Chapter 5
Conclusions
A. Critique of the M-FDS as a Scientific Paradigm
1. The Old View
2. Methodology
3. Birth and Pre-natal Memories
- a. Birth and the Fetal Period
- b. First Trimester
Perhaps the most criticized component of the M-FDS is Lake's contention that
memories from the first trimester, indeed from the blastocystic phase and even earlier, exist at all. while Lake initially believed that the blastocystic phase was almost always experienced
and remembered as positive,96 he later came to see this stage, like the ones that followed, as potentially disastrous psychologically. Representative of Lake's descriptions of "blastocystic bliss"97 include such characterizations as a good experience of non-attachment, even of
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96He notes that this conclusion was derived from "about 300 persons who had experienced in this way" (Lake, "The Internal Consistency of the Theory of a Maternal-Foetal Distress Syndrome," 3).
97Lake, "Studies in Constricted Confusion," C41. Perhaps the most elaborate description of the blastocystic period is included in a report titled "Reflections on Work in Australia and India": "Using the kind of breathing which tends to evoke brain waves associated with the recovery of deeply encoded remembered experiences, we 'tune in' to the 'wave-length' first of conception, then of cell division to the morula, or berry stage. It is when we come to the blastocystic stage, in the context of time between the fourth and tenth days after conception, that quite spontaneously, yet with striking and unique individual differences, about one-third of those working on their first occasion, will begin to experience a state of unitive bliss. They struggle to find words for a long-lost heightened sense of utterly glorious being, transcendental awareness and incomparable joy. . . . They may be dazzled by their own brilliant white light, or playing with a rich spectrum of rainbow colours. There is no attachment here, hence no risk of anyone's turning against you. None of the later sources of unhappy division are present here. Here is a complete androgyny, no male or female. There are no pulses to mark the separation of time. This state feels to be eternal, outside time. The division of right and left is unknown. Right and wrong are meaningless terms in this transcendent state. There is often a sense of immense God-like potency, of 'having God and the whole universe in here'[,] indeed of being one'with God. The divine impersonal. It is you, and you are It. The 'panenhenic' experience, of containing everything in this one structure, is not uncommon." (Lake, "Reflections on Work in Australia and India," 2).
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unitive and quite 'transcendent bliss,"'98 a "monistic sense of 'union with the Absolute,"'99 a "delightful dialogue of being and awareness with joy."100
But near then the end of his life, Lake modified this initial understanding to include negative memories of the blastocystic period:
We now have a significant number of cases in which the moment of conception itself has been registered with horror and recoil, as a total disaster - the beginning and origin of a negative evaluation of the life process and self- identity that has persisted through the blastocystic stage and through it to implantation and beyond.101
Lake's assertion that memories from as early as four days after conception even exist and that they are accessible to the adult provokes credulity. The process of neurulation,102 where the neural plate begins to develop from the ectodermal cells thereby providing the primitive nerve cells for the brain and spinal cord is not complete until the 18th day. The continued development of the neurons, particularly the process of myelinization, and the synaptic junctions between neurons was thought to be necessary for any type of "memory" to remain.
Lake was quite aware of the neurology of memory. In order to address this seeming paradox, of memories seeming to exist before the morphological structures necessary for the formation and retention of those memories, Lake turned to the work of Karl Pribram. In several works,103 but particularly in Languages of the Brain104 Pribram has argued that long-term memory exists due to a two-process mechanism. The first is the neuron itself, while the second is the neural junction. The activity of the neural junction is part of an overall
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98Lake, Tight Corners in Pastoral Counselling, 15.
99Lake, "Studies in Constricted Confusion," C41.
100Frank Lake to Father Sebastian Moore, Ungdale Archive #205, 1.
101Lake, "The Internal Consistency of the Theory of a Maternal-Foetal Distress Syndrome," 2.
102Tuchmann-Duplessis, David and Haegel, Illustrated Human Embryology Embryology, 31.
103George A. Miller, Eugene Galanter, and Karl H. Pribram, Plans and the Structure of Behavior (New York:
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1960); Karl H. Pribram, "The Four R's of Remembering," in On the Biology of
Learning, ed. Karl H. Pribram (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969), 191-225: Karl H. Pribram and
Donald E. Broadbent, eds. Biology of Memory (New York: Academic Press, 1970).
104KarI H. Pribram, Languages of the Brain: Experimental Paradox and Principles in Neuropsychology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971).
