grow up an inferior man, or an inferior woman."
-- Frank Lake, M.D. in Clinical Theology (1966)

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"People who cannot find or receive love need to find substitutes - and that's where addictions come in."
Gabor Maté in In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

* * *

"The mental pain of a breakdown is the echo of the pain of long-lost relationships. The echo resonates through into consciousness because a painful loneliness has descended again upon the patient....Patterns of loneliness in the present tend always to invoke their prototypes lying dormant at the roots of being....(G)enuine company can combat neurotic anxiety. Just as recent social isolation can arouse a reverberation of the separation-anxieties of infancy through into consciousness, so the return of good relationship, in which the lonely person is cared for, will replace the resonance of anxiety-provoking situations by the resonable of such other good relationships of infancy as are available on the reverberating circuits of memory....In this way, the mere provision of an attentive listener can put to flight an army of irrational fears." --Frank Lake, M.D. Clinical Theology (1966), pgs. 9-10.

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"Each generation of parents commits atrocities against their children which by God's decree remain invisible to the rest of the world."
-- John Updike

* * *

"How can we have the courage to wish to live, how can we make a movement to preserve ourselves from death, in a world where love is provoked by a lie and consists solely in the need of having our sufferings appeased by whatever being has made us suffer?"
--Marcel Proust

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"An eleven-month-old must sense a cataclysmic rupture in the order of things when he is given over to strangers and his mother abruptly disappears from his life. These sorts of experiences can also leave a deep impression in the psyche and create alteration in bran physiology that may... but do not necessarily, last a lifetime."
Gabor Maté in In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

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"The history of man for nine months preceding his birth would, probably, be far more interesting, and contain events of greater moment, than all the threescore and ten years that follow it."
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1840

* * *

"After the first death, there are no others"
-- Dylan Thomas, Poet

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"With each new loss we will relive, remember, or grieve once more at the thought of that very first loss. And the younger we are when that loss comes, the more heavily it weighs on everything that comes afterward."
-- Diane Cole in After Great Pain

* * *

"We call a person 'normal' if the self-deception that he uses to repress, deny, displace, and rationalize those basic wounds that are ubiquitous in human beings from babyhood works quite well. He is 'normal' in so far as his defenses against too much painful reality are as successful as (all unbeknown to the person himself) they are meant to be."
-- Dr. Frank Lake

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"The past and present are constantly conflated on a deep unconscious level, which accounts for so much of the richness of being. But it also accounts for virtually all psychopathology, which you might say consists not of unpleasant memories that we recall, but unpleasant memories which recall us."
--Robert W. Godwin, Ph.D.

* * *

"Being diagnosed with a life-threatening illness is acknowledged by the DSM-IV to be an experience that may be sufficient to cause Post Traumatic Stress Disorder."
-- Robert Scaer, M.D. in The Trauma Spectrum

* * *

"The past is not a package one can lay away."
--Emily Dickinson

* * *

"The neurotic is nailed to the cross of his fiction."
-- Alfred Adler

* * *

"The fact that many people find romantic excitement in a lover who displays the qualities of a rejecting parent, an excitement that they do not find in others, suggests the degree to which they remain not just committed to but enthralled by early attachment figures. They can't let go of the mother or gather who didn't love them the way they needed to be loved. And they continue to be betwiched by the hurtfulness that compromised their care."
"(It) feels like giving up love itself. And so one seeks love in retition .. . An obvious corollary is that the prospect of being (cared for) in a truly loving way is undermined at every turn; indeed, it feels perversely unacceptable."
-- R. Karen in Becoming Attached

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"Men are what their mothers made them."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

* * *

"Over the years I've worked with many similar people, whose deep attachment to cigarettes is rooted in a traumatic past. Unwilling or unable to get adequate help for their problems, such people use cigarettes as a form of self-medication, as a way of numbing pain. And they usually started smoking at a very early age."
-- Patricia Allison - Hooked But Not Helpless: Kicking Nicotine Addiction

* * *

"Individuals with mental health issues smoke 44% of all cigarettes."
U.S. Mental Health Services Administration"

* * *

"No matter how much she loves him in her heart - a child with a depressed mother feels constant deprivation and deep distress."
Gabor Maté in In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

* * *

"Trans-marginal [extreme] stressing in infancy is never forgotten. It cannot be assimilated to the ordinary body of experience of life with mother and father. It is 'out of this world'. Since it cannot be tolerated in consciousness, all the better aspects of parental care by which, reasonably speaking, it ought to be balanced, do not affect it at all. Parents are often very puzzled when a child who seems to have been happy and reasonably well adjusted up to a certain point begins, during the school years, or in early adult life, to accuse the parents of attitudes of rejection and harshness which certainly could not have been reasonably deduced from the later year of consciousness. They are, of course, faithful transcripts of first-year interpretations of experiences in the foundation year.
--Frank Lake, Clinical Theology

* * *

"The role of life trauma in the generation of immune disorders...must still remain an intriguing but speculative hypothesis....Pre- or perinatal trauma. . . remains an intriguing possibility."
--Robert C. Scaer, M.D. in The Trauma Spectrum

* * *

"I believe that much chronic, unexplained pain has its basis in the procedural memory for pain associated with a threat to life. This may be because the pain patient has a life history of severe trauma that has left him vulnerable, hypervigilant, and susceptible to kindling. It may also be associated with a painful injury linked to severe traumatic stress, such as an injury in warfare, a catastrophic accident, or a personal assault."
-- Robert Scaer, M.D., The Trauma Spectrum

* * *

"Parents are a serious adaptive problem for the infant.
-- W. LaBarre

* * *

"People who have been traumatically abused are saddled with the worst expectations - terrifying anxiety, loss of control, feeling like killing and being killed,(and) being alone and unable to survive in a murderous universe."
-- Leonard Shengold, M.D.

* * *

"We do not live in the past, but the past in us.
-- U. B. Phillips.

* * *

"Great wealth cannot bring happiness because money is not an infantile wish."
-- Sigmund Freud

* * *

"Our unique desire and ability to fall in love have to do with attachment experiences we all had very early in life, before we even knew what was happening to us. Attachment leaves such a lasting impression that much of our later life is spent trying to recreate its specific character, for better for worse. We are intensely attracted to those particular individuals who resonate with our earliest emotional map."
-- Robert W. Godwin, Ph.D. One Cosmos under God

* * *

"Trauma essentially plays a role in causing or triggering most if not all mental illness."
-- Robert Scaer, M.D., The Trauma Spectrum

* * *

"Some subscribers have expressed concern to me that our postings about Killer Mommies and maternal child abuse are misogynous. I can only reply with the following quote from Joseph C. Rheingold's The Fear of Being a Woman: A Theory of Maternal Destructiveness (p. viii):

"Tolstoy is quoted as saying: 'When I have one foot in the grave I will tell the truth about women. I shall tell it, jump into my coffin, pull the lid over me and say, "Do what you like now."' This is misogyny.

The 'truth about women' is that, like men, they are capable of nurturance and of destructiveness, and because they are the mothers of the race, their influence is of greater consequence than the influence of men. . . . destructiveness is the product of fear and not of malignity of character. . . .The hurtful adult was once a hurt child, and the transmission of destructiveness is not willed."


