Original subtitles

Downloaded from YTS.MX

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX

[SIREN WAILING]

[RUMBLING]

[MUSIC BOX PLAYS]

[MAN SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY]

MAN ON TV: A large, handmade pepperoni pizza for five bucks.

WOMAN ON TV: This year' fashion week has shown us

some bold new trends for the upcoming season.

She started out as a hot, new designer...

MALE NEWSCASTER 1: It was initially reported that

57 people were killed in Iraq today.

MALE REPORTER: The bi discussion of the summit was

climate change, despite opposition...

FEMALE NEWSCASTER: I heard that children were taken out, bloody.

WOMAN: I am very scared I'm worried about my daughter,

I'm worried about my...

MALE NEWSCASTER 2: The military space race is not over.

There's no doubt in my mind that...

[SPEAKERS OVERLAPPING]

FEMALE NEWSCASTER 2: ...killer was on several mind-altering medications.

MAN: ...don't want any more adrenaline junkies...

FEMALE NEWSCASTER 3: ...tragic death of a 5-year-old girl...

MALE REPORTER 2: ...cutting edge research...

WEINER: We've been very good

at making enormous strides in technology.

It makes us look advanced.

But I think where we fall down

is that we haven't gone nearly as far in our internal world.

I don't know that we've really come too much farther

than people did thousands of years ago.

MATE: Most of us don't know why we're doing what we're doing most of the time.

Especially when it comes to the really important decisions in our lives.

This is largely a society in denial.

WEINER: We have been stuck I think, for a very long time

in the ways we've done things, and everybody sees it now.

I don't think people can really look around the world

or the Earth and say, "It's all great."

Well, how about now, we start to look inside ourselves?

How about we take the ideas that fueled

this kind of development and look inside?

Why wouldn't we go back to the womb?

Why do we want to start anywhere else really, but there?

It's where we all start.

JANUS: In Western culture,

we have no idea about prenatal life.

Life begins with birth, not before.

But other cultures

have an understanding or an intuition

what prenatal life may mean for the becoming child.

They believe the pregnant woman

should be cautious and not excited,

no burdens and so on.

The time before birth is your living time.

NESCI: One hundred years ago,

babies were put into, you know, strange clothes,

they could not move,

they were embalmed like mummies,

and their heart rate beat was slower,

they would eat less, they would develop less.

Up to the '50s and even the '60s in Europe,

babies were operated on without anesthesia.

"Babies don't experience and don't feel,"

that was the general opinion, that they forget everything.

And so, you can let them cry and they forget it.

Doctors would do horrible, horrible, horrible operations.

And they told their parents

that the reason that they are not using an anesthetic

is because the anesthetic would damage the child.

But in fact they damaged the children themselves

through this traumatic experience.

The reason I did not become an obstetrician

is because I hated the way obstetricians were treating women.

They were yelling at them.

"Push! Push! Push! What's the matter with you?"

You know, "Push!" [INFANT CRYING]

And we were taught that babies can't remember anything

before the age of two.

NESCI: In this last century,

the attitude is changing dramatically.

We can identify

with a child, with a baby.

Ultrasound is magic.

How could you see a baby in the womb during pregnancy?

MONK: The nature of what w do is really thinking about

development as it starts before birth.

And we're really pushing back that timeframe

to say that there are factors environmentally

that happen, um, prenatally

and so their environment is their mother's.

Human beings are affected by the environment,

as soon as they have an environment.

And that means as soon as we're implanted in the womb.

So, from that moment on, until we die...

Uh, we are creatures

who are interacting with,

shaping, and being shaped by, the environment.

[MUSIC PLAYS]

NARRATOR: Our whole stor is about "little number five"

and how his mother is preparing for him.

She knows that he will have nothing to grow on

except the food that she eats for him.

She really is eating for two people,

herself and "little number five."

JANUS: Fifty years ago,

we have the research to brain development,

we have the epidemiological research

and we have the direct observation, uh, via ultrasound

and film and so on.

The epidemiological research

is coming from a man, uh, whose name is Barker.

Some of the early observations by Barker

were in England and Wales,

that geographically, there were different areas

that had high neonatal mortality risk

as well as high cardiovascular mortality risk.

There were further investigations,

which ultimately linked low birth weight

to an increased risk of cardiovascular mortality.

And when you think about low birth weight,

the main driver is the nutritional environment in utero.

JANUS: That was 2 or 30 years ago,

and there was an explosion of research.

Some of this came out of studies, for example,

with what's called "The Dutch Famine."

BEZRUCHKA: From November, 1944 to April, 1945,

the Nazis constrained the amount of food

going into the Netherlands.

And so the government reduced the rations

from 1,800 calories a day to 900 calories a day.

There were about 5,000 women

who were pregnant during this period.

And what happened was

people followed up in adulthood,

to look at what kind of problems they were having.

Fetuses who were in this period of famine

in the first trimester

had a whole host of problems when they got to be my age.

MATE: They will be more likely to develop

the so-called metabolic syndrome,

which consists of diabetes,

high blood pressure and heart problems.

And these are obvious examples

of how the environment already in utero

can affect the life of the adult.

The factor that we least appreciate, however, is that

in addition to these self-evident physical factors

is the emotional state of the mother.

About how many months pregnant would you say she is, Doctor?

About seven months.

Have you someone to help you with the housework?

My sister comes in once in a while,

but it's hard for her to get away.

JANUS: In our life,

the first, big person is the mother.

Mother is giving life, giving birth.

And if the mother is feeling well,

the baby feels he is living in a good world.

If the mother has stress,

he feels the world is stressful.

VERNY: Stress decreases the immune response.

Everybody knows that.

If you don't sleep enough, if you work too hard,

your stress level increases,

and your immune system goes down the toilet.

When that happens while you're in utero,

it really affects your immune system

for the rest of your life.

Human beings are affected in their development

by early experiences, including, in the uterus.

They are affected by the emotional environment

in which they're conceived and carried and birthed,

and then reared in.

The broad outlines of that knowledge

has been really well established.

But we're not practicing it as a society,

we're not recognizing it.

