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(inquisitive music playing)

We took off from Goose Bay at night.

(thunder rumbles)

What we didn't know, the storm had increased...

in pace,

and we ran smack dab into the storm.

The chief engineer said,

"We've only got one hour's worth of gas."

I didn't wanna believe I was lost.

But the number was very firm.

20 degrees.

...someone said, "It's there."

They said, "You're white. Why are you white?"

I didn't have color in my face for three days.

They never knew how close we all were to dying.

Life is about survival.

(shouting in German)

...the world will never be at peace.

Narrator: As a lead radar navigator,

23-year-old First Lieutenant Bernard Bail

was lucky enough to escape death three times,

but he didn't want to tempt fate.

Allen Weiner: If we examine his life from this young man

when he went into the air force,

that whole experience ultimately became the bedrock

for his later work with patients,

because here he went and had to bomb the fatherland

so he could protect the motherland.

Narrator: After suffering the scourge of war,

Bail set his compass on a different course.

His next mission, to become a doctor and psychoanalyst

who would pioneer a radical new theory

that strikes at the root of all emotional illness.

Narrator: Bail became convinced that all mental anguish

is the unconscious offspring

of the torment suffered by our mothers

and imprinted onto us before we were born.

We're all traumatized.

Because we've received an imprint,

and it split our mind,

and it changed the course of our personal development.

So people are often living lives

that have very little to do with who they really are

and has everything to do with who their forbearers were.

Narrator: Bail's theory posits that this imprint

cuts us off from experiencing pure love

and our true potential.

To identify this damage suffered in the womb,

Bail uses the dream as his north star

to navigate his patient's unconscious

and release them from their suffering.

Gilbert Kliman: Dr. Bail impresses me as a remarkable pioneer.

A rather fearless thinker.

Who speaks his mind

and speaks from the heart

and from immense clinical experience.

An avant-garde thinker

who did not fear to tread

where Darwin had given up.

So far, hundreds of thousands of years

have not helped mankind being kept in the dark.

Now we're being illuminated with a tremendous truth.

If we make use of it

there will be a tremendous evolution.

Narrator: Like all theories,

the path to its conclusion

was fraught with attacks and challenges.

But to chart the course of any development,

you have to start at the beginning.

Woman: So I wanna start with your mother. (laughs)

Don't you start with my mother.

Listen, in my part of town,

don't mess with my mother, you motherfucker.

-(laughs) -Be careful.

Narrator: Bernard Bail was born Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,

on November 20th, 1920,

the middle child of Russian immigrants

Lilian and Abraham Bail.

Bail: My mother played guitar.

I remember her singing Mayn Shtetele Belz.

"My Home in Belz,"

and it is very sad.

It's a tribute to a lost time and a lost place.

I knew I couldn't trust her.

Narrator: Unconsciously searching for refuge,

though his family was not religious,

Bail followed an internal calling

to enroll in Sunday school

at the local synagogue.

I thought that was just fabulous.

...sitting on top of the mountain,

my arms raised, saying, "O' Manitou..."

God. "O' Manitou..."

It was great.

My aspiration was to get the hell out of the ghetto.

Narrator: In 1942, Bail graduated college

with a teaching degree,

but the world was at war,

and he could not turn his back on serving his country,

so he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force.

They called me, and they sidelined me.

They wouldn't let me march

because I was out of step.

So I used to spend my time watching everybody march.

I thought that was hilarious.

Apparently, I'm out of step with everybody.

Narrator: Bernard Bail was one of five men

chosen to be a lead radar navigator,

trained to operate the newest radar technology.

This new radar was so accurate

that even with a layer of clouds,

Bail could precisely target where to drop the bombs.

You have to know all the stars.

Narrator: On June 5, 1944,

Bernard Bail, along with his valiant crew,

took to the skies over a dangerous area

of occupied France

and navigated his third mission.

Bail: By this time...

Narrator: For his courageous wartime efforts,

he received the Distinguished Service Cross,

the French Legion of Honor,

the Purple Heart,

three Distinguished Flying Crosses,

six battle stars, and six air medals.

...including my pilot,

who could fly in formation...

...strong, steady...

...and every one of us...

loved each other.

And would give...

his life...

for anyone as they would give their life for me.

