In this podcast episode, Cynthia Marks interviews Jill Demby Guest about her documentary film on Dr. Bernard Bail titled “And Now, Love”. The film delves into Bail's life, from his early years in South Philadelphia to his remarkable career in psychoanalysis. Jill discusses how she was introduced to the project and her subsequent journey into Bail's groundbreaking theory on the Mother’s Imprint. She recounts Bail's harrowing experiences as a radar navigator during World War II and his transformation from a soldier to a healer, inspired by his relationship with a German nurse named Irmgard during the war. The interview highlights Bail's unique contributions to psychoanalysis, his struggles against traditional psychoanalytic institutions, and his focus on the unconscious impacts of prenatal and early life experiences. Jill shares how her work on the documentary not only illuminated Bail's theories but also provided personal insights into her own life and relationships.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:04):
Hello, I'm Cynthia Marks.
I head up the Holistic
Psychoanalysis Foundationestablished by my late husband, Dr.
Bernard Vail.
Welcome to And Now, Love.
Jill Demby Guest is our guest today.
We're very lucky.
She has had a lifelong passionfor biographical documentaries
(00:27):
and has had a career rich in endeavors
as a writer, producer and director.
And she's not even done yet.
She has won several awards, three of them
being for the documentary and now Love.
And we'll tell you how to get therewhen we're finished with this podcast.
Of course, this great filmis very meaningful to me as it is about
(00:49):
Bernard, his life's work and his theory
during the course of research and filming.
I got to know Jill very welland now consider her a dear friend.
Jill is here to tell usabout her experiences with Dr.
Bail as she truly dovedeeply into his life
in order to gleanhow he came to his discoveries.
(01:12):
So welcome, Jill.
Thank you very much for being here today.
My pleasure.
You woman of major amounts of informationand knowledge and a passion
about what you discovered throughthe course of working on this film.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Let's just start with how you cameto find out about this project.
(01:33):
I came to find out about this projectthrough another psychiatrist
who I knewwho happened to be a protege of Dr.
Bail, who contacted me and said, you know,they're trying to do
a documentary on my, you know, mentor whojust an amazing guy who discovered this
really groundbreaking theoryabout the mother's imprint.
So you didn't know about.I knew nothing about Dr. Bail.
(01:55):
I mean, I'd been in therapy in my life,but I had never been in psychoanalysis,
so I didn't know.
But he said, I don't know.
I just have a vibethat this would be the right fit for you.
And he said,Why don't you read Dr. Bail's book?
You know, read Armed GuardsFlute his memoir, and then read
the Mothers Imprint bookand let me know what you think.
So I read Armed Guardsflute, his memoir first.
(02:17):
And I went crazy for it.
I thought, this man has a story worthtelling and I can get into why that was.
But not only was he an eminentpsychoanalysts psychiatrist
in Beverly Hills for years,but his back story
was thathe was a poor kid from South Philadelphia
(02:37):
who, you know, made his way into the Armyat an early age
and became a lead radar navigator in WorldWar Two,
fighting the Nazisas a young Jew from Philadelphia.
You know, he was all about oppressionand fighting oppression even back then.
So he became thislead radar navigator in World War Two
and was he flew was 25 missions in Europe.
(03:02):
And you're really only supposed to do 25.
Right.
So that that seems to be a numberthat everyone says 25.
And he was shot down.
I mean, he had several mishaps.
Third mission, shot down, survived,got lost over Iceland at one point
and had an intuitionthat he should go in a certain direction,
even though all systems were failingand seemed to come out of it
(03:25):
at the right place.
Then on the 25th mission,which is a key mission for so many people,
he was shot down by the Nazis and it wastowards the end of the war March 1945.
The Germans kind of knewthey were kind of losing the war.
Thank God he didn't get shot and killed.
But he was able to bail out of the plane
and was taken to a hospitalin Uppingham, Germany, for.
(03:47):
German officers. By German officers.
And he was taken to hospital,didn't know if he was going to be killed.
What they were going to do to himor were they going to ship him
east, was going to end up in concentrationcamp somewhere?
He had no idea.
By some stroke of good luck,which he had a lot in his life,
he was treated by a German nursewho fell in love with him, just wild.
(04:10):
So he fell in love
with this woman, Irmgard,a young German girl who also spoke English
through this series of clandestinelove letters that they had back and forth
in his hospital room.
And it was a big relationshipover a short period of time.
A big, big relationship,because you imagine
someonewho was in such a vulnerable state.
(04:32):
I mean, when they would come in the roomto give him a shot,
he didn't knowif they were about to kill him.
He didn't knowif he's going to be poisoned.
He had no idea. Every day could be his.
Every day could be his last.
And then there was peopledying all around him.
So it was just his colleagues.
Other fliers were dying all around him.
And he he had this lucky charmof this nurse, Irmgard,
(04:54):
who would leave himglasses of wine at night,
and he would respondto her notes in the bathroom because,
you know, in a secret way, hide thembecause no one could find them.
But what she did was she, as I was saying,introduce him to the world of women
in a way he had never experienced before,like what he called the divine feminine.
What that meant was so many of the thingsthat she wrote in this letter
(05:18):
were about being ableto kind of save yourself through love.
You know, that love kind of trumpedeverything that we all kind of
had one heart and it didn't matterif she was the enemy or not.
Was that at first just sort of an alienunapproachable concept for him?
Very much so, because I think, you know,he was a scrapper.
(05:39):
I mean, he was from Philadelphia.
He was just getting by. Yes.
Getting by, you know, going throughthe Depression, having a tough time.
He knew how to scrap.
You know, he, you know, got nickelsfor making phone calls for people.
As a young kid, he.
Would wait around at the drugstore
and the phone would ringand then he'd go tell Mrs.
Schwartz. It was the corner candy store.
(05:59):
And the owner of the Candy store said,Hey, I'll give you a nickel every time.
You know, you tell Mr. Schwartzso-and-so is on the line.
So he was making all this money.
And and did that mean that Mrs. Schwartzhad to come to the candy store?
Yeah. Mrs. Schwartz had to come tothe can to go get Mr.
Schwartz on the hill.
Tell her to come down.My uncle's on the phone.
So he did that.
And then he would make all these nickels,and he'd take himself
(06:21):
to the movie theater.
And he in the movie theater, he'dsee a whole other side of life.
All these actors with beautiful,bespoke suits on and a life
that he had no ideathat he could attain at the time.
But these were models to him, all theseactors and the suits and the costumes.
And he just was crazy for it.
(06:41):
I wonder,did he put himself in those shoes,
you know, in Ryan's thinkingand he would be me. Yeah.
Because then he put it outin front of himself
that, you know,those are the lives I want to live.
And then he took himselfto see Frank Sinatra, traveled by foot
through the snow on the moneyhe would make from the candy store.
That's such a unique desire for someonein his position and at his age.
(07:03):
Right.
I mean, I think he was like, I don't know,seven, eight, nine years old.
So then he had this short period of time
with this fabulous woman, Irmgard Ryan.
And you were reading all of this in his.
I was reading it in his book, yeah.
And so then they they had to in theirrelationship because the war ended.
Exactly.
Well, the interesting thingreading that in the book, when I first
(07:24):
read the book,I thought when I read that part,
I read other parts and I thought,this is a great movie.
But when I read the part about Irmgard,I thought, okay, this is this is a film.
Here'sthis guy frightened in a hospital room
in Nazi Germany,not knowing if he's going to live or die.
When that door opened, he had no idea.
(07:45):
He's in this dark roomshivering, hurt, had shells in his head.
And he's a. Jew and a Jew.
Right When that door openedand a burst of light there was his savior.
He didn't know that at the time,but that was kind of the key
image of like, this has to be a film.
So that's a lot.
And that's the doorway.
And that's.
