Yesterday’s heat wave in Los Angeles combined with our tired air conditioning system sent us to take refuge in a cool movie theatre where we saw Beatriz at Dinner, a deceptively small film (run time: 1 hour, 23 minutes) that delivers a luminous message from the feminine unconscious....
Back in the day, when I was just beginning in the field people seemed to be forever asking me, “What’s your orientation?” There were so many, as there are today still. My colleagues and I quickly settled into answering the question with a single word that required no further explanation or defense. We said we were eclectic....
It isn’t often a book comes along that gives poetic voice to a seminal scientific theory and when such a meeting of the minds does occur, we should take note. In this case, Ian McEwan’s new novel Nutshell is an extraordinarily accurate depiction of the scientific theory of eminent psychoanalyst Bernard Bail, who has discovered, through sixty years of clinical practice, that human beings are imprinted in utero by their mother’s unconscious mind....
If Oscar nominated movies are a glimpse into the Zeitgeist of the times, then this year’s crop of nominees can offer us some hope that people are finally ready to see beneath the surface, to turn a Spotlight on the lie at the heart of the system and to take a Big Short on the fraud and stupidity of conventional thinking....
It’s been said that great minds think alike and that great artists see or intuit truths about the world long before others can. With that in mind, here is an excerpt from an acclaimed writer, Denis Johnson, winner of the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. I believe it contains an uncanny reflection of Dr. Bail’s imprint theory that was beginning to be articulated by Bail at around the same time that Johnson created his artistic image....
Underworld, Don Delillo’s magnificent, thousand-page vision of the last half of the 20th century and beyond contains intimations of truths arrived at by a gifted psychoanalyst, Dr. Bernard Bail in his revolutionary theory of the imprint. It is interesting that both the novel and Dr. Bail’s original essays about the imprint emerged during the latter part of the 1990’s, shortly before the millennium, and 100 years after Freud’s groundbreaking work, The Interpretation of Dreams....