Don't find that anywhere...

in real life.

Narrator: Dedicated to defeating the tyranny of evil,

Bail would lead his crew

on another 22 successful missions.

By his 25th mission in 1945,

the Germans had developed a jet

which outpaced the American planes.

Bail's assignment? To bomb the jet factory.

Bail: I remember that day...

I had my usual meal in the morning,

three pancakes, eggs in between the pancakes.

Gentlemen, you may expect

considerable enemy opposition today.

I remembered I'm a Jew.

Can't wear the dog tags.

I tore them off.

Now, remember,

I didn't see the train station from this vantage point.

But from inside.

This was all filled with people.

I stood up, and I saluted him.

(whistle blows)

Flyers,

really doesn't matter about what side you're on.

You're a flyer, therefore a comrade.

Narrator: Bernard Bail returned to the hospital room

where he had been a prisoner of war

for the first time in 71 years.

It is now a school dedicated to combating racism.

I don't even know what to say.

I-- I can't think of anything to say.

Down this way. Yeah.

This looks familiar.

I was thinking I wasn't dead yet.

Is there a door here?

This is the room.

(typewriter typing)

Irmgard: "I know that I'm not allowed to give you this,

however it is quiet, and I would not do anything bad.

You smiled at me, and I had a deep joy.

And why should I not tell it to you?

My love of country is worth many sacrifices,

but you must promise to destroy the paper,

for it would not be good for you and for me

if they would be found.

And surely they will look at your things."

Irmgard: "Why am I speaking to you?

I wish to show you something of our real soul.

Women are different from men.

We remain true to ourselves,

and, in spite of that, we are able to give up ourselves.

I believe that we really find ourselves when we have given up."

I told her that I was Jewish.

She said that didn't matter to her.

I may be a prisoner, but to be touched by feelings...

Irmgard: "All thoughts which you don't say,

I know them from you.

All the pains of which you don't speak,

they weep in me.

You are living within me with such a great love.

Do you wish to see yourself?

You must go to the far away to yourself through my soul.

I believe that love is something holy,

but that one must not speak much about it.

One must only feel it."

I suppose she was telling me she loved me.

Narrator: The Germans were unable

to stem the force of defeat,

and in May, 1945, they surrendered,

liberating the American prisoners of war.

(flute playing)

(bell tolling)

(laughs)

Unbelievable.

It's the chimes.

Unbelievable.

I told you she's here.

She's here.

Narrator: Bail would later write,

"During the long days of my captivity,

Irmgard was the talisman that saved me,

and she continued to save me long after that.

Through Irmgard, I slowly came to understand

that spirit sustains and nourishes us

body and soul."

Even the enemy.

Todd Anton: For Americans, the first people to be sent home

were our wounded, but there was not a lot of mental care

to prepare them for what they were going to see,

and I've had a lot of veterans tell me

that the trip home was far more terrifying

than landing on Omaha Beach.

...changes a person.

Narrator: Back home, Bail found a world

both familiar and surreal.

Haunted by the war

and yearning for Irmgard,

he could no longer face the dreary life

that stood before him.

I was still very jumpy.

When a car backfired,

I remember falling to the pavement...

We had 16 million GIs

and sailors and marine and airmen

and Coast Guard men coming back,

and we didn't know how to psychologically treat them.

We called it battle fatigue.

That's what I had gone to college for.

So I went my way.

I listened to nobody.

In the course of the interview,

he said, "Why do you wanna be a doctor?

Why don't you become a rabbi?"

I thought, "It's a good thing I left my gun home."

I certainly would have killed him.

I knew he was being anti-Semitic.

There was a fixed quota,

and it stayed firm every single year,

and the gentile boys did not interact at all

with the Jewish boys.

Narrator: Bail fulfilled his dream of becoming a doctor

and graduated Temple University Medical School

in 1952.

He went on to intern at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Philadelphia

where he graduated in 1953.

My good friend said, "You ought to be a psychoanalyst."

I didn't really know what that meant.

Narrator: Desperate to escape a dead-end life in Philadelphia,

a stroke of good fortune gave him an opportunity

to move to California.

(upbeat music playing)

...which I finished in 1956.

My mother didn't like it.