(08:05):
We recreated the hospital room.
Yeah, the German hospital room.
And this experiencethen sort of became the jumping off point
for the rest of his life.
Absolutely.
It steered him in a directionthat he had no intention of going in.
Absolutely.Because he had studied to be a teacher.
I mean, that's what he started to do.
His parents said, you know, go to school.
(08:26):
You're not going to be a carpenter.
Are like your father, you know.
His mother was very strong and said,no way are you going to be doing that?
You're going to college.
But then he joined the Army,but he was starting to study
to get a degree in educationbecause he was really smart.
So what happened after that?
This experience in the war
was so transformativeand really horrifying in so many ways.
(08:47):
He thought, How are we stillkilling people so brutally?
He said, I don't want to be a killer.
I want to be a healer.
And part of that camethrough his relationship with Irmgard,
who had helped save him and heal him.
He was very fortunate.
And he says really poignantlyat some point in the film,
he says, A lot of people helped mein my life, even the enemy.
(09:11):
So he started to look at people as people,not as enemies.
Right. I guess we're all wounded.
We all hold onto.
We're all coming from our imprint, Right.
And in that way, we are on some level,all the same.
Right.
Those were things about himthat were very compelling.
(09:31):
And the other thing,I mean, there are so many other things,
but the other thing ishe was such a disrupt her even early on
and he didn't know it was disruption,but he had a way
to follow his ownwhat he calls North Star.
And he did that early on.
He was Jewish,but his parents didn't really practice
Judaism because so much of itwhen you came to this country
(09:53):
as immigrants back then wereyou were an American first.
You were so happy to be an Americanand not have to run from shtetl to shtetl
that American first, Jewish second.
So it was an assimilation process.
And were people then,even though they had made their way
to the United States,kind of inclined to keep the fact
(10:16):
that they were Jews sort of on the downlow just to protect themselves.
Many people did do that.
I know in the assimilation processbecause they changed their names.
Sure. When they came over,a lot of them changed their names.
They didn't want to be identifiedas Jewish because there was
a lot of anti-Semitism even in Americaafter World War Two as well.
And so this North Starthat he found himself following at
(10:39):
starting at a very young age,though, was an unconscious thing.
Very much. So.
Make a point of I'mdoing this different thing.
He just was led to it. Right?
He was he would pass at a local synagogue.
And I think he would wonder, whatwhat is that?
And he started taking classes on his ownat a local Philadelphia synagogue.
And he got very,very interested in the religion
(11:02):
and the idea of God and spirituality.
And then he came upon
Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat,which was his favorite story in the Bible.
And it was all about dreams,
which really kind of started to foretellhis future unconsciously at that point.
But he was leading towards that.
And of course, he was an expert dreamer,now analyst.
(11:22):
Yes. In his career.
But there you seebits of it early on. Yeah.
As a young child,just being so overcome with this idea
of Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoatand Dream interpreter.
What's.What is that? You know, and. Right.
And then he becamethe best at that, right?
And he didn't know that's what he would bewhen he came out of the war,
(11:43):
because, you know, everyone said,you hanging finish your education degree
and you got to do thatand you go back to school and you don't.
Aspire to be Jonah's teacher.
That's that top level you need to get to.
Like his mother would always say to him,which was really funny,
he says, You can fly,but don't fly too high.
And what he said is just, you know,he had the experience in the war
(12:06):
of being a leader because he was a leadradar navigator, which was a big job.
And what led him to chooseto join the Army.
He knew he was going to get draftedat some point,
so he figured,why don't I pick what I want to be in and.
Figure out a way to make my own choice?
I'm too littleto be on the ground or something.
He didn't see himself, him as a small guy,didn't see himself on the ground forces.
(12:27):
So he thought,why don't I learn to be a flier?
He got trained.
He got into a special training programto become a lead radar navigator,
and that's what he did.
And there were very, very.
Few and there were veryfew of them at the time.
So he was one of one of the few.
So there's a lot more to this storyabout what happens, you know,
(12:47):
once he's in the psychoanalytic fieldand how he needs
to become a rebelin order to support his case and so forth.
But there was so much information
even before you get to the placewhere you need to understand his theory.
Absolutely.
And then the main thing about Dr.
Bail is his theory.
How were you able to
(13:08):
maneuver through this and tieall the bits and pieces together?
Well, you know, it's interesting.
In the creative processof putting together something like this,
it is kind of a creative chaos in a waywhere you've got all these bits and pieces
and you figure, how are you goingto make this thematically work throughout?
And I, I started to see his lifelike a symphony.
(13:30):
Everything is kind of musical to me andthere's peaks and valleys and crescendos
and fast periods and slow periods,and his life was very much like that.
But I kind of start at the beginning
and I thought, how are these early thingsimpacting his later life?
Is there a thread there?
And there was this threadabout following intuition
(13:50):
and following my North Star,and then the dreams following
what your dreams are tellingyou and believing that your unconscious
will guide you to the right decisionsand the right place.
And I think you wanted us to knowthat he had several
near-death experiences
that caused him to think,There's a reason I'm here.
(14:12):
It's bigger than my own life.
Absolutely.
And that was one of the thingsthat interested me about doing a film
about him, which was exactly that pointthat he had come near death several times.
And I wondered, there's so many peoplethat have had that experience,
like how do people navigate their livesafter that?
And the way he navigatedhis life was so inspiring
(14:34):
because he really was dedicatedto life is more than me.
And he kept going back towhen he was in the war
and he was responsible for all these menthat every decision he made
as a leader impacted everyone else.
And so he followed that line of thinkingand an action
(14:55):
in manifesting the kind of lifehe had where he would be
somehow impacting and helping to transform
the lives of the people that he was ableto be in touch with and touch.
So that was an enlightening.
And here he wassaving the lives of these men.
Yes, in war.
And then he choosesto save the lives of people in peace.
(15:18):
He would say, you know, there's a warinside ourselves, that everyone has
some sort of war inside themselvesand that on the planet today,
we're actually each personinternally is fighting those wars.
And that how important that is.
And so becoming a psychiatristand psychoanalyst,
he could see that in everybody.
(15:38):
And then developing his theorylater on was one of the keys
to how people could unlock the warswithin themselves.
And really what's going on insideour selves is
what's happening out in the world.
What happens in our in our own lives
is the physical manifestationof what's happening.
Right. In the worldwhere you see wars everywhere. I mean.
And we just accept that this is how we.
(15:58):
We accept round in.
The world race war, right?
And this is how we move around internallywhere we're fighting against ourselves.
Right.
And there's resistance to peaceand it's unconscious most of the times.
Because if everyone could have peaceall the time, well,
then why wouldn't they?
And there's something blockingor having us
(16:19):
resistthe light that always wants to come in.
Because even with all the wars, you know,the light is still somehow
overshadowing in other places in the worldwhere there aren't wars.
Not perfect, perhaps, but a start.
A start when working on this film.
And you were paying attentionto this theory because you were going
(16:42):
to be describing this theory,how hard was it to get a grasp on.
It was it was difficult to get a grasp on,
but I knew I had to make it in a waythat laymen could understand it.
And I really do love doing that.
That's probably my sweet spot is
is really sort of deconstructingdifficult material
and making it palatable and understandableto people who don't understand it.
(17:08):
So I just went down a lot of pathsinterviewing neuroscientists.
And what did, even though they made nothave known his theory, they knew
pieces of the theory like neuroscientistswho study epigenetics,
where Bernard would say his theoryisn't exactly epigenetics.
It was as close as I could get.
Can you share with us laypeoplewhat you're epigenetics is?
(17:31):
Epigenetics are part of your genesthat can either get expressed
or not expressed.
Say you have parents who were once analcoholic, once a drug addict on for it.
You know, if that happenedthat you could have a predisposition.