Prenatal life is so unknown to us

and yet so important to who we are as people.

You will see it unconsciously expressed in many ways.

You will see it in movies,

you will see it in fairytales, you will see it in novels,

you will see it in mythology, in folklore.

You name it, you will see it there.

JANUS: In older times,

fairy tales were told to the young people

to help them to confront the old anxieties

from birth and from helplessness.

It's the fight with the mighty parent figures.

Maybe a witch, maybe a cruel father figure.

And in modern times, we have films.

They follow the frame of the fairy tales.

In the uterine world, you are swimming,

and there is the film, The Little Mermaid

URSULA: Hurry home, princess.

We wouldn't want to miss

old Daddy's celebration, now, would we?

JANUS: The crisis begins

when she falls in love

and feels weak

and loses her voice...

[VOCALIZING]

And then the film goes back

and shows the background. Keep singing!

There, this is a fixation, anxiety fixation

by a big, cruel, dominating mother.

[CACKLING]

And the story of the film is the fight and overcoming,

being stronger than this mother,

and it is a fight of life and death.

[URSULA CACKLES]

So much for true love!

And these ambivalent feelings

against the mother are natural.

If it is going good, our life is an adventure.

If it is bad, it is traumatic, it is suffering.

Intrauterine life is not a paradise

as some people try to make us believe.

We are the receiver of all the happiness

and of all the anxieties

and difficulties of our parents.

The fetus is a sentient being.

Think of it as moving, quivering,

without a skin.

He marinates in the feelings of the mother.

BAIL: It feels every shudder.

It feels the mother's gladness and happiness

but it feels every anxiety.

It's the anxieties that cause the difficulties.

And of course, something that happened in the womb

would be at the deepest level.

It's at the start of your life,

it happens with the woman who gave you life.

This would be at the deepest level, I think,

of everybody's personality.

NESCI: Since I was a child,

I had the feeling that there were family secrets.

My father and my mother gave me

versions of the history of the family.

That was something that didn't work out completely.

So, I understood I had to look for something

that was beyond what appeared on the surface.

I think from here came my interest in the unconscious.

[SPEAKING ITALIAN]

I was very interested in dreams and movies

because they speak a very similar language.

If you look at Alice in Wonderland,

you have the rabbit.

[WHISTLING] [CAT MEOWS]

The rabbit is the animal of making many children.

♪ No, no, no, I'm overdue!

♪ I'm really in a stew

♪ No time to say "Goodbye," hello!

♪ I'm late, I'm late, I'm late! ♪

What can I do for you?

Well, I'm looking for a white rabbit.

So, um, if you don't mind...

Eh? Oh!

There he is! I simply must get through!

Sorry, you're much too big.

Simply impassable.

You mean, "Impossible?" No, impassable.

Nothing's impossible.

There is always this question...

Too big, too small?

Always the problem, to get into? Or to go out?

To "go out" is to be delivered.

[SHRIEKING]

Once upon a time, we were walking on four legs.

We had a head which was smaller

and we had hips that were larger.

So, the birth channel was very big.

When the human beings

began to reach bipedal erect posture,

gradually the bones changed

and the birth channel became more narrow.

And then another thing happened.

The brain became larger.

And here, the obstetrical dilemma came.

How would it be able that the new human baby

could come out of the womb with such a big head?

So, if you see the whole movie again,

thinking of the obstetrical dilemma,

you will get another picture.

Someone's head will roll for this!

Yours!

And there is the issue of cutting the head.

The dream of mothers,

if you can cut the head of the child,

the child can come out.

Off with their heads!

[ALL CHEERING]

Off with her head!

Off with her...

Slowly, uh, there was a sort of natural selection

that the women who were able

to deliver earlier survived.

Because if you delivered earlier,

the baby is smaller.

And if it is smaller, it can come out.

Monster!

Help!

Ah! I'm late!

Biochemically, and physiologically, in so many ways

the human infant is way behind other mammals.

JANUS: We are all born unripe,

very helpless,

therefore a good bonding and a welcoming mother

is important for development of a child.

In earlier centuries,

birth and pregnancy and the fate of woman

was very, very difficult.

Every sixth birth meant death for the mother.

Up to one half of the children

died during birth or in the first year.

And, therefore, was an anxiety from the woman

and from the men, to all, what birth meant.

In the last 50 years,

birth becomes safer and safer.

Now we have, uh, the power,

or the stability, or the safety to confront

and to be curious.

BRENTON: I started out in the lab

studying very narrow questions in animal models.

And I quickly realized that

I was interested in broader questions

that affected human health.

I grew up in Southern California

and I grew up with "smog alert" days

and when pollution was very much defined

by whether or not we could see the mountains

that were theoretically really close by.

I grew up in one of the communities

that we actually study now,

which I always think is kind of ironic.

And it wasn't until a little bit later that the epigenetics came in.

"Epi" really means, "on top of" genetics.

So, when we think about our genetic code,

which is our DNA sequence,

when we talk about epigenetics,

we're thinking about other factors, other things,

that can be on top of or attached to that

can help fine-tune the genetic code to turn genes on and off.

YEHUDA: This is something

that we're just beginning to explore, gene by gene.

It's not what genes you're carrying,

it's what gets expressed.

Genes are, you know, only the blueprint.

Imagine you have a blueprint for a house.

You have a house that you have built,

sort of, to your own specifications.

And it has followed the blueprint

in terms of where things are

but a lot of things have changed

as a result of all kinds of environmental factors.

Being able to adapt to a changing environment quickly

is very important.

However, not every adaptation is necessarily going to be for the better.

When the sperm and the egg are forming,

as part of normal development,

there's this period of erasing past marks, basically,

and re-establishing the new set of marks for the future of that cell.

And then this happens again in early embryogenesis.

In some ways, wiping the old slate clean

and starting new for this new fetus, this new baby.

There is a whole period of time

during fetal development where many things,

including just the environment that the fetus is growing in,

could alter or shift that process.

YEHUDA: It's fantastic.

Because the idea of epigenetic changes,

based on exposure to the environment

at different intervals

really provides the body with a way

of continuously adapting to their environment.

