Ken Rose on "Life Before Birth". Part 3/6

Ken Rose: This is in the last chapter of the book, which is entitled, “Feeling emotional pain: can it be a matter of life and death.” And this is Dr. Janov commenting on the psychological professions and practices, and he writes; “so what should a therapy be and do? First of all it needs to focus on history, any therapy without a “why” in it cannot work on a deep level. Any time a therapy ushers patients through a mechanical process, requiring them to pray, meditate, think new thoughts, undergo biofeedback and so forth, it cannot succeed. We are the results of our histories, yet almost every therapy extant ignores those histories and takes the symptom for the problem: crushes it with words and ideas, drugs it with medication, punishes it with exhortations or the invocation of deity, pleads with it to be more wholesome, or analyzes it to death with some kind of guess about its causes. Let me be clear: No therapist can ever know what is in your unconscious; the unconscious contains a record of events long before we had words, and linguistic approaches, offer little hope for ascertaining what is going on in those lower regions of the brain.”
Thank you for letting me read that.

Jeff Link: Yes, it’s a wonderful passage.

KR: It is. It is difficult material, it is very difficult material, but if it’s the case, if it’s reality then not confronting this material is far more devastating. This understanding as difficult as it is, it opens up a horizon for a healthy future for the human family. It suggests a much greater understanding of the crucial importance of high quality pregnancies and childbirths, and how we all need to support mothers who are carrying our new family members into this world. And how important it is for husbands to support their wives, etcetera etcetera…

JL: Right, right. I think you make a good point that even though it is difficult, if it’s true, we can’t sort of avoid the truth, that’s sort of what we have to face. And I think Dr. Janov alludes to some earlier work and very important work by people like Sigmund Freud and Charles Darwin, and I think one of the interesting things about the book is the way we see resonances of these earlier theories kind of recurring. I think most of us are familiar with Charles Darwin and “survival of the fittest” and how that applied to animals, but I think what Dr. Janov does that’s interesting is he takes these evolutionary theories and applies them to the brain, and when we see that and we see how the Primal approach really looks at how we can heal by targeting those areas of the brain that developed first in very early human evolution and that are, unfortunately largely ignored, those areas; the brainstem and the limbic system, that’s really I think how we can arrive at cures. If you don’t mind I can say a few words on epigenetics, which I think it’s really at the heart of the book.

KR: Please.

JL: One of the things I think Dr. Janov goes back to again and again is the notion of the imprint. By the imprint he’s talking about a distinct physiologic signature that is passed from the mother to the child, and this is I think what is closely tied with a lot of new research being done in the field of epigenetics. Which Dr. Janov points out didn’t really exist when he was coming up in the field, but will probably be what more and more scientist are looking at in the years to come. The idea is that through DNA we have, we all have DNA passed through our genes, but what epigenetics is, is other chemical groups; methyl and other chemicals groups can attach to the DNA and change how our genes are expressed, and this is what’s happening during pregnancy, so the genes aren’t changing, but the way they express themselves is, and that changes how we behave, it changes our resistance to diseases, it changes how active or how inactive we become later on. It has all sorts of effects and this is, really I think, one of the most fascinating fields. He talks about its role in memory problems, in mental illness, in resistance to disease, and it’s interesting that, really what it boils down to is our cells can remember their history. So what was originally intended as an adaptive measure has all sorts of implications. It kind of goes back to a biologist, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck who Janov spent some time talking about in the book, who was well known for his work with invertebrates, he worked with worms and spiders and mosques, and he also developed an important evolutionary theory, which was kind of overshadowed by the work Darwin was doing and eventually wasn’t accepted like Darwin’s. It wasn’t the most possible, but one of the interesting things Lamarck showed was, for example; you have a giraffe, and the giraffe stretches out its neck to try and bite some leafs on a tree, overtime because there is this sort of environmental need to reach those leafs, there’ll be changes to the organism, the giraffe would grow a longer neck, and that can really play out historically, but now these ideas are coming back again as Janov notes, because of what’s going on in the womb, and how that sort of affect of the environment shaping how our genes behave really is true in the womb and specifically in the relationship with the mother and the child with the womb being sort of the environment, and the child learning to come to know what to expect when they get out into the world. One important study that Vivette Glover and her colleagues at Imperial College in London show that transmission of high levels of cortisol from the mother to the child could have all sorts of effects; lower I.Q., anxiety, ADD, depression and this is really groundbreaking research that I think it’s going to have, when if understood more, when people do dozens and hundreds of follow up studies to kind of fully understand what’s going on, I think it’s really going to change the way people think about how we develop, how we’ve evolved and how we become who we are.