Genetic li to that.
And depending on your nature nurtureenvironment as you grow up,
(17:52):
those genes may or may not get expressed.
So there's there's a certain amountof feelings that are affecting your genes.
Absolutely.
And as Bernard talked about,I mean, these are all the neuroscientists
that I talked to were in the realmof what happens in utero as well.
On a scientific level.
(18:13):
While Bernard's theoryis not a hard science,
part of it is applicable,His was more in the realm of feelings
and energies passing between people,which is also part
of the in utero situation that gets passedand get passed down to the fetus.
Nicotine, drugs,feelings, fear, all of that.
(18:36):
For some reason, it's easy for us to thinkthat drugs and nicotine get passed down.
Sure, harder to grasp,you know, a sense of sadness
being passed down, but just as valid.
Absolutely.
I mean,
especially there's been a lot of studiesabout it, especially during World War Two.
You had the famineand how that affected births later.
(18:57):
You know, there's big studies on that.
There's a lot of studies
about the in uteropassing down of transgenerational trauma,
especially when you think about in Europeat the time, people
running from place to place,women were pregnant, carrying babies.
They didn't know if they're going toa concentration camp or where, you know,
even if there were hidden somewhere,there was intense fear going on.
(19:19):
So bearing the burdens of the mother post
natal or the trauma that Bernardwas dealing with.
And interestingly enough,I think the clientele he probably had then
had a lot of parentswho were in the camps or in the war,
and so oftenthe parents didn't talk about it,
but they lived in a kind of fearthat was kind of passed down.
(19:42):
In so many instancesthat and other terrible situations
that happen around the planet,there's there's no room to talk about it.
It's just too frightening.
And I think as parents, we don't
we think we want to protect our childrenfrom those things,
but meanwhile, we've alreadygiven it to them unconsciously.
That's absolutely true.
Yeah.
(20:02):
You spent a ton of time with Bernard.
How did you find him?
Was he easy to talk to?Was he intimidating?
Was he interestedin answering all of your questions?
Well, it's interesting.
When I first met him to talk to himabout the project, he was gruff.
He was kind of a toughie.
Why do you want to do this?
And you know thatand not so much on the second meeting.
(20:24):
And then beforeI decided to commit to the project,
I really wanted to talk to himwithout a camera, which I tend to do.
So I think I spent 20 hours with himand you guys, you know, just recording
audio and I wanted to get a feel of himand what his personality was like.
And he did open up he.
(20:44):
And he did open up and he was funny.
And that's that's the thingthat really made it for me because he was
he was an elderly man.
He was 95,I think, when I started talking to him.
I think so. And he was cogent and funny.
And and he spoke in a waythat not many people spoke.
He had a beautiful sense of the language.
(21:06):
gorgeous. And words.
And and he washe was a kind of romantic guy.
I think that you and he began to share
where you had common groundlike music and theater.
And he he loved that.
And he sort of felt a warm connectionwith you, the.
Great American Songbook and Frank
Sinatra and certain songswe we really liked together.
(21:29):
Was it easy for him to share the details
of his theory, of hisof his life with you?
I feel like it was.
It seemed like it was easy for himto share those details with me
because he was always happyto talk about the imprint and the theory
and the dream interpretationsand how that fed into it.
So yeah, he he would talk about that.
(21:50):
I see this in the film.
So he he shared with you sort of his ownimprint too.
I mean, through this process,
he discovered the imprintthat he was given by his mother.
I think he, over his lifetime,continued to deal with that, as we all do,
you know, sort of chip away at itand you remove some trash
out of the waste bin,but you never get to all of it.
(22:12):
You see it when it comes upand maybe you figure out how to, like,
tamp it down a little bit.
What was his imprint?
When I gleaned that reallythe film ended up
being about his imprintand almost his removal of that imprint
that his whole lifestory was really about.
His own imprint was pretty fascinating.
(22:35):
And I didn't get that till later
because his mother and fatherhad a tough relationship.
You know, they're fighting all the time.
And and in the film,
at some point he goes, they were fightingand I just wish they would shut up.
You know, she had had a lovebefore the man she married in Russia.
She was madly in love.
And then she had to leave Russia
(22:56):
and she was in an arranged marriagepretty much with her husband.
And they had Bernard.
And so she was yearning.
She was always yearning for a lostlove and.
Probably a little pissed.
Off and pissed offkid had a relationship before. Irmgard But
it wasn't the kind of relationshipthat he had with Irmgard.
And I think when he left the war,when they parted,
(23:20):
he never got Irmgard address, which stillthat was the one thing
that just fascinated methat I could never understand, right?
It seems like such a shock.
So he was never able to really find her.
And that seems clear to younow, that didn't happen.
Exactly, because. To be love. Right?
He didn't feel like he could havethat kind of love, which was such a big,
(23:44):
all encompassing love that he didn'tfeel like he was worthy of that.
He did marry and then had two children,
then later divorced,but then tried to find Irmgard again.
And there was he was already a verysuccessful psychoanalyst at that point.
And he was going back to Hamburg, Germany,
where there was an internationalpsychoanalytic convention,
(24:07):
and he thought he would meet up with her,you know, after his divorce.
That kind of fantasy of this, didI miss the love of my life?
Could this come back?
Boy, that kind of yearning, the.
Yearning was constant.So it was not to be.
And it was the thing in his therapiesthat never could get sorted out.
I mean, and that was the questionI think I was always asking him,
(24:29):
what was the problem with your therapist?
And well,they could never really drill down.
They could really never get to it.
And I was like, why have you, you know,And finally he met you.
And I think that becamethe love of his life.
That was the gift we gave each other.
That was the gift, right?
So he did say to me that in his therapyhe was with these fabulous analysts.
(24:54):
Anybody would just be thrilledto have their time and knowledge.
And he was, too.
But he said, you know, I don't know.
It's justwe never got into the unconscious.
We had these unbilled, perceivableintellectual conversations back and forth.
And I always came away wanting to go back,
but always forever unsettled.
(25:17):
I'm not getting anywhere.
And if I'm not getting anywhere,how am I getting my patients somewhere?
I think he spoke to youabout just giving up on all known methods.
Can you talk about that. A little bit?
Yes, He did say thathe wasn't getting anywhere.
I mean, he'd given up the Freudian route.
He'd given up the clinic and route,pretty much which
(25:37):
all the institutewas taking that on as well.
The Institute of Psychoanalysis in L.A..
And the clinic and Route would take peopleback further than the Freudian right
route. But.
But not back in the beginning.
Yeah,the cleaning room would take them back
to maybe age two or maybe age one one.
I'm not totally clear on that.
But further back than Freud.
(25:58):
And he said, No, no, no,this has to go back further.
So that's when he realizedhe just wasn't getting any help.
There was something pre-birththat was being affected.
So that's when hehe started to really come from nothing.
You know, I think I don't knowwhether he took a break.
I think he did,because he had been in that feud
(26:21):
with the psychoanalytic institute.
And that was because.
Because the psychoanalytic Institutewas very
their minds were very shut downon letting new ideas in.
Not just his.
Not just his,but the entire institute was Freud bound.
So it was very hard to exploreanything new.
(26:42):
And so new people coming to the field
were kind of obligatedto that Freudian route
if they were going to make any headwayat all.
To get any respect, to get training,the training that they desperately wanted.
Had to be down that road.
Had to be down that road.
So it was like a tight knitsituation there.
And he was already in the community,but now starting to come up
(27:04):
with different ideas
and wanting to share those because he feltlike he was on to something.
So when he started sharing his new ideas,
no one was interestedand they were really shutting him down.
In a big way.
To shut him down in a big way,got rid of them,
got rid of him as a training analyst,you know.
So how did he manage to have all these
(27:24):
patients that were still interestedin working with him?