Bad environmental events cause change,

good environmental events cause change.

And what you gotta do is just make sure that

you have enough of the good events.

MATE: I was conceived

during the Second World War in Budapest, Hungary,

in 1943,

at a time when Hungary, being an ally of Germany,

uh, was in the war on Germany's side

and there was a lot of anti-Semitic legislation,

restrictions and threats.

The genocide hadn't happened yet.

And then, I'm born in January, 1944.

And then, the Germans marched into the country in March.

March of 1944.

And, as my mother told me,

the next day, she phoned the pediatrician to say that

Gabor is crying all the time, you should come and see him.

And the doctor said, "Sure, I'll come,

"but I should tell you,

"all my Jewish babies are crying."

It's so clear to me that the fear that I've carried all my life,

literally in my molecules, is my mother's terror,

and then the terror that I experienced,

during the first year of life under Nazi occupation.

Those experiences have stamped my personality,

they've stamped, um, my reactivity to the world,

they've stamped my worldview,

mostly on the unconscious level.

I wasn't a happy camper. I was...

Lot of issues in my personal life,

a lot of depression, anxiety.

Then I realized in my 50s that I had ADD.

I clearly see that this is not a genetic disease,

despite the so-called experts.

Um, it is the impact of stress in the early environment.

YEHUDA: When I was in school,

we used to have conversations about nature versus nurture.

Nobody says that anymore.

We don't have nature here, and nurture here.

We have nature and nurture interacting

to form a new thing.

I do research on post-traumatic stress disorder

and its effects on trauma survivors

and, actually, the next generation.

I'm interested in understanding

individual differences and how they manifest

interacting with the environment

and, more specifically, traumatic events.

We have been doing studies of

adult children of Holocaust survivors

and we were finding

very interesting and important effects.

If the offspring will be raised in the same context,

their body will need to be prepared

maybe for prolonged periods of starvation

or maybe for overwhelming stress.

So, having a change that is passed

from mother to offspring could be very helpful.

Maybe less helpful,

if the offspring is not gonna live

in the same environment.

An offspring lives in urban New York

where starvation is really not an issue,

then having the same kind of

biological adaptations being transmitted

may actually result in a flip side

of just being anxious,

and people not understanding why.

Or even you not understanding why.

From this evolutionary perspective,

the fetus gets constructed via epigenetic processes,

to be awfully alert

because that would be adaptive in a threatening environment.

But if you were wired to be very adaptive and very vigilant,

that's not a good fit with a postnatal environment

in the late 20th or early 21st century,

where the requirements for, you know, success in school

is to be able to sit very placidly,

to have very unique focus,

to not be oriented to what's going around.

So, again, it's this bad fit.

MATE: If there's a lot of stress in the early environment,

then the infant's capacity

to respond to stress will be altered.

The tuning out itself, which is the hallmark of ADD,

is nothing but a defense mechanism.

Infants, when their brains are developing,

if there's stress around them,

they'll tune out, that's how they survive,

the tuning out gets programed into their brains...

Bing! They're diagnosed with ADHD.

Not enough dopamine, let's give you Ritalin.

[MOROSE MUSIC PLAYING]

MATE: There are 3 millio kids in the United States,

according to latest figures,

who are taking stimulant medications for ADHD.

There are 500,000 kids,

according to the latest statistics,

who are taking anti-psychotic medications.

They're getting these medications

not because they're psychotic.

They're getting them because

it's the only way we can figure out,

when I say "we" I mean society,

to control their behaviors.

And this is what

the pharmaceutical industry is able to exploit

in their promotion of high volume drug use

in their advertisements.

We don't even know what the long-term effects are

of anti-psychotics on the developing brain.

And yet we still see

medication advertised as a quick fix,

endorsed by the medical profession.

Well, what's going on?

And what's going on with the burgeoning diagnosis of ADHD

and opposition defiant disorder

and bipolar disorder in kids

and autism, which has gone up 40-fold in the last 30 years.

What's going on and what we're not recognizing is that

people are parenting and conceiving

and carrying and birthing children

under increasingly stressed conditions.

HIRSCH: In our society there's so much rushing.

You're so busy. Everything going, going, going.

Our mind that's always busy chattering

and making us stressed.

I was born in Israel.

My mother said there was a place

where all the mothers went

with their babies for a few weeks,

then they bonded and then they all went home together.

We don't have that here.

We barely get to stay overnight in the hospital now.

Increasingly, it takes two people now

to provide a living in this culture to families.

And they're doing so

in the context of less support.

Because one of the ravages

of industrialization and globalization

is the destruction of the extended family,

the tribe, the clan, the village, the neighborhood.

MONK: Frankly, hundreds of years ago,

not to glorify the past, 'cause there were other stressors,

but you had extended family around.

I think we don't talk about that enough in our society.

So, there's less support, there's less context,

there's less connection that people can benefit from.

Less connection with grandparents,

elders, wiser women.

MONK: We started by saying,

"Let's try to bring this into the lab

"and get pregnant women to,

"what we call acutely, briefly feel stress."

And when we divided the fetal response,

the fetuses whose mothers were high-anxious

had a heart rate increase.

And the fetuses of mothers who were low-anxious,

either had no change or a decrease.

And then, what we saw is

if you go all the way out to women

reaching criteria for depression,

their fetuses have a significant stress response in the lab.

Your breathing goes up, your blood pressure goes up,

and your heart rate is going up.

That's all stimuli to the fetus.

So, over the course of pregnancy,

being in an environment of a woman

who is seriously depressed,

is different than being in an environment of a woman

who is feeling fine. No symptoms.

And that shapes fetuses

so that by the end of pregnancy,

when they get a stimuli, like the heart rate change,

they're showing differences almost,

we want to say, in temperament.

In their reactivity style.

Big reactors, or just calm.

MATE: Emotiona states aren't just

abstract psychological experiences.

They have their physiological correlates in the body.

So, if I were to scream at you right now,

your body would change in a split second.

Nobody touched you,

nobody put any poison into you,

but your body would be in a completely altered state.

High levels of cortisol, the stress hormone,

would be elevating your blood sugar

so that you could fight or have more energy to escape.