She wanted a... (laughs)

She wanted to say, "My son, the doctor,

has an office on Walnut Street."

I loved it.

It was wild, it was free, it was open.

Everybody came from someplace else,

so, metaphorically, there were no rules.

Something new could happen here.

Narrator: One evening at Schwab's restaurant,

something new did happen,

when a chance meeting fulfilled a desire

he had always held close to his heart.

When I finished my dinner,

I went over to say hello to Jim.

I really went over to meet the girl.

You know, blonde, shapely.

Just my style.

When I do that, I'm making fun of myself.

Get off your high horse, Bail.

We started going out,

and we had analysis in common,

and we said, "Let's get married."

Perfect.

She happened to be actually named Carolyn Adams.

We used to joke she was related to John Adams

coming over on the Mayflower.

And I would say,

"You ain't got nothin'.

I come from Moses.

Now, that's a lineage."

Narrator: Bail began his analytic training

at the revered Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute

in the golden age of psychoanalysis.

It was a privilege,

because not many people were accepted.

What I felt good about is I was being taught knowledge

about the unconscious.

Narrator: Bail immediately grasped

that the keys to illuminating a life

were locked in the vast layers of the unconscious.

As a navigator,

he had trusted the compass, maps, and stars.

Now, the dream would be his north star

to find the truth of a patient's being.

At this time, Sigmund Freud's ideas

dominated psychoanalysis.

Freud pioneered the principle

that the unconscious mind governs our behavior

and that the dream was the doorway

to discovering our unconscious motivations.

The interpretation of dreams

really brought dreams into importance and focus

for Western medicine and Western psychology.

Uh, certainly dreams as important or healing

had been around in all kinds of cultures for much longer.

Some of the ideas like the unconscious as a motivation

had been there in Western philosophy,

but Freud was the one

to bring them into the treatment room

and make them relevant to therapy.

The whole method of classical Freudian psychoanalysis

is trying to get at the Oedipal complex.

The idea of the Oedipal complex

was that children attach to their mother first and foremost

as the object of their libido,

and that, for boys,

gradually they come to see their father

as this rival that has the mother's attention.

Freud had people tell dreams,

and then he had them free-associate to elements of the dream.

You start with a dream figure,

and that reminds you of someone you knew next door in childhood,

and that reminds you of a different person from your childhood,

and pretty soon you're not at anything that overtly sounds

all that related to the dream you had last night.

Narrator: Though Freud's theory reigned supreme,

Bail found it to be inadequate in his own analysis.

And then when he began practicing,

he found it not to be very helpful to his patients.

Narrator: Eager to explore a new method to help patients,

Bail and his colleagues began to read the work

of Melanie Klein, a Viennese psychoanalyst

who, unlike Freud, explored the uncharted territory

of an infant's mind.

Mrs. Klein began to feel

that you could analyze children,

which was something that was antithetical

to the idea that analysis was about the Oedipus complex.

Narrator: In the 1960s, several of the British psychoanalysts

were invited to the Los Angeles institute

to teach Klein's theories.

One of the more esteemed analysts was Wilfred Bion,

who had been in training analysis

with Melanie Klein.

Narrator: Wilfred Bion was best known for his psychoanalysis

of patients in psychotic states

and understanding the nature of group dynamics.

Bail took on the challenge of inviting Bion to California

and became his first Los Angeles patient

and remained one for the next 12 years.

Klein's ideas began to take root at the institute.

These ideas would spark an intellectual firestorm

questioning the very foundation of American psychoanalysis.

Douglas Kirsner: The Los Angeles situation was very complex.

There is the very exciting climate there,

and a climate with a lot of rewards,

both professional and financial.

Marilyn Monroe's therapist Ralph Greenson

was absolute center of psychoanalysis in Los Angeles,

and he dealt all the cards, he had all the money.

He had rich patients, super rich patients.

He was aligned with this-- his colleague Milton Wexler,

who was a shrink to the stars.

They gave out so many referrals.

They were the go-to people for good referrals.

Ralph Greenson felt that Kleinians

were destroying psychoanalysis.

He had said a number of times

that he would wanna-- he'd kill the Kleinians.

You could hear them say, "Kill the Kleinians!

Kill the Kleinians."

