Life Before Birth The Hidden Script That Rules Our Lives

by Janov, Arthur

• ISBN13: 9780983639602
• ISBN10: 0983639604
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-12-01
• Publisher: NTI Upstream

Summary

Albert Einstein spent the latter years of life in pursuit of a general field theorysomething to explain how gravitational fields and electromagnetic fields intersect in a single theory. Today researchers in the field of psychotherapy are looking for an analogous theory, particularly for the treatment of psychologic and psychosomatic diseases. Arthur Janov's compilation in Life Before Birth is nothing less than the beginning of a unified field theory of psychotherapy.Dr. Janov's leitmotif is rather simple: the period of our lives that has the greatest impact on disease and personality formation is our gestation and birth. A blend of clinical observation and research leads him to suggest that overlooking pregnancy and the first months of life prevents one from adequately addressing mental illness and treating major health conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, asthma, Alzheimer's disease, and even cancer. Recent studies at the Primal Center in Los Angeles and elsewhere provide compelling evidence that fetal imprinting, an evolutionary strategy to prepare children to cope with life, establishes a permanent set-point in a child's physiology. Mothers highly anxious during pregnancy, whether from failed marriages, war-torn environments, natural disasters, or other stressful life conditions, may thus give birth to babies prone to mental illness and disease later in life. Low oxygen at birth, drugs taken during pregnancy, and a lack of parental affection in the first years of life may have similar adverse effects. Until we embrace a unified field theory of psychotherapy, Dr. Janov asserts, we are in the uncomfortable position of knowing more and more about less and less; studying the minutiae of a patient's symptoms without understanding how early experiences in the lower brain shape our personalities and our susceptibilities to disease and addiction. In the 1970s, The Primal Scream dramatically altered the landscape of psychotherapy, becoming an international bestseller and introducing more than one million readers to primal therapy, the lower-brain therapeutic method Dr. Janov applied in his therapeutic work with John Lennon. Life Before Birth is just as important. Dr. Janov asks for a reorientation of not only our approaches to pregnancy and our use of drugs for a variety of symptoms, but above all, the modes of psychotherapy we implement to treat everything from phobias and compulsions to chronic anxiety and depression. As Dr. Janov writes, "We no longer have to remain in the dark, applying hit and miss therapies while we hold our breath. We can know causes and therefore how to treat misery. We can move toward an end to human suffering, or at least be on the road toward eliminating harm."

Author Biography

Arthur Janov is one of the world’s leading psychologists and the founder and director of the Primal Center in Los Angeles. The originator of primal therapy, he has treated thousands of patients while undertaking extensive research in support of his thesis that both physical and psychic ailments can be linked to early traumas. He has lectured at the Royal College of Medicine in London, Hunter College in New York, and Karolinska Medical and Research Center in Stockholm, and his work has been the subject of documentaries in England, France, Germany, Sweden, and the United States. He is the author of 10 books, including The Primal Scream, which have been translated into 24 languages. He lives in Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. xv
Womb-life, a New Paradigm	p. 1
How Love Sculpts the Brain	p. 1
Love Before Birth	p. 3
The Die is Cast	p. 7
Are We Already Who We Are at Birth?	p. 13
Toxins and the Body's "Conscious" Defense	p. 15
Imprinting: The Signature of Pregnancy	p. 21
Searching for a Universal Psychotherapy	p. 27
The Babel of Clinical Psychology	p. 28
Electroshock Therapy: Zapping Symptoms, Avoiding Cures	p. 30
On Vital Signs in Primal Therapy	p. 34
How the Brain Talks to Itself	p. 39
Three Levels of Consciousness	p. 40
First-Line: The Brain-Stem	p. 41
Second-Line: The Limbic System	p. 43
Third-Line: The Neocortex	p. 45
The Womb as a Black Box	p. 51
The Brain that Doesn't Sleep	p. 52
Hormones and Homosexuality	p. 55
Depression: The Black Box Perspective	p. 57
The Brainstem in Primal Therapy	p. 59
The Science of Early Human Development	p. 65
How We Internalize Our External World: Telomeres as a Predictor of Life Expectancy	p. 65
How Repression Works	p. 69
Small Feet, Small Chest: A Sign of Cancer?	p. 72
Epigenetics: The Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics	p. 75
Epigenetics, Birth, and Stress	p. 78
Heredity Turned on Its Head	p. 79
Epigenetics and Pain	p. 81
Revisiting Family History	p. 82
Oxytocin: The Hormone of Love	p. 87
Mother-Child Bonding	p. 89
Trauma, Sexuality, and The Maternal Instinct	p. 91
Vasopressin: The Male Love Hormone	p. 93
Synthetic Drugs and Therapy	p. 94
Womb-life and Serotonin Output: The Origin for Later Mental Illness	p. 99
Early Trauma and Epilepsy	p. 105
Imipramine Binding Study	p. 113
How Addiction Gets Its Start Early in Our Lives	p. 117
The Limbic System and Drugs	p. 118
Dopamine and Cocaine	p. 120
Alcohol	p. 122
Explaining Addiction	p. 123
The Birth Trauma	p. 127
Explaining Adult Mental illness and Disease	p. 147
Anoxia, Reduced Oxygen at Birth, and Adult Behavior	p. 147
Hypoxia and Schizophrenia	p. 149
Stress, Personality, and the Immune System	p. 150
Oxygen, Metabolism, and Cold Feet	p. 156
The Critical Window: Like Grandmother, Like Mother, Like Son	p. 157
Early Warning Signs for Later Psychopathology and Disease	p. 160
Primal Therapy: Toward a Cure for Endogenous Depression	p. 163
On the Nature of Anxiety	p. 171
Uncovering the Salamander Brain	p. 174
Reliving Anxiety: Away from Pills	p. 177
Animal Terror: MRIs, Nightmares, Sex, and Other Clues to Our Past	p. 179
Evolution of the Left Brain	p. 185
Treating the "Right" Brain	p. 188
On Psychopathology	p. 195
On Attention Deficit Disorder	p. 201
The Root Cause of Alzheimer's and Deep Depression	p. 215
Toward a Feeling Therapy	p. 223
The Role of Evolution in Psychotherapy	p. 223
Pain's Neurological Evolution	p. 226
Therapy as a Time Machine: Stem Cells, Cancer, and Darwin Revisited	p. 229
On the Corrective Emotional Experience	p. 233
Awareness Versus Consciousness	p. 236
Memory and Reliving: In Search of Lost Time	p. 238
Pregnancy: The New Critical Window	p. 243
Feeling Emotional Pain: Can It Be a Matter of Life and Death?	p. 249
Manifesto for a New Psychotherapy	p. 259
Research Questionnaire	p. 263
Endnotes	p. 267
Index	p. 281
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.