Adrenaline would be pumping through your system,

causing your heart to beat faster,

causing your muscles to tighten up, to be stronger,

giving you more energy,

enabling you to escape or to struggle.

And what if you're carrying a baby?

And what if you're chronically scared?

Those same stress hormones

and other compounds

would be going through the placenta, to the infant.

[INDISTINCT SHOUTING]

[GLASS SHATTERS]

[SIREN WAILING]

MATE: Already back in the 1970s,

there was a CTV documentary

on how emotional deprivation in early childhood

fosters the development of violence and aggression.

Psychologists proved the inverse relationship

of violence and affection

by studying what happens to monkeys

who don't get any mothering.

Parents who are stressed

have been shown not to be able to be

as attuned to their infants and children

as parents who are not stressed.

Not their fault.

Not because they don't love the child.

Not because they're not dedicated, devoted, committed.

Simply because the stress effect

impedes their ability, not to love their child,

but to attune with their child.

So, that mutual responsiveness is interfered with.

And that has an impact on brain development.

There's an important chemical called dopamine.

Dopamine is essential for motivation and attention.

Now you take infant monkeys

and you measure their dopamine levels

in the front part of the brain,

and you find it to be normal.

Separate them from their mothers?

Those dopamine levels have diminished.

In other words, the child's brain chemistry is affected

by the unavailability of the mother.

And this is true even if the mother is physically there

but emotionally absent.

Imagine two tuning forks,

like in this very famous "Still Face Experiment".

The mother is one tuning fork and it starts vibrating.

And the baby's tuning fork

begins to vibrate in unison with hers.

And when that happens,

gradually, its own prefrontal cortex gets tuned.

So, it becomes empathic.

It begins to relate to the mother.

Infants don't understand words.

So, they respond to body language.

So, is my mother rigid? Or relaxed?

Is she afraid? Because if she's afraid, I am,

because she's my protector.

So, if she's afraid, who's going to protect me?

The size of the mother's pupils,

the mother's voice,

is it confident and relaxed, or is it tense?

These are not conscious thoughts,

but this is the infant's experience.

Depressed mothers,

or even worse, um, schizophrenic mothers.

They are not in synchrony.

The baby is getting the message

that there's something wrong with it.

Its prefrontal cortex

is not going to be tuned properly.

So, that baby is going to develop

a kind of depressive personality.

Okay... [CRYING]

I am here. And what are you doing?

Oh, yes. Oh!

CTV REPORTER: The monkeys tell us more

about the severe effects of infant deprivation.

The ones that were reared in isolation

just don't behave normally

when they're finally given a playmate.

They rarely touch, and when they do,

the contact's surprisingly vicious.

VERNY: Children who are emotionally inhibited

will become dysfunctional adults.

They will have difficulty learning

and will be more hostile.

And that starts right in the womb.

When the brain begins to be organized,

um, genetically speaking,

each neuron is destined for a certain place

where it will eventually end up.

THOMASON: Neurons, brain cells

are the information processing units of the brain

and they make connections

and they organize themselves into functional networks.

In every second of prenatal life,

50,000 new neurons are being produced.

Every second.

There is not a machine in the world that can duplicate that.

And when you have all those neurons being produced,

they are very vulnerable.

And the smallest, smallest influence

will make a huge sort of imprint

on those neurons and the neural circuits.

If there is chronic stress,

the woman is constantly obsessing about something,

or worrying about something,

more and more stress hormones, like cortisone,

is being pushed into the blood stream.

When you have too much cortisone in the brain itself,

then the nerve cells will be interfered with

in their passage and they may even be destroyed.

We were the first or amongst the first

to glimpse inside at the brain becoming wired up.

With this new, safe MRI technology,

we're observing large-scale systems.

What we see in infants exposed to stress in utero

is reduced brain volume, reduced gray matter density.

So, if you are less dense in those regions,

that suggests that there are less processors available.

We also see reductions in hippocampal volume,

and increase in amygdala volume.

The hippocampus is critically important for learning and memory.

The amygdala is very important for emotional processing,

responding to emotional information.

And why we think those are

particularly important during fetal development is,

first of all, they begin to be developed very early.

Disruption in those areas

is also associated with higher risk

for emotional psychopathology or neuropsychiatric illness.

VERNY: If the mother is upset,

if she has a very high level of neurohormones,

if she has very high level of stress hormones,

all of those things will be passed to the baby.

BAIL: There are all kinds of feelings coming from the mother.

All kinds. Anxieties.

Depression. Fears. About everything.

WEINER: Let's be clear Mothers love their children.

So do fathers.

But there are these subtle unconscious things, see,

that this mother is dealing with in her life.

Say, she may be in a tough marriage,

but she gets pregnant.

Well, part of her may want the baby,

and part of her may really say,

"Gee, this is not a good time for a baby.

"In fact, this is gonna be very hard."

And a baby may get a lot of that.

That little bit of stuff is feeling all of that,

without any way of communicating.

It just absorbs. It just holds it.

And that's what it gets for nine months.

What comes to mind is the, um, confusion,

if you can speak of that in a fetus,

um, a developing human being,

whose mother is conflicted,

who wants the child perhaps but is afraid of having a child,

who wants to love but is

herself very afraid and very stressed.

So, the kid is getting

a very confusing message about the world.

That "this world wants me, this world doesn't want me."

[BREATHING HEAVILY]

[HISSING]

[WOMAN GROANS]

MAN: Hold! Hold!

RIPLEY: [GROANS] Please!

Hold!

Help me!

No!

No!

The Alienfilms

show the very difficult side of pregnancy and birth,

the side that the mother does not want to be pregnant,

does not want to have a child, but the child is coming,

the child is there, the child wants to live.

This is the story of theAlien films.

This alien is an embryonic being

that wants to implant in the persons of the crew.

And the film is always about this unwantedness

and this will to live.

It's a dark film.

It is, in a certain way, hopeless,

and as a very melancholic film

or a depressive film.

But for people who have this background

that they were not wanted,

and had to implant in spite of this,

it is, in a certain way, fascinating.