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organization which is not specifically dependent upon any given single neuron. Pribram called this the "slow potential microstructure."105 This microstructure is composed of the "aggregate of slow potentials present over an extended location at any moment."106 Thus, the neural junctions are more than just merely transmitters of neural impulses, they can also serve as functional retainers of memory traces. Pribram writes:
It is in the junctional mechanism that the long lasting modifications of brain
tissue must take place. ... Long-term memory therefore becomes more a
function of junctional structure than of strictly neural (nerve impulse generating)
processes.107
The reason this is true is that the neurons themselves do not replicate, rather it is the neural junctions or synapses which "not only multiply but are also replete with active chemical processes, any or many of which are candidates for the evanescent, temporary, and long term modification upon which memory must be based."108
What is significant to Lake is that the neural junctions or synapses can store hologram-like patterns which could provide the basis of a distributed memory system independent of particular neurons.109 It is said to be holographic due to the way optical holograms produced by laser light work. When a camera records a visual picture of an object, each point on the film records information which arrived from the corresponding point in the visual field and thus produces an image that "looks like" the object. But when properly exposed by a coherent light source, a holographic record results when an image is taken and information from each point of the visual field is stored throughout a filter. The information stored on this filter does not resemble the visual image at all since the information does not correspond directly to the various points in the image. Rather, "the optical filter is a record of
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105ibid., 25. The name slow potential microstructure is in contrast to the gross potential nerve impulse. Two types of neuroelectric activity exist: nerve impulse discharges and graded slow potential charges. According to Bishop, the cerebral cortex in all likelihood operates largely by means of a continuous or steady state, rather than nerve impulse discharges of the axon. The dendrites of the neuron, rather than the axon are more effective as graded response elements. (George Bishop, "Natural History of the Nerve Impulse," Physiological Review 36 [1956]: 376-399). Thus the dendrites and/or synapses are crucial to the slow potential microstructure.
106Pribram, Languages of the Brain, 19.
107ibid., 47.
108Lake, Tight Corners in Pastoral Counselling, xv, quoting Pribram, The Languages of the Brain.
109Pribram, Languages of the Brain, 143.
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the wave patterns emitted or reflected from an object". Thus, the filter serves to "freeze" the wave pattern, and it remains so "frozen" until the process is reactivated, and the waves are "read out of the recording medium."110
The properties of holograms make them "potentially important in understanding brain function. Pribram cites Leith and Upatnicks when he writes:
First . . . the information about a point in the original image is distributed throughout the hologram, making the record resistant to damage. Each small part of the hologram contains information from the entire image and therefore can reproduce it.111
The same would be true for a neural holographic process. Perceptions and memories can be stored as "spatial interactions among phase relationships of neighboring junctional patterns,"112 thus allowing for the possibility of memory traces as early as synaptic junctions exist. Thus, there could be chemical storage of memory traces within the spatial junctions.
That this hypothesis may be true, according to Lake, might account for "memories" in the first trimester. These memories, stored holographically, are said by Lake to be "unfrozen" by the process of primal integration, or earlier in his research, by LSD. But this still does not account for memories of the zygotic and blastocystic phases because synaptic junctions do not exist.
Lake here takes Pribram's principles and extends them earlier in what he calls the "holographic principle". While he realizes that the synaptic junction is required for holographic memory, he states that perhaps "similar but simpler recording is feasible on the basis of properties resident in the protein molecule."113 Regarding this, he writes:
The hologram principle means that the whole is somehow present in every part, that is to say, in the single cell. We are familiar enough with this in so far as the nucleus which contains the genetic recipe for each individual is repeated identically in every cell. The same seems to be true in the case of certain protein molecules in the cell, which are now regarded as the probable basis for long-term memory.114
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110E.N. Leith and J. Upatnicks, "Photography by Laser," Scientific American 212 (1965): 24-35, cited by Pribram, Languages of the Brain, 145-146.
111ibid., 150.
112Pribram, Languages of the Brain, 166.
113Lake, Tight Corners in Pastoral Counselling, xv
114Lake, "Reflections on Work in Australia and India," 2.
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The principle that Lake is referring to is "multilevel redundancy", wherein the reduplication of the genetic and chromosomal information115 contained in the original germ-cell or zygote occurs in every single one of its descendants.116 Lake then asks the question, "Could there be reduplication and transfer of memory in the cytoplasm?" In answer to his
question he quotes Richard Dryden's Before Birth:
It is possible that the zygote contains information in addition to that stored in the nucleus. There is indeed evidence that the cytoplasm of the fertilized egg contains information that is essential to at least the early stages of
development. . . There are several sites where cytoplasmic information may be stored. The abundant free ribosomes may carry developmental information.