It made my blood turn cold.

In 1973,

the American Psychoanalytic Association

did a routine site visit to the Los Angeles institute,

and what they found was this kind of dissension

and these new ideas being taught,

and they were not happy about it.

The American was going through a crisis of paranoia,

and it frightened the candidates.

Your analysis may not be acceptable.

Only if it's traditional American psychoanalysis.

I asked the chairman of the committee,

"Define that for me.

I don't know what that is."

It was a ploy.

They were on some kind of witch hunt, really,

to close down the institute.

And they never defined what on earth

these standards were.

What they meant, it would appear,

was Freudian analysis.

They asked the Southern California institute

to give them a list of analysts who were Kleinian.

Was a bit McCarthyite.

And the Southern California institute

responded by saying that they only had a list of analysts

and here it was,

and they didn't have Kleinians or Freudians or whatever.

Bail: So somehow out of all this turmoil

the dean picked me to remove from my post of teaching.

That I was corrupting the young.

That's the words they used.

I thought, "Thank you."

They put me and Socrates in the same boat.

Thank you very much.

It was hilarious, except it wasn't.

It was dead serious.

I never said I was a Kleinian.

I never was.

But I'm for free speech.

Free mind.

To believe what I want.

My friend of many years called me one night and said,

"They're out to get you."

He was at a meeting.

They talked about getting rid of me.

He said, "I'm sorry, I can't talk to you.

If I associate with you,

I won't be sent patients.

Bye-bye."

They felt themselves totally entitled.

They felt as though they didn't have any boundaries.

Whatever they said was the way psychoanalysis should be.

Dr. Bail, having faced death in the war,

had a great deal of courage,

and he wasn't going to take this kind of...

what he felt was oppression.

Bail was seen as very formidable.

He was seen as very militant.

Bail: I consulted a lawyer.

The lawyer said, "Since they removed you without due process,

we'll sue the hell out of them.

The institute, the American, and the international."

I had them, and they knew it.

A judge was actually brought in

to talk to this issue with the Los Angeles institute,

and he told them that they could not restrict

what was being taught by the training analysts

unless they made themselves a private club,

because they were a public institution.

The American deplorably denied

that they had ever made this recommendation.

Narrator: In 1977,

at the International Psychoanalytic Conference Meeting in Jerusalem,

it was determined that the matter was settled.

Dr. Bail became a kind of persona non grata

at the institute.

Never mind that in '63

I gave the institute three quarters of a million dollars

because a dying patient I undertook to analyze was grateful.

Nobody had ever done that before.

Most analysts at that time

would not analyze a dying patient.

Dr. Bail had the courage to go deeply with her into death.

Who should get the best help if not the dying?

Narrator: Because of Bail's courage,

analyzing a dying patient

is now an accepted practice in psychoanalysis.

Kirsner: The threatened lawsuit was very important,

because part of this was a right to free speech.

Because if it could happen with Kleinians in LA,

then couldn't it happen in other places?

But this was the good--

the good part of this story,

because it freed him, I believe,

from being part of the group

so that he could discover new things.

That navigational experience

was central in navigating his way through

the institute, which was hostile

and tried to gun him down,

just like Germany tried to gun him down,

and he prevailed, and he kept flying,

until he became clear in his, you know, his work

to bring something new to mankind.

Narrator: Devastated by the betrayal of his peers

and the demise of his marriage,

Bail realized that after 12 years with Dr. Bion,

his own analysis had failed.

I felt that he already intuited

that psychoanalysis with a Freudian paradigm

had come to the limits of its efficacy.

Dr. Bail says that Bion taught him how to think.

Narrator: In 1979, Wilfred Bion returned to England,

and shortly afterwards passed away.

Losing his beloved mentor

and disillusioned about the work he had dedicated his life to,

Bail would now have to navigate his own darkness.

...and gave me the room internally

to pursue the next phase in my life.

Narrator: In 1985, divorced and wondering about the course of his life,

Bail attended the International

Psychoanalytic Association Conference

in Hamburg, Germany.

Knowing this was Irmgard's city,

he mounted a search to find her.

He hoped to find the love that had been his savior

so many years ago,

but in the heat of war,

he had never learned Irmgard's last name.