ASH: Don't touch it!

[MONSTROUS CRY]

This is a typical cult film.

There are many people who see, um, several times this film

to clear their own feelings

about wantedness and unwantedness.

MONK: I do worry about this kind of research

getting lumped with research that has a political agenda,

which is the personhood of the fetus.

Because that's a wholly different question, and it's what data is used,

in my opinion, for the discussion about the right to choose.

So I think, also people may a little bit,

shy away from this

because that is such a fraught debate.

It is an inconvenient truth that fetuses feel things.

It is just inconvenient.

Um, because if they do, then many things have to be rethought.

It makes no sense for a girl to have a baby she does not want.

If she is forced,

that means misery for a whole life

for her and for the child.

It's a very difficult issue.

And if she has not the right, she takes the right.

I think eventually, maybe in 100 years,

maybe not that long, I would say the goal would be

"let's get women and men in such a good place,

"that they come to realize that bringing another soul into this world

"is a very big job."

BAIL: I'm 92 years old,

and I've been practicing psychoanalysis for almost 60 years.

It was the war.

My being in the war and what happened to me in the war

that decided me to become a doctor.

I wanted to heal people, not kill people.

My training finished in '58.

At that time, analysis didn't teach anything about the womb,

didn't teach anything about prenatal life.

The paradigm in analysis was the masculine paradigm,

with Freud, and the Oedipal struggle.

In doing my work, I discovered that patients,

when I listened, were coming forth with a different story.

They felt very guilty about their mothers,

and they were feeling they had to,

put in a global sense, rescue their mothers.

Now nobody is born like that.

That's programed into people

when their environment is such that parents can't take care of themselves.

So one possible response

on the part of the child then is,

"Then I got to take care of them in order to maintain my relationship with them."

It's a survival thing.

Once you're in that state, whatever mom says goes,

"I'll do anything. I have to live, I'll do anything.

"So whatever you need me to do,

"do you need me to hold all of your bad feelings?

"I'll do it."

Now, an infant can't really do it,

but there's an omnipotent attempt to fix it

because your life depends on it.

Later, that fetus growing up, may become a writer,

and write these stories,

and may not know where that inspiration comes from.

Like the story of Superman.

[SCREAMING]

Okay, hold it, come on, hold it!

Get back.[SHRIEKS]

WEINER: If you think,

"I am a fetus, and I'm to take care of a full-grown woman's problems.

"How?

"Well, I better become a superhero.

"I better become the strongest person on Earth.

"I better be able to fly,

"I better be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound,

"and really do what? Save her."

What was that?

Easy, Miss, I've got you.

You've got me?

Who's got you?

WEINER: If you look at movies about superheroes,

really the task of an infant, is a superhero task.

Supermanis partly a story of my helplessness

during or after birth.

My aloneness and my fantasies

to be strong and the strongest man in the world.

WEINER: Now, thi does damage to the baby.

Because, really, if you think about it,

how is a fetus supposed to take over for a mommy?

How is a fetus supposed to take all of this trouble?

The fetus can't. There's no way.

The child automatically adjusts to the environment

in any way that'll further the chances of its own survival.

The baby has to become the mother,

doesn't get to be the baby.

And if the baby can't be the baby,

the baby can't develop his or her full potential.

And again, it's not according to the intentions of the parent, either.

But it's just what happens.

WEINER: So now we have a baby that has limitations, but is going to protect those

because, really, those were set up so early,

and they were set up to save this baby's life.

MATE: These people then develop lifelong patterns of self-suppression,

which then suppresses the immune system as well,

because the immune system and the emotional system are the same.

Not even controversial.

What will happen later on in life,

is that anything that challenges these basic limitations

that were set down, a grown person will fight against.

MATE: Because they fel responsible for their world.

"Well, if this thing happened to me,

"it's because I'm a terrible person.

"And therefore, how do I make sure it never happens again?

"I become the perfect person, so I'll be good all the time.

"I'll be good to everybody.

"I'm going to be the best in the class.

"And I'll always excel.

"I'm going to be great at my job.

"And when stuff goes wrong with my marriage,

"I'm not going to say a word, because I'm good and I can handle it all."

And then they get cancer.

An adult trauma is really a fetal trauma.

The fetus feels the pain, and all the consequences,

all the distortions of personality create an entity I call the internal saboteur.

It's the job of that internal saboteur,

to see to it you never ever experience that pain again.

People will talk about this all the time. They say, "I self-sabotage."

And I think that's a very well-known idea in our society.

I think people don't realize the depth of it.

I think they don't realize how true it really is, and what they're really doing.

And what people are really doing is saying,

"Mom, you gave me this constellation of trouble,

"I took it into my personality.

"It's set down the limits for what I was going to be able to do,

"but it kept me alive.

"I will hold onto this with every bit of strength I have."

[CELL PHONE RINGING][INDISTINCT CHATTER]

[FOOTSTEPS]

[CAR DOOR CLOSING]

Underneath everything in your life, there's that thing.

That empty-forever-empty.

You know what I'm talking about?

Yes.Yes.

Yes, I...Yes.

The capacity to be alone, and to perceive,

that's been a human challenge, I think,

for thousands of years.

And not just in this society.

It's just more difficult now because it's more pervasive

and because we all have these devices.

And that famous clip with Louis CK,

he's talking about cell phones.

And sometimes, when things clear away,

you're not watching it, and you're in your car

and you start going, "Oh, no, here it comes." That "I'm alone."

Like, it starts to visit on you.

Just this sadness. Yes.

Life is tremendously sad, just by being in it.

And so you're driving and you go, "Ah."

That's why we text and drive.

I look around pretty much 100% of people driving are texting.

Yes.

And they're killing... Everybody is murdering each other with their cars.

But people are willing to risk taking a life and ruining their own

because they don't want to be alone for a second.

By not being alone, you never really get a chance to think about yourself.

So this is a wonderful way of anesthetizing yourself

against any kind of introspection.

There used to be television and movies and radio.

And in terms of today's favorite anesthetic,

I would say it's probably Facebook and the reality shows,

and all those game things, and then of course, there's pornography.