-- Quoted by Lloyd deMause, Psychohistorian

* * *

"...Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair."
-- Iris Murdoch

* * *

"...trauma has a twofold potential; it can be the catalyst for creative change or the cause of self-destruction. It depends on your courage to embrace the unresolved pain you repressed at the time the trauma happened and the meaning you chose to give it."
-- John Bradshaw

* * *

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle."
-- Attribution -- Philo of Alexandria

* * *

"Males fear females because they dread their mothers."
-- Kenneth A. Adams, A Heaven In Hell's Despair

* * *

". . .brain researchers can now confirm what many psychologists and psychotherapists have long suspected and even assumed: Emotion memories are permanent. They become ingrained in the brain's circuitry. We may be able to suppress emotional memories, sometimes for years; but they are always there, stored away and waiting for the right trigger to launch them into our consciousness once again."
-- Joel David in Mapping The Mind

* * *

"We have not yet found a mass murderer who had a happy, loving childhood."
-- James Kimmel, Ph.D.

* * *

". . . history is the final receptacle for the repressed, the final resting-place for the infantile trauma, the group-fantasy which at last reenacts and makes real that which we would most disown -- our own childhood."
-- Lloyd deMause

* * *

"Lacking an intrinsic sense of self, the traumatized child is destined to endlessly recapitulate personal achievement as the only means of recapitulating his or her sense of self."
Robert Scaer, M.D.

* * *

". . . a traumatic experience with parental authority can contaminate all future relationships with superiors and other people in positions of authority.
-- Stanislav Grof, M.D.

* * *

"Each generation of parents commits atrocities against their children whch by God's decree remain invisible to the rest of the word."
-- John Updike

* * *

"What usually precipitates his illness is this: Some adverse external event occurs which he unconsciously interprets, not as a transient frustration, but as the beginning of a constant frustration of some unconscious longing."
-- The Merck Manual, 11th Edition, 1966

* * *

"Deprived children. . . are a source of social infection as real and serious as are carriers of diphtheria and typhoid."
-- John Bowlby

* * *

"In every nursery there are ghosts," such that "a parent and his child may find themselves re-enacting a moment or a scene from another time with another set of characters."
-- Selma Fraiberg

* * *

". . . recovery of repressed memories is not only common, but also forms a reliable, scientific basis for trusting the childhood memories that are the cause of most mental and social problems."
-- Lloyd deMause

* * *

"You can guess what happened to people long ago, if you'll just listen to what they say they felt during the past week."
-- Doyle P. Henderson in Amazing Truths About Your Emotions

* * *

"Soul murder patients are individuals who have suffered complicated, overwhelming traumata - experiences that have evoked damaging defenses, destructive compulsions to repeat their traumatic past, and crippling (but sometimes also constructive) reparative adaptive efforts to absorb and transcend what life has thrust upon them. People who have suffered in the concentration camps of childhood do seem to have certain burdens in common: murderous rage; the terrible double bind of (on the one hand) feeling absolutely dependent for rescue on parental figures who may have been the abusers or at least are held responsible for it and (on the other) wanting to kill these people, who are felt to be indispensable; massive and multiple defenses that can bring about denial and achieve brainwashing."
-- Leonard Shengold, M.D. in Soul Murder Revisited

* * *

"To be disliked and criticized when you are five or six leaves you believing that there is something radically wrong with you. Being in the struggle for approval in the present is at least being on the right track."
-- Arthur Janov, The New Primal Scream, 1991

* * *

"Behind every act of violence there is a history. A history of being molested, a history of denying."
-- Alice Miller, Interview October, 1987, Omni Magazine, "The Roots of Violence"

* * *

"Victims of a devastating trauma may never be the same (again) biologically. It does not matter if it was the incessant terror of combat, torture, repeated abuse in childhood, or a one-time experience."
-- Psychiatrist Dennis Charney

* * *

"Child abuse is the single most common cause of mental illness."
-- Charles L. Whitfield M. D.

* * *

"And when trauma occurs early, is severe and sustained, we have no data that suggest that there's any truth to the saying Time Heals All Wounds. Our society doesn't want to look at trauma's long-term effects. But it doesn't just go away."
-- Wilfred Gallagher, The Torment of the Multiple Personality Disorder, Cosmopolitan Magazine, November, 1990

* * *

". . . (t)o be fully open to the baby's emotional needs is to become reacquainted with oneself as a baby, to reexperience the pain of being totally dependent and desperate in love and yet being shut out and feeling unwanted."
-- Robert Karen, Ph.D.

* * *

"Complications in the intimate emotional reaction with one's mother or father can cause recurrent problems with sexual partners."
-- Stanislav Grof, M.D. in The Adventure of Self-Discovery

* * *

" . . . the first notion of identity in the infant, what is most his own, comes from the outside. . . through the mother's gaze, the infant (receives) precise instructions as to "who he is" and "how he must be" in order to be loved and recognized. . . "
-- Raquel Zak

* * *

"I wanted to understand the most abstract ideas -- of Kant, Hegel, or Marx. My dissertation in philosophy was very abstract. Now I see that each philosopher had to build a big, big building in order not to feel his pain. Even Freud."
-- Alice Miller in Interview in Omni Magazine, October, 1987, The Roots of Violence.

* * *

"A parent may feel rejective toward a child, consciously or unconsciously, constantly or intermittently, but seek to suppress this feeling by not permitting it to come through in actions. But there is a belief that the child senses the true feeling."
-- Frank R. Donovan in Raising Your Child

* * *

". . . knowledge of the perinatal dynamics is essential for any serious approach to such problems as religion, mysticism, rites of passage, shamanism, or psychosis."
-- Stanislav Grof M.D.

* * *

"It is not merely a question of inner conflict or of 'growing up.' 'Stop fussing over what your parents did to you!' as skeptics command patients in therapy. The scar consists of changed anatomy and chemistry within the brain."
Dr. Peter D. Kramer in Listening To Prozac

* * *

"Behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invented in order to live in an unlivable situation."
-- R. D. Laing in The Politics of Experience

* * *

"If guided with kindness and understanding the schizophrenic experience could become a transcendental journey of death and rebirth toward a new, more positive meaning in life."
-- Peter R. Breggin in Toxic Psychiatry

* * *

"In the self-help literature directed at parents virtually no attention is paid to the emotional upheavals that the parent is likely to face -- the disturbing return of long banished feelings, the sense of being driven to behave in ways that one would rather not think about, the haunting sensation of being inhabited by the ghost of one's own mother or father as one tries to relate to one's child."
-- Robert Karen, Ph.D.

* * *

"Adults who were abused in childhood are all too ready to hear that their pain is a random force of nature, and the therapist's challenge with these patients is precisely to give historical meaning to symptoms."
-- Dr. Peter D. Kramer in Listening to Prozac

* * *

"Autonomic dysregulation with abnormal cycling and disordered homeostasis, is the prototype for most of the diseases of trauma."
--Robert C. Scaer in The Trauma Spectrum

* * *

"Expressing memories of trauma is about naming what happened, not blaming others for it."
-- Charles L. Whitfield M.D.

* * *

"Mystics and schizophrenics find themselves in the same ocean, but the mystics swim whereas the schizophrenics drown."
-- R. D. Laing Quoted in Uncommon Wisdom by Fritjof Capra

* * *


"Evidence suggesting that adult mental and physical health is rooted in intrauterine experience of the fetus, the nature of the birth experience...the bonding experience of the infant is, in some circles, culturally tabo, threatens many of the standards of care in the pediatric and obstetrical specialties. It challenges cultural assumptions regarding the emancipation of women and their right to pursue professional goals. It defies the culturally accepted belief that prolonged nursing, maternal/child contact, and avoidance of daycare creates "dependency" in children. However, as is discussed later in the book, patterns of childcare throughout the millennia have varied widely in different cultures and have often clearly determined the nature of those cultures, specifically with regard to tendencies toward pacific or war behavior."
-- The Trauma Spectrum Robert W. Scaer, M.D.