Narrator: He contacted another former nurse,

praying for a clue to Irmgard's location,

but she was unwilling to meet with him.

Irmgard: Do you wish to see yourself?

You must go to the far away to yourself from my soul.

Narrator: Wandering the streets,

reading and rereading Irmgard's letters,

he searched for her in every woman's face.

Then, a package arrived at his hotel.

Narrator: The love he had hoped to recapture was gone.

Heartbroken, Bernard Bail returned to Los Angeles

and immersed himself in his work.

Determined to fulfill his mission,

to find the key that would unlock the torments

of a person's soul.

Bail: Do you wish to see yourself?

You must go to the far away to yourself through my soul.

That's what analysis is.

Dr. Bail was really on his own.

And he decided to just listen to the dreams of his patients

without any theory.

Narrator: No analyst was thinking

the way Bail was beginning to think.

And though he was in the depths of darkness,

he was beginning to see in the dark.

None of the other therapies have a beginning,

and, in science, there's gotta be a beginning

to truly follow a development.

Narrator: For the next ten years,

Bail captured his patient's dreams,

listening, interpreting,

chipping away at their suffering

like a Michelangelo of the soul.

Dream by dream, like a compass needle finding north,

they all began to point in the same direction.

Woman: I was really, in my mother's life,

to be the mother she never had.

Man: My mother was a pretty unhappy person.

Woman: My sister and my father were as hateful to me...

Man: My mother was not really present in many ways

when I was a child.

Man: My mother put up with terrible beatings.

At one point, he broke-- he broke her arm.

Narrator: Every interpretation he made pointed to the mother.

Every complaint was about the mother.

In every dream, patients talked about pleasing their mothers,

understanding their mothers, saving their mothers.

But why the mother?

And where did it all begin?

Konrad Lorenz, a Nobel-Prize winning ethologist,

discovered that birds and other species

are imprinted during important developmental stages.

He found that newborns

bond to the first moving object they see,

and take on their characteristics.

...unbeknownst to the young.

Narrator: Unbeknownst to the young. Unconscious.

But what was it that a mother passed down to her baby?

To confirm his findings, Bail recorded his own dreams

and saw the same patterns emerge.

And then he received a key piece of information.

He had a patient who delivered a baby,

and she was having a very hard time with this newborn.

And she brought the baby to his office.

The baby was crying and crying

and when he made an interpretation to the mother

based on her dream,

the baby quieted down.

And he realized at that point that speaking to the mother

was speaking to the baby.

I would say, according to my research,

all the important events happen in infancy.

There's no such thing as adult psychoanalysis

because all of our analysis

deals with the traumas of infancy and childhood.

In order for us to really understand a human being,

we have to start in the womb.

Bail: Imprints are very simple.

Things like: You are not to succeed in life.

You are not to be happy.

You are to kill yourself.

You are not to be rich.

You cannot free yourself

unless you know

or have an idea about your imprint,

because it has tentacles everywhere.

Narrator: Bail's theory goes all the way back

to preconception and fetal life.

In over 60 years of clinical work,

he discovered that every fetus is imprinted

with its mother's unconscious, unbearably painful feelings.

Everything that a mother experiences while she's pregnant

impacts the fetus. Everything.

A lot of times people wanna just assume it's-- it's blissful,

or the fetus doesn't know anything.

But a fetus knows feeling.

In fact, it's all feeling.

There have been many studies that have looked at

if the pregnancy is wanted or not wanted

or if there's a state of anxiety in Mom,

and there absolutely is an associated risk

for that developing baby to then

have higher risk of affective disorders,

neuropsychiatric disease, throughout its life.

We now know there are

forms of genetic transmission

which are called epigenetic.

Tracy Bale: Epigenetics at its most basic

really just means aspects that affect gene expression

that are not changes in the DNA sequence.

Things in the environment can influence how genes can be expressed

by placing really biochemical markers on the DNA,

and that changes how that gene might be expressed.

So some epigenetic marks can increase the expression of a gene,

and those can be inherited,

and some epigenetic marks will actually repress or decrease

and those also can be inherited.

So a woman is exposed to trauma

or infection or famine,

for instance, dietary challenge.

These sorts of stressors in the environment

can influence the germ cells, and these may be lasting.