So instead of coming to terms

with my lack of ability to love or to care or to feel,

you can do all this other stuff.

BAIL: One is frantic,

one will try anything to relieve the pain.

We can measure it by the number of people

who are addicted to various things.

Addicted to drugs, addicted to alcohol,

addicted to sex, addicted to power,

addicted to money.

The addictions run and run and run and run.

If you look at addicts, and by the way, not just drug addicts,

but any addict.

Gambling, sex addiction, shopping addicts,

what's missing is a sufficient activation,

in part, of the brain's reward motivation circuitry,

of which dopamine is an important driver, biochemically.

Cocaine elevates dopamine levels.

Nicotine elevates dopamine levels.

Um, caffeine elevates dopamine levels.

So people whose early development

sabotaged the development of their reward motivation circuitry,

will find some relief in doing drugs

that elevate dopamine levels, temporary relief.

Or in activities that elevate dopamine levels.

So for the gambling addict, that's the gambling.

He's not after the gambling, he's after the dopamine that he's getting.

And it's not about the money.

Because when they win the money,

they go back the next day and they lose the money.

And if you look at brain scans of people engaged in compulsive shopping,

the same part of the brain will light up as will light up if they do cocaine.

If, when we look at those people,

we don't see the pain that's driving their behavior,

it's because we're denying our own pain.

And if we are driven to judge them for their compulsive attachment

to seeking momentary joy from external source like a drug,

it's because we live in a society

that's completely addicted to seeking momentary joy from external sources.

Whole industries and businesses

and the livelihood of millions of people

depends on manufacturing stuff that's completely unnecessary,

doesn't enhance anybody's life in any significant way,

but which provides momentary pleasure.

I was in San Francisco a couple of years ago,

and around this block there was this thick line up,

people four abreast, around the block.

I said, "Gee, what's going on?

They said, "Oh, the new iPad is coming out."

So I actually talked to somebody.

I said, "Look, I get it. The iPad is a great... I don't have one,

"but I get that it's a great device,

"but why line up here?

"Couldn't you wait till tomorrow or next week?"

"No, man, you know." You got to have it right now.

Bob Dylan in his great...

I think Martin Scorsese, the documentary with Bob Dylan, uh,

he's sitting in the back of a limousine or a car,

and these two young fans want his signature.

You're so miserable. Come on, it won't take long.

[INDISTINCT]

They don't ask me. Those other two people don't ask me.

Why do you?

Why shouldn't you give it? You so miserable?

Why shouldn't you give it? Why did we come...

Well, because they like me. They said...

We don't like you anymore.

She called me a bum.

That's all we want.

May I have your autograph?

You're kind of a bum...

You called me a bum... Come on, Bob.

Oh, come on...

You don't need my autograph.

If you needed it, I'd give it to you.

[GUITAR PLAYING]

MATE: Nobody needs an iPad.

People can use it,

but why line up at 4:00 in the morning?

You think that's going to somehow fulfill your life,

fill in the holes where you're empty?

That's the society we live in.

[CLAMORING]

We see the addiction as the problem,

and of course that's legitimate,

addiction is a problem, it creates problems,

but it's not the primary problem.

We really need to appreciate

the importance of the prenatal environment in child development,

and to understand that when we see dysfunction in people,

we're actually seeing the imprint of that early experience.

You talk to people about their childhood, and they say,

"I don't remember, I don't remember, I don't remember."

Well, the fact is, everybody remembers,

they just don't recall.

It's usually because either nothing happened,

or too much happened. Usually it's too much.

And so that, one way they dealt with it,

was to split their attention from what's going on,

so they're not going to recall.

I know that people often tell me that I have a sad expression on my face.

That sadness is a memory.

It's somehow just programed into me.

But it's not a recall memory.

[INFANT COOING]

We have to distinguish between those two important kinds of memories,

and so often our lives show up

as those imprinted memories, and that imprint

starts in utero.

During the time in the uterus, we have no speech.

All these experiences are real experiences,

but not represented in the speech ego.

Therefore these pre-verbal experiences are unconscious.

They can be in dreams,

but also in all daily situations,

they can be present.

VERNY: When you put optic fibers into the womb,

you can see rapid eye movements of babies,

which in adults, always means that they are dreaming.

People will often wonder, "What can fetus dream about?"

Well, he dreams about the same things that you and I dream about,

in terms of our experiences.

There's a lot more to fetal life than we have ever thought.

I reckon, by now,

I've analyzed thousands of dreams

by many patients and the dreams,

reveal earlier levels of life.

The patient may be far away from his or her fetal life,

but in due time,

as one wipes away level by level,

eventually we get down to the truth.

Everybody has an imprint.

The imprint happens

because of the long history of traumas in the world.

We have to be aware of the fact that

there is a whole spectrum, you know, uh,

of traumas that can happen to us.

And it is those things that are passed on from generation to generation.

So that if a certain gene is switched on,

it will continue to be switched on

until the environment somehow switches it off.

Genetically, we have taken genes from a lot of people

so each one of us has roots,

even if we don't know the roots that we have.

And these roots, furthermore, go back in time,

so in some way, we have, inside of ourselves, layers of humanity.

What we're actually looking at is the impact

of the multi-generational family history.

Mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers,

and however far we go back,

people have been through wars, famine, disasters of all sort.

Stress that affected one generation,

will be played out very exactly in the next generation

to the degree that the next generation

has understood or not understood it.

Has dealt with it or not dealt with it.

So fundamentally, so long as we're not conscious,

we're going to pass on our stress and our trauma to our kids.

GAVIN: When I was in graduate school at the University of Michigan,

one of my classmates was talking about this idea

called the black-white disparity in preterm birth in low birth weight.

Something I'd never heard about.

And I was shocked at the reality that in any given year,

black women are nearly twice as likely

as their white counterparts

to deliver a low birth weight or preterm infant.

And why that's such a big concern

is that babies born early obviously have higher rates of morbidity and mortality.

When I became a professor here,

I immediately wanted to know what was behind this.

And then, with my own pregnancy,

I was carrying twins, a higher risk pregnancy.