* * *

"When presenting these concepts in workshops and lectures, I have understandably been challenged at times by women in the audience, many of whom are working mothers. In these instances, I try to present myself as messenger, not the judge. There is no doubt that the entry of women in areas of the workplace formerly occupied by males has provided many positive benefits for our society. One can only look at this trend as cultural progress. The dilemma lies in the irrefutable evidence that face-to-face, skin-to-skin nurturing of the newborn and developing infant is not only beneficial but also essential for optimal brain development."
-- The Trauma Spectrum, Robert W. Scaer, M.D.

























Observations . . . On Life Before Birth

"The emotional connection to the mother is the psychological lifeline for the unborn infant, and when that connection is lacking anxiety and insecurity can result."
-- Michael Gabriel in Remembering Your Life Before Birth

* * *
"It is here, in the first three months or so in the womb, that we have encountered the origins of the main personality disorders and the psychosomatic stress conditions."
-- Frank Lake M.D. in Tight Corners in Pastoral Counselling

* * *

"Positive experiences in the womb, and after birth are the closest contacts with the Divine that we can experience during our embryonic life or in infancy. . . .Conversely, negative and painful experiences that we encounter in the intrauterine period, during birth, and in the early postnatal period send us deeper into the state of alienation from the divine source."
-- Stanislav Grof, M.D. in The Cosmic Game

* * *

"The behavioral reactions of a pregnant mother affect her fetus in ways that contribute to its perceptions of itself and of its environment in the womb; and those perceptions persist into adult life."
-- Roger Moss

* * *

"I was assured by neurologists that the nervous system of the baby was such that it was out of the question that any memory to do with birth could be reliably recorded as fact. I relayed my incredulity to my patients, and, as always happens in such cases, they tended thereafter to suppress what I was evidently unprepared, for so-called scientific reasons, to believe.

But then a number of cases emerged in which the reliving of specific birth injuries of forceps delivery, of the cord round the neck, of the stretched brachial plexus, and various other dramatic episodes were so vivid, so unmistakable in their origin, and afterward confirmed by the mother or other reliable informants, that my suspicions was shaken."
-- Frank Lake in Clinical Theology

* * *
"(t)he memories of prenatal existence, birth, and early postnatal events leave deep imprints in our unconscious and exert a profound influence on our life. It is, therefore, imperative that in the future we do whatever is possible to improve the conditions under which children are conceived, develop as embryos, are born, and are treated after delivery."
-- Stanislav Grof, M.D. in The Cosmic Game

* * *

"Pain has but one acquaintance and that is death
Each one unto the other society enough."
-- Emily Dickenson

* * *

"At the perinatal level of consciousness, our idiosyncratic histories begin to yield to a narrow set of issues fundamental to human existence: birth, physical pain, disease, and death."
-- Christopher M. Bache, Ph.D.

* * *

"'What did that (first hit of morphine) feel like?' I ask. 'Like a warm, wet blanket,' he replies, 'a place of safety - the safety that came before pain and danger, before the enormity of being born, pushed and drugged, kicking and screaming into this world.' The sex-trade worker who told me that his first hit of heroin was like a warm soft hug was fantasizing the state of infant joy. Stephen's 'warm wet blanket' harkens back to even further, to the womb - perhaps the last time he'd had a sense of security."
-- Gabor Maté, M.D., in In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

* * *

(Fetal life) ". . . is not drifting on a cloud, (but is) eventful as the nine months that come after birth. The foetus is not unaware of itself, or of the emotional response of the mother to its presence, but acutely conscious of both and that interaction."
-- Frank Lake, M.D

* * *

"A prenatal event may have far-reaching effects that are all but impossible to counteract in later life. . . .The more prenatal nurture matters, the less postnatal nurture can matter."
-- Matt Ridley, Ph.D. in Nature Via Nurture: Genes, Experience & What Makes Us Human (2003)

* * *

"The severest forms of human pain" [originate from] ". . .the soul-destroying pain and heart-breaking suffering that comes from the distress of the foetus in the womb when the mother herself is distressed. . .these first three months after conception hold more ups and downs, more ecstasies and devastations that we had ever imagined."
-- Frank Lake M.D. in Tight Corners in Pastoral Counseling

* * *

"The function of the brain is to learn, and the learning that takes place in the womb is of the deepest and most fundamental sort."
-- John E. Nelson, M.D.

* * *

"We find that it is not sufficient to look back, to find the origins of significant trauma, of consequent fixated pain, and therefore of the personality reactions that represent flight from that pain, only so far as the first year of life, or even to the traumas of birth. Things go wrong -or go well- much earlier than that."
-- Frank Lake M.D. in Research into the Pre-natal Aetiology of Mental Illness, Personality, and Psychosomatic Disorders.

* * *

". . .the very earliest experiences which can lead to disturbed feelings of identity . . . have their origins in the distresses of babyhood."
-- Frank Lake in The Origin and Development of Personal Identity

* * *

(W)e believe that we have discovered in the trauma of birth the primal trauma."
-- Otto Rank

* * *

"We have recognized the neuroses in all their manifold forms as reproductions of, and reactions to, the birth trauma."
-- Otto Rank

* * *

"There is evidence that personal birth experience is significant and is held as memory material. When birth trauma is significant, every detail of impingement and reaction is, as it were, etched on the patients memory, in the way to which we have been accustomed when patients relive traumatic experiences of later life."
-- D. W. Winnicott in Birth Memories, Birth Trauma and Anxiety"

* * *

"Some of you have followed our research into what looked like the earliest recallable experiences of human beings, namely, the sensations and emotions accompanying one's birth . . . Increasingly over recent years we have been invaded by evidence that the foetus in the mother's womb is picking up all sorts of messages about itself."
-- Frank Lake, M.D. in Report from the Research Department

* * *

"The catecholamines which convey the 'messages' to do with emotions round the mother's circulation, gearing all her organs and cells to feeling joy or sorrow, love or loathing, vitality or exhaustion, pass through the placental barrier (which to these substances is no barrier) into the foetal blood stream via the umbilical vein.

In this context the foetus does its own emotional homework and responds, either passively accepting the mother's bad feelings as its own, as if true for itself, or by being protestingly overwhelmed by them. It can aggressively fight them back, in resolute opposition to sharing the mother's sickness. Others become 'fetal therapists' trying to bolster up a debilitated and debilitating mother from their own feelings of relative strength. Sensitivity to 'poisonous' feelings coming from a rejecting mother is very great . . .To be the focus of mother's love imprints a confidence that 'sets us up' for life."
-- Frank Lake in Report from the Research Department

* * *

"Birth traumas are imprinted as deep subconscious memories that are reactivated during crisis points in adult life."
-- John E. Nelson, M.D.

