Primal Integration Therapy-School of Lake Dr Frank Lake MB, MRC Psych, DPM-(1914-1982)* (2000)

ABSTRACT: Already a British medical missionary and parasitologist, Lake trained in psychiatry. He used LSD from 1954 to 1969, but turned to deep breathing and other approaches. Following pioneers in psychotherapy he facilitated deep regression. By recognizing the original context of a primal memory patients re-integrated the separate memory systems. Lake scientifically defended the feasibility that cell memory could antedate brain memory. Some of his insights into maternal-fetal effects have been corroborated in sociology, criminology, obstetrics and biochemistry. Valuing child-bearers helps their offspring to know they are loved, and be less prone to depression, compulsions, violence. Coordinating psychotherapy and theology, Lake sought individual and social change. Lake and his ways England may boast its great inventors but our establishment is not the most welcoming to their discoveries! No surprise then that Frank Lake's pioneering, in the most sensitive aspect of life psychologically and biologically, has met great resistance in his own country. He would certainly have been more happily received in California or, I feel sure, in Heidelberg. Frank gave his profoundly loving attention to his patients, and to his studies, but at great cost to himself, and maybe greatest to his family. He described himself as a man who could not give himself in love decided to barricade him behind books and write a book large that it needed wheels attached1. He called his key book Tight Corners, words that evoked memories of a birth in which I fought. . . to win through. Experiencing such English resistance to his new way as if it were his birth process, Lake would push people out of his way. He was as uncompromising with his team as he was dedicated to his patients and to his way of working. This is the key to Frank's story. He studied exhaustively the so called 'schizoid personality disorder'. Those who have been transfixed by total anguish of body, mind, spirit and relationships, cannot help resisting the help they request. Lake as a scientist was hard to convince. But by 1966 he acknowledged that his patients were reliving both their birth trauma and their anguish as the baby set aside in a cot, and not being re-bonded with the mother at once after birth. In this double trauma he identified the cause of their lasting affliction, as described fully in his huge book Clinical Theology. Within twelve years, by 1978, fresh evidence again overwhelmed his skepticism. He became convinced that his patients were regressing much further back, that some were reliving their first trimester in the womb and even conception itself. In the new book he had begun, Tight Corners in Pastoral Counselling, he wrote2: What we . . . have become firmly convinced about, is the vulnerability of the fetus to all that is going on in the mother, particularly in the first trimester. Affliction in its worst forms strikes in the first three months after conception . . . Any severe maternal distress, whatever its cause, imprints itself on the fetus. These damaging experiences are now accessible to consciousness without undue difficulty. This, Frank Lake's outstanding contribution, has been much overlooked. What he reveals is the stage of the most powerful imprinting for life, and he pioneers is the most direct means of accessing the root cause for primal healing. Trust Ludwig Janus to spot from a distance the significance of Lake. I wish to thank him for the opportunity to relate something of Lake's achievement, which has been seriously overlooked and is vitally important. Frank Lake trained in medicine before the war at Edinburgh. In late 1939 he became engaged to Sylvia Smith and sailed to India as a missionary doctor and parasitologist. Sylvia rejoined him to marry in Poona in 1944. In 1949-50 as Superintendent of the Christian Medical College, Madras, working with the Head of psychiatry, Dr Flora Nicholls, he was struck how the use of a primitive electrical shock machine and what I may vulgarly call a 'dose' of radical Christianity could transform depressed and anxious people3. …