Then it becomes transgenerational.

So it can be passed from grandparent

down to grandchild, and so on.

My grandmother had learned

many years earlier

that fifteen members of her little village in Russia

had been exterminated.

What my grandmother went through still affected me

two generations later.

Psychologically, I know that my grandmother

was terribly and unreasonably

afraid that I would die.

So if people want to think that the next generation isn't going to feel

what we're all doing today, they're just wrong.

Every baby born...

feels it all.

I'm now in the midst of a project for

Native American preschoolers,

and I'm pretty well convinced

that they're reacting to the massacres,

which occurred hundreds of years ago,

but have been imprinted in the psychological

if not the genetic memories

of their forbearers.

Mothers do more than turn genes off or on.

They tell you what kind of life you will have.

Loren Weiner: We're talking about the unconscious world.

So this is beyond what most people are really perceiving

is happening.

That in this unconscious world,

everyone is carrying around

the imprint they received from their mothers.

See, this has been going on for millennia.

So we've got mother after mother

passing down all of this information

She doesn't know she's passing down.

All of this unwanted material.

All of these things that are so hard to feel.

"I don't feel good enough, I don't feel loved."

But now that baby, that fetus, took in the same feeling.

Loren Weiner: Even in the nicest of environments,

you will still have this going on,

and the reason it's so important is that it is the root

of all psychopathology.

And really, of all pathology, physical and mental.

Allen Weiner: The baby, in the beginning,

is really kind of an energetic essence

that is very loose and very free.

It is very vulnerable to turbulence.

Now, the imprint, which is unconscious,

when it is driven into that bubble of energy,

damage is done.

Profound damage to that energetic field is done.

So for survival's sake, a fetus will say,

"I will take all of this burden for you.

I will relieve you, Mom.

Therefore you will do better

and you'll guarantee that I live."

But now we've got a fetus that doesn't have access

to all of itself.

So it will split off this toxic material

from the mother.

Once it's walled off,

the fetus does everything it can to not touch it again.

Narrator: For the fetus, walling off the pain meant walling off feelings,

leaving the child powerless.

From this weakened place,

all the power rests with the parents,

especially the mother.

This is why this work is very difficult.

Because people feel threatened that they will return

to a time of excruciating pain

about which they can do nothing.

MAN: My father comes home from his office Christmas party drunk,

brandishing a loaded pistol...

...saying to my mother, "I'm gonna kill you.

But first I wanna kill your-- your mother."

He went looking for my grandmother.

She hid from him in a closet.

That was the kind of thing

that happened frequently in our house--

violence, threats of murder.

Loren Weiner: Our adult lives are actually

replicating our experiences in the womb.

And after a while, you'll start to hear that

the complaints sound like that of a baby.

My girlfriend didn't do this for me.

My boyfriend didn't do that for me.

I didn't get taken care of.

I didn't get loved the right way.

Dana Gardiner: My past relationships had all been destroyed

pretty much by my own philandering that I did.

But it really wasn't until

I got to experience Doctor Bail's philosophy

that, uh,

that allowed me to see that...

the very need for contact

that had kept me from loving,

was, in a sense,

exactly the same need within my mother

that led her

to seduce a little five-year-old boy.

What we see is that a fetus is not only trying to save the mother,

it's really saying, "I'm going to become you."

Cheryl Pappas: My mother's health was varying,

and I was always saving her from death, I thought.

I simply mirrored my mother's...

condition.

I fought for her.

I had no other purpose in life.

I knew my mother's life. I didn't know mine.

But I knew hers.

The imprint, since it's unconscious,

can best be seen in the physical world

by the idea of a marionette.

Whereas the strings that go to the appendages

really go to the mother's unconscious,

and therefore the mother's unconscious

controls the freedom of the baby.

Death at an early age was the script the imprint had for me.

If I had not gone into analysis,

I would have been dead by the age of 30.

Someone comes in in pain,

because, "I hate being," let's say, an attorney.

"I wanna be an artist.

Well, but I can't, because internally I don't feel right

if I make the move to be an artist."

Well, you've got to help them understand

that's not you,

that's you really up against a mother who wants you to be an attorney.

My son, the attorney.