* * *

"The focus for psychopathology is now, for us, the first trimester of intrauterine life. These first three months after conception had more ups and downs, more ecstasies and devastations than we had ever imagined."
-- Frank Lake. in Tight Corners in Pastoral Counseling

* * *

"(O)nly at the very end of the period in which I was using LSD 25 in the therapy of neuroses and personality disorders, that is, at the end of the sixties, did I invite those who wanted to work at primal depth, using LSD, to come to residential conferences with spouse and friends. I soon found how greatly this group work helped the process, and wished that I had realized that earlier!
-- Frank Lake in Tight Corners in Pastoral Counseling

* * *

"(A)though the shopworn notion that an immature brain cannot support awareness or store memories is dear to many pediatricians, recent scientific observations of babies should lay that idea to rest. . . . This research suggests a vast, unseen dimension of family interaction operating on a microscopic level invisible to ordinary view."
-- John E. Nelson, M.D. in Healing the Split

* * *

"Before birth, the foetus may be seriously damaged if the mother is dependent upon alcohol, nicotine or other drugs. It is also damaged by the less readily identifiable changes that transmit to the baby a mother's rejection of a particular pregnancy and of the life growing within her. Any severe maternal distress, whatever its cause, imprints itself on the foetus."
-- Frank Lake in Tight Corners in Pastoral Counseling

* * *

"She may have been full of anger internally, while fear, compliance or compassion prevented its ever being shown externally. she may have loved the man by whom she became pregnant, while hating the resultant fetus, or loved the prospect of having a baby, while hating, fearing or feeling deeply disappointed and neglected by its father. The fetus receives all such messages but has difficulty in distinguishing what relates specifically to it and what belongs to the mother's feelings about her own life in general."
-- Frank Lake in Tight Corners in Pastoral Counseling

* * *

"It may be due to her marriage, to her husband's withdrawal rather than more intimate supporting when he is asked urgently for more than his personality can easily give. It may be due to the family's economic or social distress in a distressed neighborhood. . . If she is grieving the loss of, or nursing a still dying parent, the sorrow overwhelms her and overwhelms her fetus."
-- Frank Lake in Theology and Personality

* * *

"The pain of the world, picked up by the family is funnelled by the mother into the fetus."
-- Frank Lake in Theology and Personality

* * *

[Included is] ". . . both the registering of the mother's condition, of yearning, anxiety, fear, anger, disgust, bitterness, jealously, etc, into the fetus, and its own emotional response to this distressed and distressing invasion.
-- Frank Lake in Studies in Constricted Confusion

* * *

"As soon as the tragedy of human life impinges upon the infant, indeed upon the fetus still within the womb, the truth of what has happened is immediately murdered by repression and turned into a lie which denies that it ever happened.
-- Frank Lake in Theological Studies in Mental Health in India

* * *

"(W)e believe that we have discovered in the trauma of birth the primal trauma. . . (and that) . . . we are led to recognize in the birth trauma the ultimate biological basis of the psychical. . . We recognized the neuroses in all their manifold forms as reproductions of, and reactions to, the birth trauma.
-- Otto Rank in The Trauma of Birth

* * *

"We believe that we have succeeded in recognizing all forms and symptoms of neuroses as expressions of a regression from the stage of sexual adjustment to the pre-natal primal state, or to the birth situation, which must thereby by overcome."
-- Otto Rank in The Trauma of Birth

* * *

"(T)here is evidence that personal birth experience is significant and is held as memory material. When birth trauma is significant, every detail of impingement and reaction is, as it were, etched on the patients memory, in the way to which we have been accustomed when patients relive traumatic experiences of later life."
-- D. W. Winnicott quoted by Frank Lake in Primal Integration Work

* * *

"The release of the trauma of birth is the introductory phase of the integration of pre-natal trauma. The more vital phase concerns the shocks suffered prior to birth. In order to release these shocks, the mind must take cognizance of their existence and nature.
-- Nandor Fodor in The Search For the Beloved

* * *

"I believe first of all that which all my patients assert, that the embryo already feels plainly whether its mother loves it or not, whether she gives it much love, little love, or none at all, in many instances in fact in place of love sheer hate."
-- J. Sadger in Preliminary Study of the Psychic Life of the Fetus and the Primary Germ

* * *

"We have always known, whether taught by St. Augustine, Søren Kierkegaard or Sigmund Freud, that infants suffered abysmally, and that human beings crawling out of their abysses into life have damaged perceptions, distorted goals and a lifetime bondage of primal fears.

What we had not known, and even now are somewhat terrified to know as clearly and rigorously as we in fact do, is the contribution to this soul-destroying pain and heart-breaking suffering that comes from the distress in the womb when the mother herself is distressed. The focus for psychopathology Is now, for us, the first trimester of intra-uterine life. These first three months after conception hold more ups and downs, more ecstasies and devastations than we had ever imagined."
-- Frank Lake in Tight Corners in Pastoral Counseling

* * *

(Some researchers have found) ". . .correlations between stressful maternal life events which occurred during pregnancy and the incidence of adult male homosexuality. Domer and his colleagues found that out of 800 homosexual males" ". . . highly significantly more homosexuals were born during the stressful war (World War 11) and early post-war period than in the years before or after this stressful period. This finding suggested that stressful maternal life events, if occurring during pregnancy may represent in fact, an etiogenetic risk factor for the development of sexual variations in the male offspring.
-- G. Dorner et als in Endokrinologie


































Observations . . . On the Agony of Birth

"The agony of birth is both of body and mind. It is easier to believe in the former than in the latter."
-- Nandor Fodor in The Search For the Beloved (1949)

* * *

". . . birth is for us humans relatively traumatic. This is due to the biological facts of our upright posture and our relatively large brain. Both of these evolutionary developments have necessitated that humans be born earlier than otherwise would be good for them. Thus the adventure and exhilaration of coming into the world is regularly accompanied by a mixture of uncertainty, desperate aggression, and even fear of annihilation."
-- Dr. Ludwig Janus in The Enduring Effects of Prenatal Experience

* * *

"It would take an army of therapists to keep up with the endless production line of trauma at birth! "
-- David Chamberlain, Ph.D., in Birth Trauma Is Real

* * *

"'What did that (first hit of morphine) feel like? I ask. 'Like a warm, wet blanket,' he replies, 'a place of safety' - the safety that came before pain and danger, before the enormity of being born, pushed and drugged, kicking and screaming into this world. The sex-trade worker who told me that his first hit of heroin was like a warm soft hug was fantasizing state of infant joy. Stephen's 'warm wet blanket' harkens back to even further, to the womb - perhaps the last time he'd had a sense of security."
Gabor Maté M.D. in In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

* * *

". . .(W)hile time heals the worst wounds as far as consciousness is concerned, for the unconscious the passing of years has no meaning. This part of our personality does not know of oblivion, and the dynamic tension of the memories stored up in its hidden recesses is apt to cause disturbance as soon as a parallel psychic state arises in the conscious mind. "
-- Sandor Fodor in The Search For the Beloved

* * *

"He doesn't speak, the newborn? Why his entire being shouts out, "Don't touch me! Don't touch me!" And yet at the same time, imploringly, begging, "Don't leave me! Don't leave me!" This is birth. This is the torture, the Calvary."
-- Dr. Frederick Leboyer

* * *

"When analytically adjusted psychiatrists have recognized that the content of the psychosis is 'cosmologic,' we need not avoid the next step, that of analysis of cosmology itself, for then we shall find that it is nothing other than the infantile recollection of one's own birth projected on to Nature."
-- Otto Rank in The Trauma of Birth (1929)

* * *

"Every institution is a womb, every boundary is a potential cervix and every change is a little birth."
-- David Wasdell

* * *

"Yes, hell exists. It is not a fairy tale. One indeed burns there. This hell is not at the end of life. It is here. At the beginning. Hell is what the infant must experience before he gets to us."
-- Dr. Frederick Leboyer

* * *

"We are all born mad; Some remain so.
--Samuel Beckett

* * *

"The dynamics of bullying or victimhood are rooted deep in a wounded child's psyche. This is why moral preaching and the plethora of antibullying programs have little or no impact on the growing bullying tendencies among youth."
--Gabor Maté, M.D., in In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