The mechanism of protein synthesis lends it self to analysis by information theory, with . . . the ribosomes helping to convert the coded message into a protein molecule.117
Lake would see here the possibility of micro-storage of early memories. Elsewhere he describes how this memory would originate and then how it's residue might remain:
If, at any stage, a restricted group of cells is delightfully excited or terribly
traumatized, it is the descendants of that groups of cells which will, according to
the holographic principle, continue to store and resonate to similar experiences.
The psychological and physiological basis of long-term memory is in the
hologram which exist, at infinitesimally small potentials, in the protein molecular
substance of every cell that is a descendent of the ones that were excited or
distressed in the first place.118
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115Another possibility is that memory is stored in RNA. Although there seems to be considerable evidence against it, some continue to hold this hypothesis, which was based on a series of studies with flatworms, rats, and monkeys, in which RNA was taken from animals that had "learned a task" and given to subjects which had not learned the task. Those who were injected with the "experienced" RNA sometimes learned the task faster than those who didn't. This effect, when it was found, could also be countered by destroying the RNA before it was injected into the naive subjects, who did not perform any better on the task than controls, thus leaning credence to RNA as the mechanism of storage. (Pribram, Languages of the Brain, 39-40).
116Lake writes: "Even if, by mitotic division, that one cell has now increased numerically to the 1062 cells of the adult human body, each of those cells carries a nucleus identical 'with that of the first cell." (Lake to Father Sebastian Moore, 2).
117Richard Dryden Before Birth (London: Heinemann, 1978) quoted by Lake, Tight Corners in Pastoral Counseling, xvi.
118Lake to Sebastian Moore, 2.
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There is, then, according to Lake, a compulsion of sorts, to repeat the experience in adulthood "so as to be able to feel it again, enjoy it again, or ward it off again more successfully, or suffer it again in order to replenish the rationale for bitterness."119 This is especially true if the experience was a positive one. The compulsion to regress back to an ideal state in light of the present pain is strong. Thus to recover this sense of participating again in a state of unitive bliss can be a resource in therapy, because it promotes an original sense of oneness which the person can strive for. Lake writes that "as a find on an archeological dig it is a great treasure."120
Thus, while there seems to be a limited amount of evidence for at least the possibility of birth and pre-birth "memories" of some sort, the questions of their veracity and indeed, their access years later is problematic. Lake is not ignorant of the problems inherent in the report of these "memories" and he attempts to control for such variables as "suggestablity" and a selective culling out of supportive evidence while ignoring opposing evidence.121 For instance, on the topic of holographic memory storage Lake is somewhat tentative:
My interest in the biological existence of pre-verbal memories is not to demonstrate the legitimate existence of our findings but to indicate their
biological feasibility, and to guard against dismissive criticism based on an
antiquated neurology when they are reviewed.122
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119ibid.
120Lake, "Reflections on Work in Australia and India," 2.
121Regarding the primal integration process and the evidence gathered by it, Lake answers this question:
"How do I guard against selecting evidence that supports the hypothesis and 'selecting-out' what opposes it? By including in the same series, undergoing the same controlled experience of primal integration, a significant number of subjects who are free of the M-FDS together with those who manifest the syndrome. We have no control -- such as could distort the outcome in favour of the hypothesis -- over the dependent variable, that is, the effect on observable behavior and reported experiences when the subject is re-experiencing the exigencies of first-trimester existence. With quantifiable regularity, those who are free of the M-FDS in any form in adult life, are found to be free of the equivalent distress syndrome when re-living the first trimester. Whereas those who suffer from the syndrome suffer equivalent pains, distresses, sensations, movements, images and colouring and in the utterances that issue from them during the re-experiencing. 'Suggestion' or 'selectivity' are ruled out as falsifying factors.
The regular practice of conducting the integrative work with six subjects in one large room or two smaller rooms at the same time, some of whom complain of the M-FDS and others not, constitutes the most effective control we can devise. The independent variable can be judged to arise out of the different experiences of the subject, at different levels of development and under different environmental pressures, not from invalidating variable in the experimental situation itself. If, as is usual, each subject takes part in this three-hour re-integration process twice in the 6-day workshop, on the second occasion he will be one of a freshly-volunteering group of six. Yet for each person there is an internal consistency between both occasions though they are by no means identical. New 'memories' emerge. This is a further control factor." (Lake, "The Internal Consistency of the Theory of a Maternal-Foetal Distress Syndrome," 2).
122Lake, Tight Corners in Pastoral Counselling, xiv.
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