I started thinking about my great grandmother. Um...

She had two sets of twins that both perished before they reached 12 months of age.

It haunts me.

No one has since had twins

until from my great-grandmother to me.

So that was always a story my grandmother told me

that she remembers them, briefly in her life.

She was working out in the field,

so she brought them out in the fields with her.

And she wasn't able to breastfeed them.

So that contributed to their early demise.

Obviously she felt a deep sadness about that,

and my mother repeated that story,

and she, as well as I, felt this deep remorse for the loss of these twins.

My grandmother had undiagnosed depression,

which then contributed to my mother's stress level as well.

And I started thinking about that,

and how that got transmitted to me,

and how I was going to transmit that to the next generation.

It was scary.

I felt like at any point in time,

unfortunately, my children could die in utero.

How I dealt with the anxiety,

was that I would refuse to look at the ultrasound

until my husband told me everything was okay with their heartbeats.

Um, and that's basically how I lived through that pregnancy.

And I think that affected me in my attachment to them

when they were born, initially.

I couldn't change their diapers.

I didn't really want to hold them,

which is probably part of the reason why we had a third child.

Every woman who has a child,

puts on that child her experience.

And so any way that women are treated

is what gets passed down.

Women have borne the burden, the pain,

of thousands of years

where men have treated women badly,

have devalued women.

That devaluation, that pain,

is part of every woman's heritage.

Men took over, being stronger,

and made women believe they were second-class.

And women are second-class in the minds of men to this very day.

You know examples and I know many examples.

Despite our talk about equality, it is an uphill battle.

Thousands and thousands of years, of this toxicity

that is ground into the unconscious

of every person and every woman.

Now, that stuff is what is projected into the new baby.

And what's terrible is the children born now,

have to bear that burden from the past,

and have to bear the burden of current conditions in the world.

MATE: I had this sex trade worker who has died since of HIV,

but I asked her what heroin did for her, and she said,

"The first time I did heroin, it felt like a warm soft hug."

Which is exactly what she would have gotten from her mom,

had her mom not been traumatized herself.

And a guy in his 40s, a big imposing-looking,

muscled, tattooed fellow in rehab,

I asked him what the heroin did for him,

and he said "Doc, I don't know how to tell you this,

"but it's sort of like when you're a kid,

"and you're three years old, and you're sick and you're shivering

"and your mommy puts you on her lap,

"and she wraps you in a warm blanket

"and gives you warm chicken soup,

"that's what the heroin feels like."

What are they talking about?

They're talking about love.

Heroin gives them that feeling of love.

Who wouldn't want that?

The heroin is their attempt

to solve the problem of the absence of love in their lives.

And that of course, again, goes back to early experience.

There's that awareness that we have to get to know ourselves.

But we flee from that kind of knowledge,

and I think we flee from it because there's pain there,

and people don't want to experience pain.

WEINER: I think pharmaceuticals are so prevalent

because people don't know what to do.

The problem is, when you say to somebody,

"Take this drug," what you're really saying is,

"I don't think I can understand you.

"I don't think we can get at your pain,

"I don't think we can understand why you're anxious everyday

"or understand why you're depressed,

"so what I'd like to do is quiet you down.

"I'd like to at least...

"Let's make it feel a little better every day."

Well, then you're stuck.

You have to take a pill the rest of your life.

And most people on medication will say,

"Well, it helped me for so long,

"but, Doctor, I still have nightmares.

"What do I do?

"My relationships still don't go right.

"What do I do?

"I'm still not happy.

"I'm not suicidal. But I'm not happy.

"What do I do?"

When they present this stuff about trauma

and early experience and pain to physicians,

they don't get a lot of arguments,

and I don't get a lot of arguments.

We present the data.

What we get is silence.

A kind of stunned, uncomfortable silence.

This is your last chance.

After this, there is no turning back.

You take the blue pill,

the story ends, you wake up in your bed

and believe whatever you want to believe.

You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland,

and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

WEINER: I think the kind of suffering people,

at least come into the office with,

runs the gamut.

And it really is everything from,

"I can't find the right mate,"

to "My marriage is falling apart,"

to "I don't know what I want to do with my life."

And then of course you have much more severe pathologies.

People can't work,

or they can't go to school,

they can't sustain any kind of meaningful relationship.

And, you know, sometimes they're really on the verge of saying, "I'm done."

InThe Matrix, Morpheus would play the analyst.

What it's really talking about here is the imprint.

It's really saying,

"Listen, each person doesn't realize that they're plugged into their own imprint."

The Matrix is a system, Neo.

That system is our enemy.

WEINER: This is it.

You think you are living your life,

but really you're not.

And what Neo discovers, is that life is a fantasy.

In a way, that's what the power of denial does.

Keeps you from really living your life.

You have to understand,

most of these people are not ready to be unplugged.

And many of them are so inured,

so hopelessly dependent on the system,

that they will fight to protect it.

You've split off your personality.

You've taken on an enormous portion of your mother's.

So it's not really you.

The moment when Neo is unplugged is quite a moment.

I think it's just as terrifying for a patient.

Because they're facing the moment of their initial trauma.

[YELLS]

Okay.

Get my body back into a power plant,

re-insert me into the Matrix, I'll get you what you want.

I think everybody could understand

Cypher's desire to be plugged back in.

Nine hard years, they're running for their lives.

This is a constant battle.

He's saying, "What have I really got?

"Please make me numb again, give me back my fake life."

After nine years, you know what I realize?

[SIGHS]

Ignorance is bliss.

The part of him that can't tolerate it,

that says, "This is too painful, I don't like it," wins.

But we know where he's going back to,

and it's not good-looking.

I think a lot of people consciously want freedom.

They're talking about it all the time.

But if we start to see the reasons that people may talk about it,

but might not either fight for it,

demand it, or even notice when it's chipped away at.

Because there is an idea already embedded that says,

"Take care of me. Take care of me.

"See, if you're free, you won't take care of me.

"I need you to take care of me because I can't handle doing all of this."

BAIL: Civilization is a very thin veneer that everybody wears.

You wipe that off,

everybody's functioning like a baby.