* * *

"(P)erinatal unconscious . . . is the source of individual and social psychopathology and of so much of the suffering in the modern world."
-- Dr. Stanislav Grof in H.R. Giger and the Soul of the Twentieth Century

* * *

"Whenever the cause of the innocent foetus' or neonate's suffering, whether it is the umbilically-communicated rejection, neglect or hate of intrauterine life, or the possible "brain-destroying, suffocating, twisting, tearing, crushing torture" of birth or the later experience of neglect and abuse, this 'truth' must be quickly 'murdered.' Lake writes that "as soon as the tragedy of human life impinges upon the infant, indeed upon the foetus still within the womb, the truth of what has happened is immediately murdered by repression and turned into a lie which denies that it ever happened." The truth, however, remains to be uncovered. "Though split off from consciousness, dissociated and repressed, no detail of the incident has been obliterated."
Frank Lake - quoted in a dissertation by Stephen M. Maret entitled, Frank Lake's Maternal-Fetal Distress Syndrome: An Analysis

* * *

"One may question whether the terror the adult experiences in going through a birth primal is experienced at all by the preborn infant, and there is no simple answer. Nevertheless it appears safe to say from innumerable experiences with persons of all ages that the biological patterns that are established by the withdrawal or threat of life support system remain very intact and are recoverable in fairly much pristine form as much as fifty and sixty years later. Obviously, a word like "terror" is an adult form of identification which is applied later to birth's biologically patterned experience. The word "death" is likewise an adult way of identifying a response to a physiological event, the two together giving "terror of death" a not uncommon ego signification. The preborn of course does not have the words, it only has the biological patternings which eventually give rise to the words."
-- Dr. Daniel W. Miller in Birth, Death and Organic Energy from Primal Community

* * *

"The trauma of birth involves a life-and-death struggle, with a potential for becoming the basis for many extremes of emotion. As an event that we all share, it has the potential for bringing about mass scale psychological aberrations, with perhaps hundreds of thousands of people sharing a common experience of tremendous unconscious rage."
-- Stanislav Grof, M. D. in The Holotropic Mind

* * *

". . . in the depths of the unconscious mind, one remains exactly the child who suffered the trauma."
-- Dr. Ludwig Janusin The Enduring effects of Prenatal Experience

* * *

"The prevention of substance abuse needs to begin in the crib - and even before then, in the social recognition that nothing is more important in the future of our culture than the way children develop."
--Gabor Maté, M.D., in, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

* * *

"Groups go to war in order to overcome the helplessness and terror of being trapped in a birth canal, through means of a sadomasochistic orgy in order to "hack one's way out" of the mother's body."
-- Lloyd deMause in The Foundations of Psychohistory

* * *

"It would be foolish to believe that the mind begins to function only at the moment of birth."
-- Sandor Ferenczi

* * *

"It is unnecessary to state that the time spent in the uterus is critically important, demanding every conceivable care, but it is extraordinary to realize how little attention has been paid in the past to this foundation of all our existences."
-- Anthony Smith

* * *

"Patterns of behavior that are permanently repeated throughout life are very often the blind repetition of experiences made at birth."
-- Dr. Ludwig Janus in The Enduring effects of Prenatal Experience

* * *

"Since birth-traumatized infants tend to cry more than those not traumatized and since excessive crying by infants is a potent trigger for child abuse, it can be concluded that birth trauma is an important factor contributing to child abuse."
-- Aletha Solter Ph. D. in Tears for Trauma: Birth Trauma, Crying and Child Abuse from Primal Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology

* * *

When asked by a student about the influence of his experiences in Vietnam on his choices in writing and directing films such as "Platoon," "Born on the Fourth of July" and "Natural Born Killers," Oscar winner Oliver Stone replied:

"The violence was evident before Vietnam. There was blood, there was screaming, there was forceps and there was me."
-- Feb 20, 1996, at Oxford, England

* * *

From the script of Oliver Stone's movie, "Natural Born Killers"
--

"When did you first start thinking about killing?

"Birth. I was thrown in a flaming pit of scum. I was forgotten by God."

* * *

"Once others plunge into a war-as-birth experience, neighbors feel sucked into a similar fetal trance state (even though Americans realize European wars are irrational, once they start they get picked up by 'a force they cannot resist' and jump into their own birth primal)."
-- Lloyd deMause in The Foundations of Psychohistory

* * *

"The only sin is the sin of being born.
--Samuel Beckett

* * *

". . . a decent birth is at least half the job of child rearing and may be equal to years of positive experiences with parents. . . whereas an improper birth leaves one vulnerable to even the most benign events."
-- Dr. Arthur Janov
in Imprints: The Lifelong Effects of the Birth Experience

* * *

"The loathing of the pain of being born may be so great that the wish to die almost entirely replaces the former longing to live. In fact, the intensity of the earlier longing is transformed, mechanically and without any act of the will to the latter, at the point where sheer intolerance of pain takes over.
-- Frank Lake M. D. in Personal Identity - Its Origins

* * *

"Any therapist using experiential work is bound to develop profound respect for the elemental energies of perinatal origin underlying psychosomatic disorders."
-- Stanislav Grof, M.D. in Beyond the Brain

* * *

". . . bearing a child becomes traumatic whenever the similarity between giving birth to a child and being born approaches close to the threshold of awareness."
-- Nandor Fodor in The Search for the Beloved (1949)

* * *

"If you've got a lot of insomnia, chances are you've got a lot of birth trauma. . ."
-- Dr. Arthur Janov - Larry Mantle's Radio Talk Show - Radio Station KPCC - Feb 2, 1997



































Observations . . . On Child Nurturing

"Civilization will commence on the day when the well-being of the newborn baby will prevail over any other consideration."
-- Wilheim Reich

* * *

"To conclude from adoption studies that a predisposition to alcoholism 'runs in the family' and must, therefore, be genetic is to ignore all this evidence of environment effects before birth."
-- Gabor Maté in In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

* * *

"Billions of dollars are made in the gap between infantile entitlement and parental failure."
-- Robert W. Godwin, Clinical Psychologist

* * *

"Being loved in the present brings up all the ways in which we were not loved in the past. No amount of love in the present, not a single person, not ten thousand people loving us all at once, can make up for or take away the pain of the betrayals of the past. . . .The only insurance against repeating the pain in the past is to allow ourselves to feel it fully and release it in the present."
-- Geneen Roth in When Food Is Love

* * *

"A baby born today has a roughly 50-50 chance of keeping his father. This is the first generation of American kids who must face not the sad loss of fathers to death, but the far more brutal knowledge that, to their fathers, many other things are more important than they are."
-- Maggie Gallagher in The Abolition of Marriage

* * *

"Who would not shudder if he were given the choice of eternal death or life again as a child? Who would not choose to die?"
-- St. Augustine

* * *

"And since your child needs you so much, 'he does not bear a grudge against those who have hurt him. . . . However much his mother whips him, he looks for her and values her above all others."'
-- St. John Chrysostom
- quoted in Lloyd deMause's The Emotional Life of Nations

* * *

"In my beginning is my end."
-- T. S. Elliot, East Coker

* * *

"It is quite natural for the child's soul to want to have a will of its own, and things that are not done correctly in the first two years will be difficult to rectify thereafter. One of the advantages of these early years is that then force and compulsion can be used. Over the years children forget everything that happened to them in early childhood. If their wills can be broken at this time, they will never remember afterwards that they had a will, and for this very reason the severity that is required will not have any serious consequences."
-- J. Sulper - Essay on the Education and Instruction of Children (1748) Quoted in Alice Miller For Your Own Good