So psychoanalysis, really in the main,

is identifying these strings and cutting them

by making you conscious.

Bail: The goal of analysis

is not surmounting the Oedipal complex,

it's really knowing what your imprint is

and getting all the trash from your mind

out of your mind.

Loren Weiner: The dream is the vehicle you'd use

to do the entire treatment.

It tells you what happened in your life,

because everybody has an unconscious.

So the unconscious is recording everything.

Everything.

Everything you've ever been through,

felt, seen, learned.

And if we can correctly understand that dream,

it relieves the mind and it lets the person grow.

Narrator: Unlike Freud, Bail's method deciphers the dream

listening for the mother's story.

Uncovering the associations in the dream

that will reveal the mother's imprint.

My mother was holding this monkey.

And the monkey is sitting there screaming

and I'm kind of watching it.

Now, you know,

how are you gonna interpret that dream?

I was the little screaming baby

that was trying to reach her

and couldn't

because she wasn't comforting the baby at all,

she was just holding this little monkey.

And by seeing myself in the monkey,

I came to recognize that

on the very deepest level,

that there were a lot of feelings

of abandonment

and a lack of connection to my mother

that I was carrying throughout my life.

Dr. Bail's theory

really goes where Freud stopped.

He continues, and he's really saying,

"Look, we can't just understand dreams as wish fulfillment.

We have to go further."

It's not about sleeping with my mother.

It's about understanding which parts of my mother

I wanna give up

and which parts of my mother are unconsciously

operating in the background,

which I can discover and then put aside

and find my own self.

If you don't get the imprint,

you don't fight against your imprint,

it's like mowing weeds.

You think you've got them, but you haven't got them.

You've got to go and pluck every single weed out.

Nobody knows what they're fighting.

And because they don't know what they're fighting,

they'll lose the battle,

as they have for the past 100,000 years.

I was both the doctor and the patient in this dream.

There was a, um,

figure on a gurney in an emergency room

which I was looking at,

but I felt that I was the figure as well.

I had a pelvis and a head, but nothing else.

And Dr. Bail interpreted that, I think correctly,

as meaning that the way I was living,

I was-- my intellectual side was alive

and I had a lot of sexual feeling,

but no-- no heart.

No, uh, capacity for... for love.

(sobbing)

And, uh,

that has come only with time

and with treatment with him.

Loren Weiner: Little by little, each dream

that removes a piece of toxin

that isn't the person,

you're getting back to the essential nature of yourself.

You're getting back to your full potential.

I kept looking for women who were like my mother.

And my mother hated me.

And I married them, uh, three times in succession.

Loren Weiner: You have to say at some point,

"Imprint, thank you. You saved me, I thought.

But it's so time to let you go."

Maybe down the line when people are more accustomed to this idea, right?

When little kids grow up just knowing, "Oh, you know, I got an imprint.

I'm gonna have to work on this, because I'm not really a bad kid.

I got loaded down with a bunch of junk that isn't me."

(tango music playing)

The woman is the main act, and that's how it should be.

The great sorrow that women have endured,

and the abuse women have endured,

the "no place at the table" that women have endured,

and men are jealous of women, ultimately,

because women can do the one thing no man can do.

They can't produce a baby.

This creates the situation

that makes the imprint

so debilitating.

Is that there's centuries and centuries

of female oppression that gets passed

to every baby that's born.

The masculine forces really run things for far too long.

It, you know, has great intellect,

but it really doesn't have the sensitivity,

the feeling, that's feminine.

These are forces that are contained within each person.

And the optimal state is that a person has them in balance.

Balance, love,

is the only thing that works.

And women must have a place at the table

if there's to be peace.

(tango music playing)

But if you're not sexual,

then you're not really alive.

Life is sex, sex is life.

It's that simple. That's how life should be: simple.

Yes.

(thunder rumbles)

I never expected, uh,

to get in touch with the spiritual side of myself.

Indeed, the deeper one gets into oneself,

the more spiritual one becomes.

Judith Parker: Dr. Bail says once you clean up the unconscious

from all the detritus of past generations,

the angels come,

and I have seen the angels in dreams.

We are supposed to be in contact, through our unconscious,

with the Divine.

That is pure love.