Well, I think that he must to havethe patients still want to work with him.
I think he must have gotten somewherewith them,
for them to have the loyaltyand the confidence
to continue, because psychotherapy,psychoanalysis is a very
you put yourselfin a very vulnerable position.
(27:47):
So they must have felt safe with him,which is a huge thing
in any client therapist relationship.
And also he loved people so much.
People would feelthat he had their best interests at heart.
So I think they felt thatand so they would continue.
I look back on some of his old calendarsand date books, and it's just filled
(28:10):
day after day, you know, ten, 12
patients a day, five days a week.
So there were clearlya lot of people who were being helped
or who were intriguedby the possibility of the help
that they could get,whether they made it or struggled.
But amazing that that many peoplefound their comfort zone with his theory.
(28:32):
Absolutely true.
And so he, as I understandit, just started
listening to the dreams of his patientsjust one after the next.
Over time, thousands of dreams.
And it's right to saythat he eventually saw a pattern
and people were making commentsabout their moms,
(28:53):
about their upbringing,about what life was like as a baby,
which he then was able to take backbefore they were born.
The one thing that stands out for meis when he it was a pivotal moment
in a session where he was listeningto the dreams of everyone, of course.
But a woman had come in with a new babyand he realized
(29:14):
if the mother was upset,the baby was upset.
And he started to make this connectionlike, there's something in there
that he started tothen grow his theory from that.
I mean, it wasn'tthe only session he had like that.
But but that's an moment and it was
as if soothingthe mother would soothe the baby.
(29:35):
Right? Exactly.
That gives me goose bumps. I know.
It still gives me goose bumps becauseyou think about that and it's like.
I know because we're so quickor maybe we're not even thinking about it.
To dismiss those kinds of connections,really,
that that that sort of umbilical corddoesn't go away, right?
It doesn't go away.
I mean, in terms of his therapeuticunderpinnings when he talks about
(30:01):
whatever blocks you're experiencingin life, whether, I'm not lovable enough
or I'm not able to do thisor that or whatever, I can't love
whatever you're feeling,that those were the burdens handed
down to you in utero through your mother.
Her feelings were coming down to you.
And it's you know, like you also said,it's not people always ask,
is it just the mother?
And of course, there's father involvedand there's nature and nurture
(30:25):
what environment you're grown up in,and that can affect everything.
But he he always said that
everyone has a traumato a greater or lesser degree.
And if you just startasking questions of people,
you'll find out pretty quicklywhat that is.
Even as a layperson, if you start thinkingabout your dreams and writing them down
(30:46):
and thinking about the peoplein your dreams or the activities
in your dreams and relate them back to howyou live your life, you'll start to see
some glimpses of what you've been carryingaround in terms of trauma, right?
Like you said, you know, the dreamsor the railroad to the unconscious.
In getting through all of thiswith Bernard and and really understanding
(31:10):
the imprint, did that affectthe way you live your life?
It did in a way in that I was workingwith my daughter, who worked on the film
with me a little bit,and I saw our relationship more clearly.
In what way? What do you.
I thought that I could see how ways that I
navigate life, my shortcuts or whatever,
(31:32):
a certain anxietiesthat they would be present in her to, too.
And you two spent a lot of time.
We spent a lot of time together. Yeah.
And we we get along really well.
But but Iwhen I look back on my own childhood,
in my own mother, I felt once
I learned about his theory, I could seevery clearly not I couldn't see.
(31:53):
I could feel very clearlymy mother's imprint on me,
which is really that I'm always tryingto make the 801 train to New York.
You know, there's my mother,like just shooting ahead
of working woman in New York in thein the fifties.
You know.
Tell me a couple of ways
that that sort of presented itself toyou are some some examples of yeah,
(32:15):
I see I'm doing that thingand I'm not happy doing that thing.
Yeah,I have situations where my mother was
very kind of high strung and I willI will get like that.
And when you're in those moments,whatever they are, can you catch yourself
and say, Ah, this might not be my trueself, this could be my imprint?
(32:36):
Well, when I'm in those moments, let's sayI have a boss who was kind of difficult
and then I would think it might be,you know,
kind of my brothercriticizing me or something.
I can catch it if it's not too intense.
Depends on the trigger.
But yeah, I can look at it.
Which I think for a lot of us, most of us,we aren't going to have access
(32:57):
to people like Dr.
Weiner or the few peoplewho get to practices this fabulous mode.
So I think we have to be curiousabout this work and read Dr.
Bails books and essaysand watch your great film.
I mean, all of those will help us kind of
come to a pathwhere we can start to consider things.
(33:18):
And I hope that this curiosity,you know, sort of expands
and we share with our friendsand neighbors.
I think that was really tellingafter the film
when we would have all these screeningsat different places and libraries
and universities and Holocaust centers
(33:39):
that the Q and A's at the endreally told me everything.
So many people at the end were crying.
And it wasn't.
Sometimes it was sadness, crying,but some times it was relief, crying like
people would come up to me or to himand say, I understand my life
for the first time.
So to me that's an important aspect of
(33:59):
whether you can afford psychoanalysisor this kind of
theoretical insight into your life
that in a way just having thatand saying to your therapist, Hey,
I saw this film and they talked about thiswhen it had such an effect on me
viscerally.
And that's where it is.It's in your feelings.
(34:20):
And that's what Dr. Bail always said.
It's about feelings or everything.
And so if you get in touch with that,
just from seeing a film,you might want to explore further.
Yeah. So the curiosity is there.
If people will sit and watchand hear the story.
Through Dr. Bails life.
You say you saw this threadconnecting all of these things
(34:44):
and you, after the factin a way discovered that really
this film was about himdealing with his imprint.
So I'm guessing you never had anopportunity to talk with him about that?
No, I did, actually.
I absolutely talked to him about thatfact, because as we were getting
so starting
to get towards the end of the film,I said to him, I really feel like this
(35:06):
film is like
the arc of your whole imprint,that you're working out your imprint here.
And he agreed he's he didn't say yes,but he said,
Yeah, I think that that is a possibility.
But that's what it felt like to me,that he was really working out his own
print imprint in his life and in his work,which was pretty astonishing.
(35:27):
The story of Bernard
parachuting out of this planethat had been shot out of the sky
and how he made it to the hospitalis unbelievable and terrifying.
Share with us a little bit about that.
Well, when he was shotout of the plane on his 21st
mission, that was the timethey were shooting down Airman.
(35:49):
Like target practice.
Like target practice. Yeah,but he made it.
And he had to take off those dog tags.
That's right?
He had to take off his dog tagsbecause he was Jewish.
So the presence of mind to do thatwhile you're bailing out of a plane.
And being shot at and.
Being shot at takesa lot of presence of mind and courage
(36:09):
to do it, because you take that offand you have no idea.
Pretty much.
I mean, I guess he had a thingthat said Bernard Bail on him.
But and then, I mean, you saw it.
How am I going to make it out of here?
You know, he was in a field somewhere.
I made it to the earth.
Yeah, I made it to Earth. And now what?
And I think he was takenin by a family overnight
and then taken to a train station.
(36:31):
And where's that train going?Yeah, Stuttgart, Germany.
Taken to a train stationThere. And everyone's yelling.
Everyone's yelling and throwing rocks.
And I still feel likehe was born under a lucky star,
because even at that point,people were throwing rocks at him.
There was a German airman on the platformand he broke up the crowd.
(36:52):
Gosh. Stroke of luck.He broke up the crowd.
And in in the film know, Bernard said,I saluted him
because that's where it's a policyamong airmen.
You know, that's what you doeven though they're the enemy.
And that is such a poignant moment.
Also another kind of life saving moment
where he was just kind ofthere was something him.
(37:15):
So great,so perfect that he eventually listened
to all of those bitsthat were guiding him. Right.
