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ABSTRACT: Already a British medical missionary and parasitologist, Lake trained in psychiatry. He used LSD from 1954 to 1969, but turned to deep breathing and other approaches. Following pioneers in psychotherapy he facilitated deep regression. By recognizing the original context of a primal memory patients re-integrated the separate memory systems. Lake scientifically defended the feasibility that cell memory could antedate brain memory. Some of his insights into maternal-fetal effects have been corroborated in sociology, criminology, obstetrics and biochemistry. Valuing child-bearers helps their offspring to know they are loved, and so be less prone to depression, compulsions, violence. Coordinating psychotherapy and theology, Lake sought individual and social change.
Lake and his ways
England may boast its great inventors but our establishment is not the most welcoming to their discoveries! No surprise then that Frank Lake's pioneering, in the most sensitive aspect of life psychologically and biologically, has met great resistance in his own country. He would certainly have been more happily received in California or, I feel sure, in Heidelberg.
Frank gave his profoundly loving attention to his patients, and to his studies, but at great cost to himself, and maybe greatest to his family. He described himself as a man who could not give himself in love so decided to barricade him behind books and write a book so large that it needed wheels attached1. He called his key book Tight Corners, words that evoked "memories of a birth in which I fought. . . to win through." Experiencing such English resistance to his new way as if it were his birth process, Lake would push people out of his way. He was as uncompromising with his team as he was dedicated to his patients and to his way of working.
This is the key to Frank's story. He studied exhaustively the "so called 'schizoid personality disorder'. Those who have been transfixed by total anguish of body, mind, spirit and relationships, cannot help resisting the help they request." Lake as a scientist was hard to convince. But by 1966 he acknowledged that his patients were reliving both their birth trauma and their anguish as the baby set aside in a cot, and not being re-bonded with the mother at once after birth. In...