With all these archaic mechanisms,

with all those archaic feelings running rampant.

WEINER: Now, the good news is, life in the pod was nothing.

You thought this would all kill you at the start.

But giving it back or getting rid of it,

unplugging from it, will actually give you a life.

This may be your first chance to know your whole self.

Can you imagine?

But you're talking to a baby.

You're talking to a little baby who's saying, "No, I'll die."

You're not talking to an adult.

An adult might say, "Yeah, I get it, Doctor.

"I'm rooting for you."

But a baby says, "Don't you dare.

"I'll fight you."

InThe Matrix,

there's a whole scene where there's a battle,

and I would say the battle is between Neo and a terrified baby.

Which is, "Are you going to be able to change things?"

Every time a person wants to change something,

the baby that's afraid steps in,

and it says, "I can't change this.

"This saved me.

"This preserved my life.

"You want me to change this? You must be crazy."

And it's not so polite.

That experience is so dreadful,

that anything, any clue,

any hint of an analyst approaching that domain

will send a number of patients scurrying.

Fear of re-experiencing that terrible trauma.

The necessity to wake up is universal.

But what induces sleep

is our vulnerability as fetuses to handle the suffering.

And so that we don't even fault ourselves

for having been asleep, but we do.

We accept that, that's what happened.

When I was 21 and enlisted in the Air Force,

I thought war was exciting.

With all kinds of fantasies built up by movies and books.

The 25th mission,

the target was to hit this jet plane factory deep in Germany.

And over the target, we got hit.

I felt the noise, and I screamed.

It was so painful.

I saw the pilots who were like dolls on the side.

I knew they were dead.

And there was only myself and the engineer,

and he couldn't move.

And I called him a name.

I said, "You son of a bitch! Come on!"

He was frozen.

And then it was too late. I jumped.

His fear overwhelmed him.

I know about fear.

You cannot be in the war without knowing about fear.

One understands why people seek to die,

for example, stand up in a trench

and be shot by the enemy just to get it over.

But I also learned that survival is what people strive for.

Survive.

Survive at any cost.

Do anything to survive.

WEINER: When you see people fight to get their lives,

and you see what human beings are capable of,

I don't think there's anything like it in the whole world.

It's striking

how often I've been told by people with serious illnesses,

and even fatal illnesses,

that this disease was the best thing that ever happened to them.

Now, I don't recommend that way of waking up.

But what they mean is that,

"Having to deal with this disease

"actually woke me up to who I really am,

"and who I've been and what I've not been all my life.

"And it's taught me what life really is all about.

"And that's worth dying for."

WEINER: I think inThe Matrix,

it's very interesting because when Neo finally dies,

what brings him back to life is love.

Well, wait a minute,

love can bring you back from death?

This is very good news.

BAIL: When you com to a point of knowing

what is the cause of all this.

And you know it's your fetal life

where all this desperation, this pain, takes place.

And when you have an answer, like the door opens.

Because one can make sense of it.

One can make absolute sense of all the feelings.

The patient has to come to an emotional understanding

because what is first in a human being is feeling.

The fetus is a feeling entity.

Not a mental entity.

A feeling entity.

Only when compassion is present,

will people allow themselves to see the truth.

Compassion for the fact that unconsciousness is a response.

Because it was too painful to be conscious when we were young.

Not to blame ourselves for what we did as a result of that,

but to be compassionate with ourselves,

not to fault ourselves,

what we did to ourselves or others,

but to be curious as to why we did it.

I read a quote by Maya Angelou.

She said,

"You do the best you can

"until you know better, then you do better."

That's a paraphrase.

You have to be careful how you tell a woman

that what she does impacts her baby

because she can only do what she can do.

I tend to be very analytical and think about things a lot,

and, um, give myself some unneeded anxieties.

HALE: Is this chil going to be healthy?

Is the child going to have

some kind of, you know, developmental disorders,

or be killed at whatever age?

I spent a lot of the pregnancy being very on edge.

ERTEL: The way that we're taught in our society,

we're always second-guessing.

We're looking to books and other people for information

on how to raise our children when it should be,

and it is, an innate knowledge.

Women need to know that babies are strong.

We all spend nearly nine months in this intrauterine life

with this happiness and with these sufferings

and we all have to pass through birth,

which is perhaps one of the hardest labors on this planet.

To be born.

And to give birth.

The birth is a journey of the hero

like The Little Mermaid...

Alice in Wonderland...

and The Matrix.

I remember walking into the clinic on a Monday,

and having nurses' jaws drop.

I was 213 pounds the day before I delivered them.

I started having contractions around 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning.

WILSON: When labor actually started,

all of our children were able to be there for the birth.

It was absolutely insane getting to the hospital.

My feet were hanging out the window, practically.

We arrived, screamed up to the front door.

And then, you know, like, an hour later,

I was ready to push.

Certainly the contractions were intense,

but I can only imagine what it feels like inside.

I was thinking to myself, you know, just breathe.

Just breathe, just breathe.

It's an awful pain, but it brings you ahead.

And with every wave,

you come a little bit nearer to our world.

VERNY: World ecology has to start with womb ecology.

We cannot have peace and good people in the world

without raising peaceful, good children.

And that has to start at conception,

not at birth, but at conception.

The more people really realize all of this,

I think the more thought goes into how we treat

the unborn child, but also how do we treat the mother?

How do we start to make sure we're really making this a world

where we don't have to send so much

very troubling, difficult thoughts and feelings towards our fetuses?

It's our responsibility to make a better job of it

than we have done in the past.

There are too many children who are neglected,

who are born and raised unloved,

and unless this changes,

the world is not going to change.

WEINER: When you start to lift off the damage,

you get to a much more loving state of mind.

And love in that sense is not only a feeling,

it's also a set of actions.

It's also a set of relating.

It's, above all,

a constant seeking to understand the other.

BAIL: When a baby is understood, that baby is loved.

When the mother puts the baby to the breast,

and the baby's hungry, that baby is loved.

When the mother picks the baby up and holds it and pats it

and that's what the baby wanted, that baby is loved.

Being understood is being loved.