And that he strung those together.
Right. And found his path on you do.
So that train
then eventually took him to the hospitalwhere I spoke about right guard.
And so that took him to the hospital.
And then he had the experience thereand was saved by the nurse pretty much.
(37:38):
But then in the film,
I thought it would be an interesting ideato take him back to Germany.
Was he pretty receptive to that?
Was very receptive to itbecause he was going to Europe.
So I said, You guys are going to Europe.
How about we go back to Germany,to the room You were incarcerated in?
And he thought it was a good idea.
So we went to Germanyand took him back to the room.
(38:01):
Boy, the anticipation of that.
Moment and well, one of the interestingthings is when I was researching
the room that he was incarceratedin, we had a German team
helping us with locationsand scouting from the book.
You know, we thought it was room number102 or something, the description of it.
And I was asking, Bernard, isit is it this room or that room?
(38:23):
And he would tell me.
So we scouted a few rooms there andwe picked one room that we thought it was.
But when we got him to Germany
and he walked up the stepsinto the hallway, the corridor
where those rooms were, it was likehe was like a sniffing dog.
And he, you know, because he couldn't seevery well at that point.
He had real macular.
(38:43):
I think degeneration very hardfor him to see,
but it was like he had a nose for it.
He just went down the hall.
We were going to go into this roomto the right.
He went down the hall,felt his way to a door,
opened the door and said,This is the room. Wow.
It's like he sniffed it out.
And we were like, you know, it was justlike this moment of, like, chills.
(39:05):
That trip,I think, really affected him good and bad.
I think terms of the, let's say,the imprint,
he had been traumatizedreally from where to drop the bombs.
So he knew he was stepping on ground,
where he basically had been in chargeof killing people.
So he was now on German ground.
(39:27):
He hadn't been there in 71 yearsand it was very difficult.
So I thinkwhile the German people were fantastic.
They were unbelievable.
Loving and welcoming.
It was very healing. Yes.
And they askedso many great questions. Right.
And they asked questions to him.
And he was so open and as were they.
(39:50):
So that was a real turnaround.
I mean, to go back to a placewhere you almost died
and relive it in a waythat the world has changed.
What a great thing to be touched by. Yeah.
After all of the experienceshe'd had over those 70 years.
Absolutely.
And he was talking about Irmgard, too,while we were there.
(40:11):
And we went outsideand he was talking about the room
and how he had survived and how lucky was,and then how Irmgard had been this gift.
And then as he was talking,church Bails started ringing
and he said, She's here,you know, she's here with me.
Who could have foretold, right?
(40:31):
That thing which once. Again, and.
How he was kind of fortunatein certain ways.
But a connection to his unconsciousthat I don't know somehow
even presents itself in the real world.
Yeah, it's like he brought it on.
It's likehe could foretell these situations almost.
We are so fortunate to have had this man
(40:52):
walk this planetand we have so much to learn from him.
Still,I feel like we need to carry this on. And.
And I so appreciate your film and now love
and there is a website and now love.
The movie and now love the movie. Dot com.
And if you go to our web siteand now love dot com,
(41:15):
we will connect you to the movie,which is fabulous.
And we just touched on elements and.
Absolutely the movie is on Amazonand Apple TV and a host of other.
To access. Very easy to access.
I know this story of coursebut it was really terrific for me
to kind of relive thisand talk about it with you
(41:35):
because you know more than anyoneabout all things
Bernard and I can't thank you enoughfor being here and sharing.
And if you have questions about thisor questions for Jill,
I'm speaking on your hack.
You can ask us and we'll answer.
I thank you so much for joining us todayand we'll see you next time.
Bye for now. Thank you.
Hello, I'm Cynthia Marks.
I head up the Holistic
Psychoanalysis Foundationestablished by my late husband, Dr.
Bernard Vail.
Welcome to And Now, Love.
Jill Demby Guest is our guest today.
We're very lucky.
She has had a lifelong passionfor biographical documentaries
(00:27):
and has had a career rich in endeavors
as a writer, producer and director.
And she's not even done yet.
She has won several awards, three of them
being for the documentary and now Love.
And we'll tell you how to get therewhen we're finished with this podcast.
Of course, this great filmis very meaningful to me as it is about
(00:49):
Bernard, his life's work and his theory
during the course of research and filming.
I got to know Jill very welland now consider her a dear friend.
Jill is here to tell usabout her experiences with Dr.
Bail as she truly dovedeeply into his life
in order to gleanhow he came to his discoveries.
(01:12):
So welcome, Jill.
Thank you very much for being here today.
My pleasure.
You woman of major amounts of informationand knowledge and a passion
about what you discovered throughthe course of working on this film.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Let's just start with how you cameto find out about this project.
(01:33):
I came to find out about this projectthrough another psychiatrist
who I knewwho happened to be a protege of Dr.
Bail, who contacted me and said, you know,they're trying to do
a documentary on my, you know, mentor whojust an amazing guy who discovered this
really groundbreaking theoryabout the mother's imprint.
So you didn't know about.I knew nothing about Dr. Bail.
(01:55):
I mean, I'd been in therapy in my life,but I had never been in psychoanalysis,
so I didn't know.
But he said, I don't know.
I just have a vibethat this would be the right fit for you.
And he said,Why don't you read Dr. Bail's book?
You know, read Armed GuardsFlute his memoir, and then read
the Mothers Imprint bookand let me know what you think.
So I read Armed Guardsflute, his memoir first.
(02:17):
And I went crazy for it.
I thought, this man has a story worthtelling and I can get into why that was.
But not only was he an eminentpsychoanalysts psychiatrist
in Beverly Hills for years,but his back story
was thathe was a poor kid from South Philadelphia
(02:37):
who, you know, made his way into the Armyat an early age
and became a lead radar navigator in WorldWar Two,
fighting the Nazisas a young Jew from Philadelphia.
You know, he was all about oppressionand fighting oppression even back then.
So he became thislead radar navigator in World War Two
and was he flew was 25 missions in Europe.
(03:02):
And you're really only supposed to do 25.
Right.
So that that seems to be a numberthat everyone says 25.
And he was shot down.
I mean, he had several mishaps.
Third mission, shot down, survived,got lost over Iceland at one point
and had an intuitionthat he should go in a certain direction,
even though all systems were failingand seemed to come out of it
(03:25):
at the right place.
Then on the 25th mission,which is a key mission for so many people,
he was shot down by the Nazis and it wastowards the end of the war March 1945.
The Germans kind of knewthey were kind of losing the war.
Thank God he didn't get shot and killed.
But he was able to bail out of the plane
and was taken to a hospitalin Uppingham, Germany, for.
(03:47):
German officers. By German officers.
And he was taken to hospital,didn't know if he was going to be killed.
What they were going to do to himor were they going to ship him
east, was going to end up in concentrationcamp somewhere?
He had no idea.
By some stroke of good luck,which he had a lot in his life,
he was treated by a German nursewho fell in love with him, just wild.
(04:10):
So he fell in love
with this woman, Irmgard,a young German girl who also spoke English
through this series of clandestinelove letters that they had back and forth
in his hospital room.
And it was a big relationshipover a short period of time.
A big, big relationship,because you imagine
someonewho was in such a vulnerable state.
(04:32):
I mean, when they would come in the roomto give him a shot,
he didn't knowif they were about to kill him.
He didn't knowif he's going to be poisoned.
He had no idea. Every day could be his.
Every day could be his last.
And then there was peopledying all around him.
So it was just his colleagues.
Other fliers were dying all around him.
And he he had this lucky charmof this nurse, Irmgard,
(04:54):
who would leave himglasses of wine at night,
and he would respondto her notes in the bathroom because,
you know, in a secret way, hide thembecause no one could find them.