* * *

"The end result of man's biological evolution produced a helpless baby whose instinct is to form an intensely personal relationship, challenging the parent to regress and relate, rather than repress and be alone."
-- Lloyd deMause in The Foundations of Psychohistory

* * *

"Such disobedience amounts to a declaration of war against you. Your son is trying to usurp your authority, and you are justified in answering force with force in order to insure his respect, without which you will be unable to train him. The blows you administer should not be merely playful ones but should convince him that you are his master."
-- J. G. Kruger, Some Thoughts on the Education of Children (1752)

* * *

"The young child which lieth in the cradle is both wayward and full of affections; and though his body be but small, yet he hath a real [wrong-doing] heart, and is altogether inclined to evil. . . . If this sparkle be suffered to increase, it will rage over and burn down the whole house. For we are changed and become good not by birth but by education. . . .Therefore parents must be wary and circumspect for saying or doing ill."
-- Robert Cleaver and John Dod, A Godly Form of Household Government (1621)

* * *

"With the knowledge that there is a direct causal connection between trauma in childhood and pathology in adulthood there exist possibilities for well being which test the limits of our imagination. Psychotherapy -- both individual and collective -- can free us from our past."
-- Dr. Arthur D. Robbins, False Memories or Hidden Agendas? - The Journal of Psychohistory, Winter 1995

* * *

"Intimacy is showing another person the parts of ourselves that we believe to be unworthy and thereby risking that they will turn from us the way our parents did. . . Intimacy brings with it tenderness and humor, companionship and affection, but it also demands that we relive the most agonizing moments of being a child."
-- Geneen Roth in When Food Is Love

* * *

"The proper time to influence the character of a child is about a hundred years before he is born."
-- Dean Inge

* * *

"If a child does not receive adequate attention and richness of social experience in early life, the results are apt to be irreversible. No amount of subsequent training can fully compensate for the error. Nature relies heavily on the behavior of the mother toward the newborn in its first years of life. . . The measure of love the child receives, the types of training and education and the time when they take place, will determine the characteristics of the future man."
-- George Crile, Jr. M.D. in The Naturalistic View of Man

* * *

The child ". . . neither demands nor receives her full attention, for he has no store of longings, no ancient hungers, to gnaw at his devotion to the here and now. Consistent with the economical character of nature, he wants no more than he needs."
-- Jean Liedloff in The Continuum Concept

* * *

"When we allow our bodies or our weight to interfere with the quality of intimacy in our lives, when we feel too fat to have our thighs or our bellies stroked, when we feel too ugly to be seen with the lights on, we are trying to protect ourselves from being hurt. Again. But the hurt we are protecting ourselves from is not in the present. Nor is it in the future. We are trying to protect ourselves from a feeling a hurt that has nothing to do with our lives now; over and over, for the rest of our lives, we try to protect ourselves from feeling our past, and in so doing we never allow ourselves to claim the present."
-- Geneen Roth - in When Food Is Love



































Observations . . . On Getting Well

"Natural forces within us are the true healers of disease."
-- Hippocrates

* * *

"What is not felt remains unchanged or gains in inward pressure, which forces people to step up their methods of avoidance. This is the sort of vicious cycle that trauma creates. Abandoned feelings call out for attention from the growing shadow of existence. Treatment must aim at putting these disjointed sensations together. Doing this involves coaxing them gently to begin to feel and tolerate the sensations that once overwhelmed them."
-- Bessel A. van der Kolk, M.D.

* * *

"The natural tendency of the ego is still to take flight from such terrors into defensive manoeuvres. This is the crux of therapy, not merely to bring the ultimate forms of mental pain to the doors of consciousness, but to endow the ego with supernatural fortitude to endure them....for the most part we have not the courage."
Frank Lake, M.D., in Clinical Theology, p. 27

* * *

"If anyone wishes to come into God's ground and his innermost, he must first come into his own ground and his innermost, for no one can know God who does not first know himself. Here, the eye with which I see God is the same eye by which he sees me."
-- Meister Eckhart - Medieval German mystic

* * *

"The time allotted to us is analogous to the shutter of a camera; it opens with our birth, allowing in the small amount of light we must work with before it closes and the universe vanishes. With that light we must enter our “dark room” and develop our conception of existence--what we are, why we are here, and what is our relationship to the whole."
-- Robert W. Godwin, Ph.D.

* * *

"Biological psychiatry might obtain more clinically meaningful results if it focused on the psychobiology of trauma and abandoned the search for causality in genes and endogenous chemical derangements."
-- Colin Ross

* * *

"When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained."
-- Mark Twain

* * *

"CLAY: I'd spent a lot of time on the floor [feeling]. Sometimes eight, ten, or twelve hours a day for long periods of time. I decided I wanted to live. Sometimes it's real hard. The hardest thing is going on the road [he's a musician], cause there's no . . . sometimes I'll go out in the van and cry, but I can't go deep enough because there isn't a real safe place. But, the first couple of years I was here, just leaving for three or four days was almost more than I could take, and I couldn't conceive of being off the floor for any length of time."
--Clay: An Interview - from The Denver Primal Journal

* * *

"In taking patients to the depths of their unconscious, we have yet to see the mysteries heretofore described in the psychiatric literature. It is not the vault of Danteesque phantasmagoria. There are not demons from the eighteenth century, no id or shadow forces a la Freud, no mystical consciousness to aspire to, nothing that involves a transcendental process. What we find is just sad, terrified little us."
-- Dr. Arthur Janov in Why You Get Sick and How You Get Well

* * *

"We shall not cease, from exploration.
And at the end of all our exploring,
We will arrive where we started.
And know the place for the first time"
--T.S. Eliot

* * *

"To consciously choose to behave differently from the way you feel compelled to behave is essential for this work [primaling] to be successful, and it is very difficult."
-- Jean Jenson in Reclaiming Your Life

* * *

"All the body senses -- seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling, and smelling -- are all connected to emotion. I should say emotion is connected to the senses, because the emotion is the foundation."
-- Marlo Morgan

* * *

"Physical release may be the only way to cope with the intense grief and rage that emerge during psychotherapy with borderlines as they realize that they will never receive from their parents the nurturing that produces a whole and secure self."
-- John E. Nelson, M.D. in Healing The Split

* * *

". . . (I)t has emerged over the years of practicing primal therapy that the severest and most profound traumas cannot be integrated but rather wreak a havoc upon the entire system and may indeed bring about early death." --Nicholas Barton

* * *

"There is only one person who can observe the cause and the cure first hand, and it's not the therapist. It's the patient. "
-- Thomas A. Stone in Cure By Crying

* * *

"The main message of this book is that emotional problems, behavioral problems, and stress-related illnesses are not caused by stress itself, but by the suppression of the natural healing mechanisms, specifically crying and raging, that serve the purpose of restoring the body's physiological and psychological balance following stress."
-- Aletha J. Solter, Ph.D. in Tears and Tantrums

* * *

"So many of the patients have experienced a neglect of their most basic, deepest human needs -- for touching and for companionship, for sharing inner feelings, for expressing creative energy, for sexual fulfillment, for personal validation, and for the giving and receiving of love. Instead their lives were characterized by duty and obligation to the very people who gave them little or nothing in return."
Dennis Jaffe -- Quoted in The Type C Connection: The Behavioral Links to Cancer and Your Health by Dr. Lydia Temoshok and Henry Dreher

* * *

"Take the obsession away and you are still left with the wounds it was designed to blot out. Take the obsession away and you are left feeling as trapped as a child in a family where there is no one to turn to and where there is no one to turn to and nowhere to go but off a bridge. An obsession freezes your feelings in time . . . if you were sexually abused at the age of five, told no one, and began eating compulsively, you will be left with the raw terror that you felt at time when, at age forty-six you stop using food to comfort yourself. Unless you do something with terror or sadness or rage, with feelings of abandonment or engulfment, with messages you received and internalized about your self-worth and lovableness, unless you bring them to the surface . . . they stay rooted to the childhood soil in which they were planted."
-- Geneen Roth in When Food Is Love

* * *

"Patients with deep disturbances are less likely to benefit from primal therapy than those with milder disturbances."
-- Tomas Videgard Ph.D.