So when a baby's mind is split,

and part of its connection to the Divine is cut off,

it's now got less connection to pure love.

They have choices

where they couldn't see before.

So it's a new world.

They see with different eyes.

Sharon Weiner: I had been in other therapy for a few years,

and it wasn't going anywhere and I started feeling worse,

and I'm an artist and it was-- it's very easy to sort of

watch the progression with my artwork

and, um, the work became

more and more minimal-- in a bad way.

Dr. Bail has helped me with all of that because it's--

with my imprint, it was to be not visible,

and things just started to change dramatically.

Before Dr. Bail, I was a person that had difficulty loving.

I think the issue for me and my own errors,

uh, philandering within relationships,

has to do with the feeling of wanting desperately

to be seen.

I think Dr. Bail takes that deeper.

Then it's about the feelings that you felt,

either as a very young child

or as a fetus within your mother,

uh, and it's those feelings

that-- that you have to feel

as opposed to intellectually

try to understand.

I was a very cold person.

All I cared about was money, power for myself,

uh, I looked upon others as people to use for my own benefit.

And, um,

that's something that I never would have known

had it not been for my treatment with Dr. Bail.

It's the only means I know of really, uh,

addressing unhappiness

and effecting personality change.

Uh, you won't get in from drugs,

you won't get it from any other kind of talking therapy.

The truth is the light.

And the truth is so relieving.

Ah! It's like taking a deep breath...

and actually not having to work so hard.

When you are living a lie, it takes so much work.

Narrator: At 96,

Bernard Bail has found his balance.

And the love he's been searching for since Irmgard.

Group: ♪ Happy birthday to you ♪

♪ And many more... ♪

Woman: Yay!

(clapping)

(laughter)

I have been

deeply in love with this man for

two years.

This is the first time I have ever allowed myself

to be held.

Most people fall in love at a much younger age.

But I recognize

that I-- I can't do anything but love him.

He tells me he's going to live another 100 years.

Here at the end of his life,

he says...

I'm just his gift from God.

He's my gift.

Narrator: Today, Bernard Bail still practices the work he loves.

And continues to share his theory at conferences worldwide.

He wrote and published The Mother's Signature,

and in-depth accounting of his theory of the mother's imprint,

a memoir, Irmgard's Flute,

and hundreds of essays exploring his theory,

dreams, and prenatal and infant mental life.

His greatest wish is that everyone has access

to the information in his discovery

and takes it into their hearts,

knowing that it's the key to unlocking

the love in themselves and the planet,

one person, one dream at a time.

So, I think the time is right.

I think one day people will look back

and really realize the implications of this.

That if this can be understood and things can change,

everything can change.

And everything can get better.

And everybody can have love.

♪ Head in the clouds ♪

♪ You circle high ♪

♪ Here under roots ♪

♪ I watch you fly ♪

♪ And as if in a balloon ♪

♪ My heart floats to you ♪

♪ My heart floats to you ♪

♪ With body bound ♪

♪ In gravity ♪

♪ This weightless love ♪

♪ Breaks free ♪

♪ So as if in a balloon ♪

♪ My heart floats to you ♪

♪ My heart floats...♪

♪ I'll send you all I got ♪

♪ Pop it when you want ♪

♪ Untie the bottom knot ♪

♪ Just don't let it drop ♪

♪ And hold it to your chest ♪

♪ Let it be your jets ♪

♪ And far beyond our heads ♪

♪ Let's propel each other up ♪

♪ Your mind's too young ♪

♪ And mine not old enough ♪

♪ Without a common language to speak with ♪

♪ We've built a wall ♪

♪ But as if in a balloon ♪

♪ My heart floats with you ♪

♪ My heart floats with you ♪

♪ My heart floats with you ♪

♪ I'm sending you all I have ♪

♪ I'm sending you all I have to give ♪

♪ Maybe someday wings will burst out my back ♪

♪ And I'll float with you ♪

♪ I'll send you all I got ♪

♪ Pop it when you want ♪

♪ Untie the bottom knot ♪

♪ Just don't let it drop ♪

♪ And hold it to your chest ♪

♪ Let it be your jets ♪

♪ And far beyond our heads ♪

♪ Let's propel each other up ♪

Captioned by Post Haste Digital