But what she did was she, as I was saying,introduce him to the world of women
in a way he had never experienced before,like what he called the divine feminine.
What that meant was so many of the thingsthat she wrote in this letter
(05:18):
were about being ableto kind of save yourself through love.
You know, that love kind of trumpedeverything that we all kind of
had one heart and it didn't matterif she was the enemy or not.
Was that at first just sort of an alienunapproachable concept for him?
Very much so, because I think, you know,he was a scrapper.
(05:39):
I mean, he was from Philadelphia.
He was just getting by. Yes.
Getting by, you know, going throughthe Depression, having a tough time.
He knew how to scrap.
You know, he, you know, got nickelsfor making phone calls for people.
As a young kid, he.
Would wait around at the drugstore
and the phone would ringand then he'd go tell Mrs.
Schwartz. It was the corner candy store.
(05:59):
And the owner of the Candy store said,Hey, I'll give you a nickel every time.
You know, you tell Mr. Schwartzso-and-so is on the line.
So he was making all this money.
And and did that mean that Mrs. Schwartzhad to come to the candy store?
Yeah. Mrs. Schwartz had to come tothe can to go get Mr.
Schwartz on the hill.
Tell her to come down.My uncle's on the phone.
So he did that.
And then he would make all these nickels,and he'd take himself
(06:21):
to the movie theater.
And he in the movie theater, he'dsee a whole other side of life.
All these actors with beautiful,bespoke suits on and a life
that he had no ideathat he could attain at the time.
But these were models to him, all theseactors and the suits and the costumes.
And he just was crazy for it.
(06:41):
I wonder,did he put himself in those shoes,
you know, in Ryan's thinkingand he would be me. Yeah.
Because then he put it outin front of himself
that, you know,those are the lives I want to live.
And then he took himselfto see Frank Sinatra, traveled by foot
through the snow on the moneyhe would make from the candy store.
That's such a unique desire for someonein his position and at his age.
(07:03):
Right.
I mean, I think he was like, I don't know,seven, eight, nine years old.
So then he had this short period of time
with this fabulous woman, Irmgard Ryan.
And you were reading all of this in his.
I was reading it in his book, yeah.
And so then they they had to in theirrelationship because the war ended.
Exactly.
Well, the interesting thingreading that in the book, when I first
(07:24):
read the book,I thought when I read that part,
I read other parts and I thought,this is a great movie.
But when I read the part about Irmgard,I thought, okay, this is this is a film.
Here'sthis guy frightened in a hospital room
in Nazi Germany,not knowing if he's going to live or die.
When that door opened, he had no idea.
(07:45):
He's in this dark roomshivering, hurt, had shells in his head.
And he's a. Jew and a Jew.
Right When that door openedand a burst of light there was his savior.
He didn't know that at the time,but that was kind of the key
image of like, this has to be a film.
So that's a lot.
And that's the doorway.
And that's.
(08:05):
We recreated the hospital room.
Yeah, the German hospital room.
And this experiencethen sort of became the jumping off point
for the rest of his life.
Absolutely.
It steered him in a directionthat he had no intention of going in.
Absolutely.Because he had studied to be a teacher.
I mean, that's what he started to do.
His parents said, you know, go to school.
(08:26):
You're not going to be a carpenter.
Are like your father, you know.
His mother was very strong and said,no way are you going to be doing that?
You're going to college.
But then he joined the Army,but he was starting to study
to get a degree in educationbecause he was really smart.
So what happened after that?
This experience in the war
was so transformativeand really horrifying in so many ways.
(08:47):
He thought, How are we stillkilling people so brutally?
He said, I don't want to be a killer.
I want to be a healer.
And part of that camethrough his relationship with Irmgard,
who had helped save him and heal him.
He was very fortunate.
And he says really poignantlyat some point in the film,
he says, A lot of people helped mein my life, even the enemy.
(09:11):
So he started to look at people as people,not as enemies.
Right. I guess we're all wounded.
We all hold onto.
We're all coming from our imprint, Right.
And in that way, we are on some level,all the same.
Right.
Those were things about himthat were very compelling.
(09:31):
And the other thing,I mean, there are so many other things,
but the other thing ishe was such a disrupt her even early on
and he didn't know it was disruption,but he had a way
to follow his ownwhat he calls North Star.
And he did that early on.
He was Jewish,but his parents didn't really practice
Judaism because so much of itwhen you came to this country
(09:53):
as immigrants back then wereyou were an American first.
You were so happy to be an Americanand not have to run from shtetl to shtetl
that American first, Jewish second.
So it was an assimilation process.
And were people then,even though they had made their way
to the United States,kind of inclined to keep the fact
(10:16):
that they were Jews sort of on the downlow just to protect themselves.
Many people did do that.
I know in the assimilation processbecause they changed their names.
Sure. When they came over,a lot of them changed their names.
They didn't want to be identifiedas Jewish because there was
a lot of anti-Semitism even in Americaafter World War Two as well.
And so this North Starthat he found himself following at
(10:39):
starting at a very young age,though, was an unconscious thing.
Very much. So.
Make a point of I'mdoing this different thing.
He just was led to it. Right?
He was he would pass at a local synagogue.
And I think he would wonder, whatwhat is that?
And he started taking classes on his ownat a local Philadelphia synagogue.
And he got very,very interested in the religion
(11:02):
and the idea of God and spirituality.
And then he came upon
Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat,which was his favorite story in the Bible.
And it was all about dreams,
which really kind of started to foretellhis future unconsciously at that point.
But he was leading towards that.
And of course, he was an expert dreamer,now analyst.
(11:22):
Yes. In his career.
But there you seebits of it early on. Yeah.
As a young child,just being so overcome with this idea
of Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoatand Dream interpreter.
What's.What is that? You know, and. Right.
And then he becamethe best at that, right?
And he didn't know that's what he would bewhen he came out of the war,
(11:43):
because, you know, everyone said,you hanging finish your education degree
and you got to do thatand you go back to school and you don't.
Aspire to be Jonah's teacher.
That's that top level you need to get to.
Like his mother would always say to him,which was really funny,
he says, You can fly,but don't fly too high.
And what he said is just, you know,he had the experience in the war
(12:06):
of being a leader because he was a leadradar navigator, which was a big job.
And what led him to chooseto join the Army.
He knew he was going to get draftedat some point,
so he figured,why don't I pick what I want to be in and.
Figure out a way to make my own choice?
I'm too littleto be on the ground or something.
He didn't see himself, him as a small guy,didn't see himself on the ground forces.
(12:27):
So he thought,why don't I learn to be a flier?
He got trained.
He got into a special training programto become a lead radar navigator,
and that's what he did.
And there were very, very.
Few and there were veryfew of them at the time.
So he was one of one of the few.
So there's a lot more to this storyabout what happens, you know,
(12:47):
once he's in the psychoanalytic fieldand how he needs
to become a rebelin order to support his case and so forth.
But there was so much information
even before you get to the placewhere you need to understand his theory.
Absolutely.
And then the main thing about Dr.
Bail is his theory.
How were you able to
(13:08):
maneuver through this and tieall the bits and pieces together?
Well, you know, it's interesting.
In the creative processof putting together something like this,
it is kind of a creative chaos in a waywhere you've got all these bits and pieces
and you figure, how are you goingto make this thematically work throughout?
And I, I started to see his lifelike a symphony.
(13:30):
Everything is kind of musical to me andthere's peaks and valleys and crescendos
and fast periods and slow periods,and his life was very much like that.
But I kind of start at the beginning
and I thought, how are these early thingsimpacting his later life?
Is there a thread there?
And there was this threadabout following intuition
(13:50):
and following my North Star,and then the dreams following
what your dreams are tellingyou and believing that your unconscious
will guide you to the right decisionsand the right place.
