Note:  Anne Marquez, author of "'Independence Day':  Pre- and Perinatal Adventure in Film" has just completed a dissertation giving the results of a study she did involving seven people who had dramatic healings upon regression to and reexperiencing pre- and perinatal trauma.  Concerning this study, on February 28th, she writes:

Dear Mickel and Mary Lynn,  The results of my study are unsurprising, for the most   part.  One unexpected result, however, was that all seven of my   subjects--who remembered their pre- and perinatal experience and healed   themselves of some condition--had been abused as children.  Most in   multiple ways.  What do you make of that?

This musepaper is a response to that question.  I was moved to respond to it at length because I know that her question, and the perspective I offer in my response, is an issue crucial to the paradigm switch that we are undergoing.  Just about everybody in the field of psychoanalysis and mainstream psychology, for example, see the situation in the old Freudian way in which regression is considered an expression of sickness or "weak ego strength" and in which the more functional, more defended and repressed person is considered the healthy ideal. This is despite the fact that some of the most brilliant, artistic, and mystical or saintly people of history have been known to have had obvious and blatant "sick" qualities.  People who come to mind immediately:  Fyodor Doestoevsky, Sylvia Plath, St. John of the Cross, Edgar Allen Poe, Judy Garland, Vincent Van Gogh, Hermann Hesse . . . the list is endless.  In our own time, we might, arguably, add to that list: John Lennon, Janice Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, John Belushi . . . and perhaps even River Phoenix.  There is also the much discussed relation or, as it is often put, "the borderline between madness and genius."  And then in primal cultures we have the understanding that the shaman of the tribe is almost universally a person who has had a psychic "wounding" of some kind in childhood.  The "wounded shaman" idea has been given wide distribution of late.  Indeed, a book of recent years discussed the "spiritual advantages of a difficult childhood."

Yet this is not a new or previously unrecognized issue in psychology, however much psychoanalysis and mainstream psychology have ignored or misconstrued it.  In William James's classic, The Varieties of Religious Experience, published nearly a hundred years ago, in 1899, he discusses at length in separate chapters two contrasting types of "religion"--one the religion of "healthy-mindedness" and the other that of "the sick soul."  Basically, his analysis lays out that the majority of people adopt a "healthy-minded" religiosity the purpose of which is to keep them "normal" or, as he puts it in the words of his age, "healthy-minded."  (Today, we would use terms like positive thinking and we would align these people with either the ideals of conservative religion or those of that pastel-minded portion of the New Age movement whose attitude toward their inner Pain is expressed in the book title You Cannot Afford the Luxury of a Negative Thought!.)  Whereas, William James puts forth, some people are so "afflicted" that they are required to pursue their inner journey to the depths of their psyche and to confront their inner demons, quite the contrary of the path of the other religious sort, whose task is to keep out their inner demons at any and all costs, and for whom the "Pandora's Box" myth expresses their attitude.  It is clear from reading James that he considers the path of the "sick soul" to represent an honest and authentic spirituality--as it is the path of the saints, seers, and holy people throughout time--whereas the religion of "healthy-mindedness" has a goal which seems more mundane by comparison--that of keeping people in line, for society's sake, and of helping one to function effectively in doing the tasks one feels one must do because of the demands of society.

The "sick soul's" attitude is, of course, that of Joseph Campbell's "hero's myth," which is expressed in Jung's famous saying, "One does not become enlightened by imaging figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious."  At any rate this issue is both of long standing and yet is crucial to a paradigm shift in our culture which--in the wake of such historical behaviors of "normal" people who would create the Holocaust, World War Two, nuclear weapons and their use on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and an environmental devastation of such a magnitude as to make likely the elimination of all life on this planet in the not-too-distant future--includes the questioning of the sanity of "normality" and requires a rethinking of our deeply engrained common-sensical attitudes about it. Thus, this musing will examine just exactly why and how one might be "sick"--by society's standards, and even in terms of how one feels--and yet actually be healthier, saner, or better off, both for oneself and in the long run for society.

What Do You Make of the Fact That All Who Benefited Greatly from Pre- and Perinatal Reexperience Had Been Greatly Abused as Children?

It has to do with this:

We come from a paradigm that says that people who are able to function well are, well, actually "weller" than people who are not.  There is some truth in this, as in all statements, but what it leaves out is the fact that often it is the one who appears "sicker" or, let us say, less functional, on the outside, who is closer to being "well" or, let us say, is closer to being real or authentic or, instead of just being "normal" (by which I mean having the "normal accepted neurosis" of our culture) is closer to being really healthy, happy, "straight," and so on.

Now, what this has to do with people who are more abused as children being more readily able to remember and be healed of their pre- and perinatal experiences has to do with--and here is where Janov gets the credit--the fact that abused people tend to have less effective defenses against their primal pain.

It works like this:  If you grow up normally, i.e., with the usual pre- and perinatal trauma and then infant trauma, but a relatively untraumatic childhood, or you are at least not gravely violated or abused as a child or adolescent, then you have a relatively "stable" period of time growing up in which you can develop relatively effective defenses against your underlying pre- and perinatal and early infancy primal pain.  We call this "normal childhood development" and Child Development texts are built on this paradigm of a traumatized child growing up and finding effective ways to cope with insides that want to explode, eventually finding ways to repress and push away or sublimate or deny these energies.  Usually the way of doing this is to identify with the behavior and manner of the parent of the same sex.  Freud called this "identification with the aggressor," and although it is not called this in Child Development textbooks, it is the same process:  I.e., the child represses his or her real personhood and individuality, along with the early Pain with which it is associated, and splits off to become somewhat of a carbon copy of one's parent of the same sex.  This is called role-modeling, from the parents' side, and role development from the perspective of the child.