* * *

"We are about as effective at stopping the expression of an emotion as we are in preventing a sneeze."
-- Antonio Damasio in The Feeling of What Happens

* * *

"It's been 25 years now. . . Nothing else would have worked for me at the time. . . I recovered my entire childhood. . . I thank God for it (primal therapy). . . It is sort of like you wake up one morning and realize you have a wife and 5 kids in Kansas - an entire life that you had forgotten about. . . It's like a major archeological excavation and it changes your life forever."
-- Call in by Joann - Larry Mantle's Radio Talk Show (KPCC) - Interview of Dr. Arthur Janov and France Janov, Pasadena California - Feb 2, 1997

* * *

"The purpose of grieving (for the lost years) is not just to heal. It is not just to understand the pain. . . .Healing is the step between grieving and growing. The purpose of healing is to become whole, and the purpose of being whole is to move toward a vision of life in which you are fully alive, connected to what sustains you, available to receive and give love. Healing from the past is the first step. Living in the present is the next. "
-- Geneen Roth in When Food Is Love

* * *

". . . cure occurs when the individual has felt and received insight into a particular pain enough to be able to change the situation in the present which keeps triggering that pain."
-- Mickel Z. Adzema in Creating Positive Scenarios: The Other Half of the Cure

* * *

"Some women think that nursing is an appropriate way to calm a baby, even though he may not be hungry. . . Babies need to cry in order to release the pain resulting from both emotional and physical trauma. Anything that stops the crying is a disservice to the baby, even though it appears to be loving and kind. The need to cry does not disappear when a baby is nursed. It is simply postponed. The tears will need to come out eventually."
-- Aletha J. Solter Ph.D. in Tears and Tantrums

* * *

"One of Al Hubbard's favorite break-the-ice devices was carbogen, a mixture of carbon dioxide and oxygen, which came in a small portable tank. Carbogen was what therapists referred to as a potent abreactor: ten or fifteen lungfuls and you tended to relive your childhood traumas. And judging on how well you handled them, Al would either offer to run an LSD session for you, or he wouldn't.

It was from Hubbard that many researchers first learned the cardinal rule of set and setting, which stated that the LSD state was contingent on the mindset of the person taking the drug and the setting in which the experience occurred. . . . to use the drug for subtler ends called for an understanding of how ambiance was heightened in the psychedelic state: how certain pieces of music—Bach, for instance—came across under LSD as so holy it was almost as though God was humming the tune . . ."

-- Jay Stevens, loose quotes from Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream

* * *

"I have never, ever seen past lives in my thousands of patients over a quarter of a century of primal treatment. It is not because I don't believe in it. It is because I am careful to see that each and every pain is properly integrated so that there is no flooding of consciousness."
-- Dr. Arthur Janov in Why You Get Sick and How You Get Well

* * *

"The main objective of the techniques used in experiential psychotherapy is to activate the unconscious, unblock the energy bound in emotional and psychosomatic symptoms, and convert a stationary energetic balance into a stream of experience. . . in its very nature the psychotherapeutic process is not the treatment of a disease, but an adventure of self-exploration and self-discovery."
-- Stanislav Grof M.D. in Beyond the Brain

* * *
"The process of feeling childhood helplessness is absolutely necessary and unavoidable. But it is not, as Janov hoped, of itself sufficient to resolve destructive, and self-destructive, patterns of behavior. . . . as long as the needs continue to be neglected and unfulfilled in the present, old pains and their destructive attendant symptoms will constantly be triggered."
-- Alice Miller in the foreword to Jean Jenson's Reclaiming Your Life

* * *

"No feel, no heal"
-- Dr. Arthur Janov

* * *

"My experience has been that the seeming failure of abreaction described in psychiatric literature was the result of its not having been carried far enough or used in a systemic way. It was kept on the relatively superficial level of biographical traumas and was not encouraged or allowed to go to the experential extremes that usually lead to successful resolution."
-- Stanislav Grof, M.D. in Beyond the Brain

* * *

"I can remember when, together with a number of other leaders in the Anglican renewal movement, I met Frank in London to convey to him our concern . . . and to beg him to not to go on suggesting that the text, 'You must be born again' in John 3 could be validly exegeted as meaning, 'You must relive your birth experience.' We cannot have convinced him because he went on doing it."
-- Tom Small - quoted in Dr. Stephen M. Maret's dissertation Frank Lake's Maternal-Fetal Distress Syndrome: An Analysis







































Early Observations on the Unconscious Mind

"The absence of a conscious perception is no proof of the absence of mental activity."
-- Plotinus (204-70 AD)

* * *

"We do not see things as they are but as we are."
-- The Talmud

* * *

"I do not observe my soul apart from its act. There are thus processes in the soul of which we are not immediately aware."
-- St Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274)

* * *

"My mind is troubled, like a fountain stirr'd; And I myself see not the bottom of it."
-- Shakespeare (1564-1616) (Troilus and Cressida, III,iii, 311.)

* * *

"Death borders upon our birth, and our cradle stands in the grave."
-- Joseph Hall (1574–1656)

* * *

"The heart has reasons that reason does not know."
-- Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

* * *

"Men are to be viewed as the organs of their century, which operate mainly unconsciously."
--Goethe (1749-1832)

* * *

". . .the reliques of sensation may exist for an indefinite time in a latent state . . .''
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

* * *

"Men regard themselves as free, since they are aware of their will and their desires, and do not even in dreams think of the causes which determine their desiring and willing, as they do not know them."
-- Spinoza (1632-1677)

* * *

"The memory of birth and the expectation of death always lurks within the human being"
-- E. M Forester (1879 -1970) in What I Believe

* * *

"The world, according to Plato, was composed of archetypal ideas that always remained deep in the brain."
-- Voltaire (1694-1778)

* * *

"In sooth, I know not why I am so sad:
It wearies me; you say it wearies you;
But how I caught it, found it,
or came by it,
What Stuff 'tis made of,
whereof it is born
I am to learn."
--Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

* * *

"It is by no means certain that our individual personality is the single inhabitant of these our corporeal frames. We all do things both awake and asleep which surprise us. Perhaps we have co-tenants in the house we live in."
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)

* * *

"There is a pain -- so utter
It swallows substance up
Then covers the Abyss with Trance
So Memory can step around -- across."
-- Emily Dickinson

* * *

"Let no one imagine that I would join the Cartesians in asserting that nothing can be in the mind of which it is not aware. . . . That is a prejudice, which impedes the understanding of the mind. . . "
-- C. v. Wikff (1679-1752)

* * *

"Our days, our deeds, all we achieve or are,
Lay folded in our infancy; the things
Of good or ill we choose while yet unborn."
-- John Townsend Trowbridge (1827– ?)