And I think you wanted us to knowthat he had several
near-death experiences
that caused him to think,There's a reason I'm here.
(14:12):
It's bigger than my own life.
Absolutely.
And that was one of the thingsthat interested me about doing a film
about him, which was exactly that pointthat he had come near death several times.
And I wondered, there's so many peoplethat have had that experience,
like how do people navigate their livesafter that?
And the way he navigatedhis life was so inspiring
(14:34):
because he really was dedicatedto life is more than me.
And he kept going back towhen he was in the war
and he was responsible for all these menthat every decision he made
as a leader impacted everyone else.
And so he followed that line of thinkingand an action
(14:55):
in manifesting the kind of lifehe had where he would be
somehow impacting and helping to transform
the lives of the people that he was ableto be in touch with and touch.
So that was an enlightening.
And here he wassaving the lives of these men.
Yes, in war.
And then he choosesto save the lives of people in peace.
(15:18):
He would say, you know, there's a warinside ourselves, that everyone has
some sort of war inside themselvesand that on the planet today,
we're actually each personinternally is fighting those wars.
And that how important that is.
And so becoming a psychiatristand psychoanalyst,
he could see that in everybody.
(15:38):
And then developing his theorylater on was one of the keys
to how people could unlock the warswithin themselves.
And really what's going on insideour selves is
what's happening out in the world.
What happens in our in our own lives
is the physical manifestationof what's happening.
Right. In the worldwhere you see wars everywhere. I mean.
And we just accept that this is how we.
(15:58):
We accept round in.
The world race war, right?
And this is how we move around internallywhere we're fighting against ourselves.
Right.
And there's resistance to peaceand it's unconscious most of the times.
Because if everyone could have peaceall the time, well,
then why wouldn't they?
And there's something blockingor having us
(16:19):
resistthe light that always wants to come in.
Because even with all the wars, you know,the light is still somehow
overshadowing in other places in the worldwhere there aren't wars.
Not perfect, perhaps, but a start.
A start when working on this film.
And you were paying attentionto this theory because you were going
(16:42):
to be describing this theory,how hard was it to get a grasp on.
It was it was difficult to get a grasp on,
but I knew I had to make it in a waythat laymen could understand it.
And I really do love doing that.
That's probably my sweet spot is
is really sort of deconstructingdifficult material
and making it palatable and understandableto people who don't understand it.
(17:08):
So I just went down a lot of pathsinterviewing neuroscientists.
And what did, even though they made nothave known his theory, they knew
pieces of the theory like neuroscientistswho study epigenetics,
where Bernard would say his theoryisn't exactly epigenetics.
It was as close as I could get.
Can you share with us laypeoplewhat you're epigenetics is?
(17:31):
Epigenetics are part of your genesthat can either get expressed
or not expressed.
Say you have parents who were once analcoholic, once a drug addict on for it.
You know, if that happenedthat you could have a predisposition.
Genetic li to that.
And depending on your nature nurtureenvironment as you grow up,
(17:52):
those genes may or may not get expressed.
So there's there's a certain amountof feelings that are affecting your genes.
Absolutely.
And as Bernard talked about,I mean, these are all the neuroscientists
that I talked to were in the realmof what happens in utero as well.
On a scientific level.
(18:13):
While Bernard's theoryis not a hard science,
part of it is applicable,His was more in the realm of feelings
and energies passing between people,which is also part
of the in utero situation that gets passedand get passed down to the fetus.
Nicotine, drugs,feelings, fear, all of that.
(18:36):
For some reason, it's easy for us to thinkthat drugs and nicotine get passed down.
Sure, harder to grasp,you know, a sense of sadness
being passed down, but just as valid.
Absolutely.
I mean,
especially there's been a lot of studiesabout it, especially during World War Two.
You had the famineand how that affected births later.
(18:57):
You know, there's big studies on that.
There's a lot of studies
about the in uteropassing down of transgenerational trauma,
especially when you think about in Europeat the time, people
running from place to place,women were pregnant, carrying babies.
They didn't know if they're going toa concentration camp or where, you know,
even if there were hidden somewhere,there was intense fear going on.
(19:19):
So bearing the burdens of the mother post
natal or the trauma that Bernardwas dealing with.
And interestingly enough,I think the clientele he probably had then
had a lot of parentswho were in the camps or in the war,
and so oftenthe parents didn't talk about it,
but they lived in a kind of fearthat was kind of passed down.
(19:42):
In so many instancesthat and other terrible situations
that happen around the planet,there's there's no room to talk about it.
It's just too frightening.
And I think as parents, we don't
we think we want to protect our childrenfrom those things,
but meanwhile, we've alreadygiven it to them unconsciously.
That's absolutely true.
Yeah.
(20:02):
You spent a ton of time with Bernard.
How did you find him?
Was he easy to talk to?Was he intimidating?
Was he interestedin answering all of your questions?
Well, it's interesting.
When I first met him to talk to himabout the project, he was gruff.
He was kind of a toughie.
Why do you want to do this?
And you know thatand not so much on the second meeting.
(20:24):
And then beforeI decided to commit to the project,
I really wanted to talk to himwithout a camera, which I tend to do.
So I think I spent 20 hours with himand you guys, you know, just recording
audio and I wanted to get a feel of himand what his personality was like.
And he did open up he.
(20:44):
And he did open up and he was funny.
And that's that's the thingthat really made it for me because he was
he was an elderly man.
He was 95,I think, when I started talking to him.
I think so. And he was cogent and funny.
And and he spoke in a waythat not many people spoke.
He had a beautiful sense of the language.
(21:06):
gorgeous. And words.
And and he washe was a kind of romantic guy.
I think that you and he began to share
where you had common groundlike music and theater.
And he he loved that.
And he sort of felt a warm connectionwith you, the.
Great American Songbook and Frank
Sinatra and certain songswe we really liked together.
(21:29):
Was it easy for him to share the details
of his theory, of hisof his life with you?
I feel like it was.
It seemed like it was easy for himto share those details with me
because he was always happyto talk about the imprint and the theory
and the dream interpretationsand how that fed into it.
So yeah, he he would talk about that.
(21:50):
I see this in the film.
So he he shared with you sort of his ownimprint too.
I mean, through this process,
he discovered the imprintthat he was given by his mother.
I think he, over his lifetime,continued to deal with that, as we all do,
you know, sort of chip away at itand you remove some trash
out of the waste bin,but you never get to all of it.
(22:12):
You see it when it comes upand maybe you figure out how to, like,
tamp it down a little bit.
What was his imprint?
When I gleaned that reallythe film ended up
being about his imprintand almost his removal of that imprint
that his whole lifestory was really about.
His own imprint was pretty fascinating.
(22:35):
And I didn't get that till later
because his mother and fatherhad a tough relationship.
You know, they're fighting all the time.
And and in the film,
at some point he goes, they were fightingand I just wish they would shut up.
You know, she had had a lovebefore the man she married in Russia.
She was madly in love.
And then she had to leave Russia
(22:56):
and she was in an arranged marriagepretty much with her husband.
And they had Bernard.
And so she was yearning.
She was always yearning for a lostlove and.
Probably a little pissed.
Off and pissed offkid had a relationship before. Irmgard But
it wasn't the kind of relationshipthat he had with Irmgard.
And I think when he left the war,when they parted,
(23:20):
he never got Irmgard address, which stillthat was the one thing
that just fascinated methat I could never understand, right?
It seems like such a shock.
So he was never able to really find her.
And that seems clear to younow, that didn't happen.
Exactly, because. To be love. Right?
He didn't feel like he could havethat kind of love, which was such a big,
(23:44):
all encompassing love that he didn'tfeel like he was worthy of that.
He did marry and then had two children,
then later divorced,but then tried to find Irmgard again.
And there was he was already a verysuccessful psychoanalyst at that point.