But it essentially means that the child becomes something other than what she or he is, something alien to its real core or essence (because the core or essence is tied up with the pre- and perinatal and early infancy horrors); and this alien or unreal self is chosen both because it is separate from the Pain and because it is reinforced and rewarded by the parents and society around . . . i.e., parents just love it when little Janey and Joey act like and want the things that Daddy and Mommy behave like and want.  In fact, that was one of the big reasons that Mommy and Daddy had Joey and Janey  in the first place!  Fearing their own death (a repressed fear, of course, which being unconscious can therefore affect them without their realizing it), they have conceived little Joeys and Janeys unconsciously feeling that they will be able to live on through them when they die.  Ken Wilber has called this mechanism part of one's "Atman Project"--i.e., it is one of the substitute ways that we try to become immortal and deny death (It is a "substitute" way because if we had not split off in the first place, we would still have our "real self," which is identical with our Atman, which is identical with our inner Divine nature, and which is therefore already immortal.  Thus we would know that this project to make ourselves immortal in substitute ways--by having children, leaving a legacy of some kind, etc.--is unnecessary because we are already immortal and death is just an illusion that came into play when we became split off from ourselves and "forgot" our Divine nature).

OK, so you are wondering, what does this have to do with children who are abused being able to better remember their pre- and perinatal pain.  Well, here is where it really does get simple . . . honest!  Children who are abused throughout childhood never have that stable period in which to develop that unreal and defended and repressed, albeit socially rewarded and socially functional, self, which children who are not abused throughout childhood are able to erect (in order to keep out their Pain).  So it works like this.  The child tries to come up with a "personality" that is acceptable and rewarded by the parent(s), but nothing is really good enough.  Every attempt fails.  The child tries being one thing, then another.  But there is constant abuse.  There is no way the child can be right.  There is no effective defensive personality that will be pleasing to the parent(s)/society, so the child cannot have years of developing, reinforcing, and making engrained a  particular "personality" or defended self, which he or she can cling to at all costs (the costs of feeling one's Pain) and develop and reinforce and elaborate upon, and on and on.

When the child has a childhood's worth of time to erect and reinforce such an unreal personality facade, we say that he or she has grown up well.  We call these children "good kids"; they cause no trouble; they have found a way to be that is split off from the inner howling of their Pain and is, on a nearly daily basis, positively reinforced and rewarded by their social environment.  But for the abused child, that time of childhood and adolescence is spent trying out one role after another, none of which are going to be good enough, the abuse will continue no matter what the child does, says, or is.  Therefore, a single personality cannot be developed.  This is called "fragmentation of self" and later on in young adulthood, "identity diffusion" and other such psychobabblical terms.  If the abuse is severe enough, the fragmentation can be severe, and then we see the development of Multiple Personality Syndrome.  No one way of being will ever stop the abuse, so the child develops elaborate multiple personalities, each of which serve a different function, all surrounding the problems of dealing with the constant abuse and the fact that the child is more "open" to, and suffers more from, the underlying energies of primal pains.

So anyway, without this defended self--skillfully employing, because of years of practice, effective ways of keeping one's early Pain at bay, which the "normal" person has been allowed to develop--the abused child, by contrast, has really quite shoddy and ineffective ways of separating him- or herself from his or her early Pain.  Thus, the abused child suffers more, from that early Pain "leaking through" into consciousness.  One can say that the abused child is "more open" to her or his Unconscious Self (with, of course its Pain, as well as its inherent Divinity).

The upshot of all this:  People abused as children have less "walls" (Notice this process portrayed wonderfully in Pink Floyd's "The Wall") or defenses against their early Pain and therefore they are more able to remember it, they are more able to relive and receive healing from it, they are more able to go beyond it into their real selves and into realizing their inherent Divinity.  Thus it is that the one who suffers more in adulthood, who is more obviously neurotic or "sick," is actually closer to being well, or to being really healthy and really real.

Now, of course, I am not advocating that we abuse our children so that they might benefit from being closer to their Unconscious and to their primal pain.  The better course is to reduce, and to the extent we can, eliminate pre- and perinatal and infancy trauma by being loving and good and welcoming parents when our children are very young.  When primal trauma is reduced or, to the extent it can be, eliminated . . . well, then, there is little in the way of primal pain to have to defend against or to split off from.  In this way also we can create children who are closer to being real, without all the suffering, and who are closer to their inherent Divinity.  This is of course further helped if the child has parents who are more real themselves and who therefore have less of the agenda of wanting the child to be a carbon copy of themselves; and therefore they can be parents who can allow and even encourage the child to become whatever the child uniquely is, i.e., can encourage the child to be his or her real self as opposed to becoming a split off, defended, albeit functional, "personality" or facade that is like the parent and can carry the parent's agenda (not his or her own).  This way of child-caring is the most evolved way, as described in deMause's "The History of Childhood As the History of Child Abuse" (published in Aesthema journal and reprinted on this website).  It is of course something we are trying to implement currently, as pre- and perinatal psychologists, or simply as aware parents.

This idea of people who are more obviously "sicker" being closer to being really healthy is something I address in two articles of mine:  "The Emerging Perinatal Unconscious: Consciousness Evolution or Apocalypse?"--which was printed in The Journal of Psychohistory and is available on my website currently; and even more elaborately it is described in "The Scenery of Healing"--which was also published in The Journal of Psychohistory as well as the Pre- and Perinatal Psychology Journal, and will soon be uploaded onto this Primal Spirit website also.

For Anne Marquez's response, and the continuing dialogue, click on Primal Spirit Forum.

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