* * *

“I sent my soul through the invisible,
some letter of that afterlife to spell;
and by and by my soul returned to me,
and answered, "I myself am Heav'n and Hell"”
-- Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyan (LXVI)

* * *

"One's own self is well hidden from oneself; of all mine's of treasure, one's own is the last to be dug up.
-- Friederich Nietzsche(1844-1900)

* * *

"Huge amounts of evidence support the view that the "conscious self" is in fact a very small portion of the mind's activity. . . . (W)e can say that for the most part, the self is not divided by some line between a conscious and a nonconscious self. Rather, the self is created by nonconscious processes, as well as by the selection associations of these processes into something we call 'consciousness.' To put it another way, we are much, much more than our conscious processes."
--Daniel J. Siegel, M.D. The Developing Mind, 1999















































Recent Insightful Observations of Others

"The amount of contact parents have with their children has dropped 40 percent during the last quarter-century."
-- William R. Mattox, Jr

* * *

"All the child-development experts have reiterated to me time and again that zero to 3 is the most formative time in a person's life -- a time when they develop a conscience. It's going to do little good nine and 10 years from now unless we raise children in that age range right."
-- Attorney General Janet Reno - Senate Committee hearing on violence, Oct 20, 1993

* * *

"The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal. These people are not parenting,"
-- Bill Cosby

* * *

"I would like to see every child in America born is a planned, wanted child."
-- Joycelyn Elders - U. S. Attorney General

* * *

"In day care centers ". . . people look at you as a number. . . " As a result men are growing up "cold, unloved and unwanted and filled with pain. . . You're angry but don't know who to strike at."
-- Louis Farrakhan in New Orleans

* * *

"As you grow older, life only gets worse, . . . and then you go to Hell"
-- Alun Woodard, The Delgados, Scottish Rock Band











































Miscellaneous Quotations


"'Primal' is a kind of orgasm."
-- Henry Ebel, Ph.D.

* * *

"I felt that I was primaling my life as an egg or sperm, principally a sperm. It took me three years to develop the courage to have myself filmed doing that for posterity, if nothing else, because I felt that I was mad, that this primaling had gone too far and had taken me into some craziness that was beyond reality."
-- Graham Farrant, M.D.

* * *

"The unconscious is actually the past in the present."
-- Dr. Robert W. Godwin, One Cosmos under God

* * *

"All human behavior is indeed adaptive, but not necessarily to the external, "real" world. Rather, the most bizarre human beliefs and practices become perfectly understandable if we look at them as adaptions to the fears and anxieties of the internal psychological world."
-- Dr. Robert W. Godwin, One Cosmos under God

* * *

"I'm afraid I won't live long enough to feel all of my Pain"
-- A friend in his sixties, who has been primalling for over 30 years.

* * *

"Never in my life have I met a person who so seldom revealed his feelings and if he did so instantly locked there away again. During my time in Spandau (prison) I talked with Hesse about this peculiarity of Hitler's. Both of us agreed that there had been moments when we felt we had come close to him. But we were invariably disillusioned. If either of us ventured a slightly more personal tone, Hitler promptly put up an unbreakable
wall."
-- Albert Speer in Inside the Third Reich

* * *

"It is always infinitely better for human beings to suffer the pain of finding out who they really are because the rewards and freedoms always outweigh the pain they have to undergo to get there."
--Elena Avila in Woman Who Glows In the Dark

* * *

"Perhaps, the bulk of all human belief is in things that are not only not so but cannot possibly be so."
-- Weston LaBarre

* * *

"Janov's theory is remarkably reminiscent of early Freudian writings. . . This process is in fact classic abreaction. . . it is said that the person's first primal scream usually came when being presented with the bill."
-- E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., in Freudian Fraud

* * *

"(Stanislav) Grof remains a resolute scientist with demanding standards arguing that transpersonal psychology can stand up for itself under rigorous research conditions. He remarks finally, that given the efficacy of these transpersonal methods, Western science will one day have little choice but to take notice."
-- Chapter 5, Transpersonal Psychology, Dissertation, Title and Author Unknown

* * *

"Ah, primal therapy. It takes ten times as long to get half as far as you thought you'd get."
-- Telephone conversation with a long-time primaler

* * *

"Giving birth . . . may be for the mother a kind of fulfillment of the . . . double wish to be a baby and have a baby. . . Her own symbiosis with [her] mother may be experienced. . . and thus the loss of the growing separation would be a double one -- the lost of [a child] and the loss of the mother."
-- Ann Berman in Early Female Development

* * *

Alfred Amkraut and I found that mice which spontaneously developed fighting behavior had greater immune resistance to virus-induced tumors. It pays to get mad even if you are a mouse!"
-- George F. Solomon M. D.

* * *

"Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal . . ."
-- R.D. Laing

* * *

"The only bad emotion is a stuck emotion."
-- Dr. Rachel Remen

* * *

"I believe it is the most fascinating work being done today: the study of preverbal infants. The first months are not empty. On a level too primitive for speech, we feel, and with enormous intensity. If you believe the Baby Watchers -- as I do -- the capacity for memory is there too."
-- Nancy Friday in Jealousy

* * *

"The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother."
-- Anonymous

* * *

"Symptoms are a form of remembering without consciousness."
--M. L. Erderlyi

* * *

"Our childhood is stored in our bodies."
-- Alice Miller

* * *

"The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well"
-- Joe Ancis

* * *

"It is not only the irrational in history that is susceptible to psychohistorical explanation; all of history, its strengths as well as weaknesses, integration as well as disintegration, has childhood determinants and
group dynamics."
-- Lloyd deMause in The Foundations of Psychohistory

* * *

Resistance and Breaking Through

"I got up and headed toward the kitchen. 'I don't want to talk about it.'

He followed on my heels. 'Hey! Since when don't we talk?' As always, he was concerned about my feelings. He pulled me to him. 'Come on, what's the matter? what'd she say now?'

I had a bad habit of slamming down a steel shell over my tender emotions when I didn't want to discuss something sensitive. It was an unjust and cruel way to treat someone I loved, but it was my only defense against being forced to talk about painful matters. Bill had become adept at cracking that shell, and I hoped that he wouldn't try tonight because I always ended up crying when the defense was broken. Only Bill could bring up the out-pouring of my deeply repressed emotions.

I held hard and cold against his attempt. 'Nothing!' I barked.

'You were out there all afternoon and she never spoke? She never said anything?' I exasperatedly shifted my weight. 'Do you have to know everything?' He held me to him. Damn! He was going to do it. He stroked my hair. 'Honey, please, I love you so much. Don't keep the hurt inside. Don't shut me out.' Everything would've been fine if only he had shouted back at me. I could handle arguing -- tenderness I couldn't. I hated it when he became extra gentle when I was forcing the opposite outward feelings. I just hated it. 'I just don't want to talk about it right now.' And I stiffly bristled in his arms.

He was stubborn. He hugged all the harder. 'Mary, I love you. Please talk to me, please honey,' he softly whispered into my ear.

The lump lodged. The eyes began to sting. Shoulders trembled. My shell cracked wide open and fell in pieces about my feet.

He cradled me in his arms as he led me into our room.

I poured out my depressing day and we talked. We talked for a long while before we fell silent. We looked hard into each other's eyes and soon we were the only two people in the entire world. He had shattered my emotional shell and had made my world beautiful with his love. I slept like a newborn babe."
-- Mary Summer Rain, Phoenix Rising