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In
this book I've tried to portray some facts
of my life and world.
What
is here is sketches of my childhood, first
questions, speculations, observations,
reflections on conception, intra-uterine
life, being born and giving birth:
allusions to behavior and experience of
adults which seem to belong to the same
class as traumatic neuroses. They make us
wonder: the adult content of the adult
misery seems to have the form or mold of
intra-uterine and birth catastrophes-can
this be possible?
I
continue to muse over the ways in which
structural configurations emerge into two
sets of elements, mythological and
embryological.
The
unborn, mothers and babies in childbirth,
people deemed to have lost their minds,
have this much in common: they are often
entirely at the mercy of, in the complete
power of, others. Then we get a glimpse
into how we treat each other when we have
carte blanche, more or less.
We
have feelings which can't be gainsaid,
facts which cannot be denied, reason which
keeps us from falsehood.
The
main fact of life for me is love or its
absence.
This
is a generalization for which I can think
of no exception. Whether life is worth
living depends for me on whether there is
love in life. Without a sense of it, or
even the memory of an hallucination of it,
I think I would lose heart completely. If
I study human biology, the science of
human life, I don't suppose I will ever
come across the term or the concept and
very little evidence of it. Here is a
contradiction.
I
recount in the course of this book the
fact that when I was last in the U.S.A.,
the question I was asked most frequently
was: 'How do we get in touch with our
feelings?' Even men did not ask this
question directly, but by implication, by
asking questions about primal therapy,
drugs, Rolfing, bioenergetics, Gestalt
therapy, meditation, massage, yogas of
different kinds.
I
was asked about my feelings.
People were far more interested in how I
felt about this or that than in what I
thought about it.
This
book begins with autobiographical
flashbacks to early childhood, then goes
into the speculations, questions to the
mirror, childhood- Who am I? etc. I then
present a theory of intra-uterine life and
mythology, dreams and fantasies,
reflections on birth, birth trauma, birth
practices, vignettes of the psychiatric
world, and the world of human
neuroscience, questions of ethics, of
knowledge, of meaning, of faith, of
belief.
I
detest much of the theory and practice of
natural science and biology. There is a
frustrated natural scientist in me, who
has little else than scorn and contempt
for embryologizing mythology, for
softheadedness posing as
tenderheartedness; for ungrateful and
ungracious attacks on research to which
millions of people, including the
assailant, owe their healths and lives;
for the threadbare cliques of obscurantist
and obstructionist organicism.
Nevertheless
feelings are facts too, and record the
fact that the passages which I've quoted
from some scientists still make me quiver
with rage (Masters), gasp with
astonishment (Warren McCulloch), shake my
head and purse my lips (William James),
clamp my teeth together (Sperry), shudder
(Cerletti), etc. What is done to unborn
children, mothers and babies in
childbirth, to people who lose their
minds, amazes me. I know I'm not
the only one and that this only goes to
show how many savage, primitive,
atavistic, archaic, wild, deviant,
psychopathological, undisciplined, stupid,
untamed, unacculturated minds still remain
to be weeded out by natural selection,
facilitated by human and genetic
engineering.
Behind
this book are many influences undisclosed
in its pages. The work of Arthur Janov,
Stanislav Grof, and others who allow to
happen whatever is going to happen when
people let go has unearthed many (I
imagine thousands by now) experiences in
adults in which they go through the
experience of being born. In what ways
this adult birth sequence, which I have
personally witnessed over two hundred
times, is connected with one's physical
birth is almost entirely unknown. But
connected it does seem to be.
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