And he was going back to Hamburg, Germany,
where there was an internationalpsychoanalytic convention,
(24:07):
and he thought he would meet up with her,you know, after his divorce.
That kind of fantasy of this, didI miss the love of my life?
Could this come back?
Boy, that kind of yearning, the.
Yearning was constant.So it was not to be.
And it was the thing in his therapiesthat never could get sorted out.
I mean, and that was the questionI think I was always asking him,
(24:29):
what was the problem with your therapist?
And well,they could never really drill down.
They could really never get to it.
And I was like, why have you, you know,And finally he met you.
And I think that becamethe love of his life.
That was the gift we gave each other.
That was the gift, right?
So he did say to me that in his therapyhe was with these fabulous analysts.
(24:54):
Anybody would just be thrilledto have their time and knowledge.
And he was, too.
But he said, you know, I don't know.
It's justwe never got into the unconscious.
We had these unbilled, perceivableintellectual conversations back and forth.
And I always came away wanting to go back,
but always forever unsettled.
(25:17):
I'm not getting anywhere.
And if I'm not getting anywhere,how am I getting my patients somewhere?
I think he spoke to youabout just giving up on all known methods.
Can you talk about that. A little bit?
Yes, He did say thathe wasn't getting anywhere.
I mean, he'd given up the Freudian route.
He'd given up the clinic and route,pretty much which
(25:37):
all the institutewas taking that on as well.
The Institute of Psychoanalysis in L.A..
And the clinic and Route would take peopleback further than the Freudian right
route. But.
But not back in the beginning.
Yeah,the cleaning room would take them back
to maybe age two or maybe age one one.
I'm not totally clear on that.
But further back than Freud.
(25:58):
And he said, No, no, no,this has to go back further.
So that's when he realizedhe just wasn't getting any help.
There was something pre-birththat was being affected.
So that's when hehe started to really come from nothing.
You know, I think I don't knowwhether he took a break.
I think he did,because he had been in that feud
(26:21):
with the psychoanalytic institute.
And that was because.
Because the psychoanalytic Institutewas very
their minds were very shut downon letting new ideas in.
Not just his.
Not just his,but the entire institute was Freud bound.
So it was very hard to exploreanything new.
(26:42):
And so new people coming to the field
were kind of obligatedto that Freudian route
if they were going to make any headwayat all.
To get any respect, to get training,the training that they desperately wanted.
Had to be down that road.
Had to be down that road.
So it was like a tight knitsituation there.
And he was already in the community,but now starting to come up
(27:04):
with different ideas
and wanting to share those because he feltlike he was on to something.
So when he started sharing his new ideas,
no one was interestedand they were really shutting him down.
In a big way.
To shut him down in a big way,got rid of them,
got rid of him as a training analyst,you know.
So how did he manage to have all these
(27:24):
patients that were still interestedin working with him?
Well, I think that he must to havethe patients still want to work with him.
I think he must have gotten somewherewith them,
for them to have the loyaltyand the confidence
to continue, because psychotherapy,psychoanalysis is a very
you put yourselfin a very vulnerable position.
(27:47):
So they must have felt safe with him,which is a huge thing
in any client therapist relationship.
And also he loved people so much.
People would feelthat he had their best interests at heart.
So I think they felt thatand so they would continue.
I look back on some of his old calendarsand date books, and it's just filled
(28:10):
day after day, you know, ten, 12
patients a day, five days a week.
So there were clearlya lot of people who were being helped
or who were intriguedby the possibility of the help
that they could get,whether they made it or struggled.
But amazing that that many peoplefound their comfort zone with his theory.
(28:32):
Absolutely true.
And so he, as I understandit, just started
listening to the dreams of his patientsjust one after the next.
Over time, thousands of dreams.
And it's right to saythat he eventually saw a pattern
and people were making commentsabout their moms,
(28:53):
about their upbringing,about what life was like as a baby,
which he then was able to take backbefore they were born.
The one thing that stands out for meis when he it was a pivotal moment
in a session where he was listeningto the dreams of everyone, of course.
But a woman had come in with a new babyand he realized
(29:14):
if the mother was upset,the baby was upset.
And he started to make this connectionlike, there's something in there
that he started tothen grow his theory from that.
I mean, it wasn'tthe only session he had like that.
But but that's an moment and it was
as if soothingthe mother would soothe the baby.
(29:35):
Right? Exactly.
That gives me goose bumps. I know.
It still gives me goose bumps becauseyou think about that and it's like.
I know because we're so quickor maybe we're not even thinking about it.
To dismiss those kinds of connections,really,
that that that sort of umbilical corddoesn't go away, right?
It doesn't go away.
I mean, in terms of his therapeuticunderpinnings when he talks about
(30:01):
whatever blocks you're experiencingin life, whether, I'm not lovable enough
or I'm not able to do thisor that or whatever, I can't love
whatever you're feeling,that those were the burdens handed
down to you in utero through your mother.
Her feelings were coming down to you.
And it's you know, like you also said,it's not people always ask,
is it just the mother?
And of course, there's father involvedand there's nature and nurture
(30:25):
what environment you're grown up in,and that can affect everything.
But he he always said that
everyone has a traumato a greater or lesser degree.
And if you just startasking questions of people,
you'll find out pretty quicklywhat that is.
Even as a layperson, if you start thinkingabout your dreams and writing them down
(30:46):
and thinking about the peoplein your dreams or the activities
in your dreams and relate them back to howyou live your life, you'll start to see
some glimpses of what you've been carryingaround in terms of trauma, right?
Like you said, you know, the dreamsor the railroad to the unconscious.
In getting through all of thiswith Bernard and and really understanding
(31:10):
the imprint, did that affectthe way you live your life?
It did in a way in that I was workingwith my daughter, who worked on the film
with me a little bit,and I saw our relationship more clearly.
In what way? What do you.
I thought that I could see how ways that I
navigate life, my shortcuts or whatever,
(31:32):
a certain anxietiesthat they would be present in her to, too.
And you two spent a lot of time.
We spent a lot of time together. Yeah.
And we we get along really well.
But but Iwhen I look back on my own childhood,
in my own mother, I felt once
I learned about his theory, I could seevery clearly not I couldn't see.
(31:53):
I could feel very clearlymy mother's imprint on me,
which is really that I'm always tryingto make the 801 train to New York.
You know, there's my mother,like just shooting ahead
of working woman in New York in thein the fifties.
You know.
Tell me a couple of ways
that that sort of presented itself toyou are some some examples of yeah,
(32:15):
I see I'm doing that thingand I'm not happy doing that thing.
Yeah,I have situations where my mother was
very kind of high strung and I willI will get like that.
And when you're in those moments,whatever they are, can you catch yourself
and say, Ah, this might not be my trueself, this could be my imprint?
(32:36):
Well, when I'm in those moments, let's sayI have a boss who was kind of difficult
and then I would think it might be,you know,
kind of my brothercriticizing me or something.
I can catch it if it's not too intense.
Depends on the trigger.
But yeah, I can look at it.
Which I think for a lot of us, most of us,we aren't going to have access
(32:57):
to people like Dr.
Weiner or the few peoplewho get to practices this fabulous mode.
So I think we have to be curiousabout this work and read Dr.
Bails books and essaysand watch your great film.
I mean, all of those will help us kind of
come to a pathwhere we can start to consider things.
(33:18):
And I hope that this curiosity,you know, sort of expands
and we share with our friendsand neighbors.
I think that was really tellingafter the film
when we would have all these screeningsat different places and libraries
and universities and Holocaust centers
(33:39):
that the Q and A's at the endreally told me everything.
So many people at the end were crying.
And it wasn't.
Sometimes it was sadness, crying,but some times it was relief, crying like
people would come up to me or to himand say, I understand my life
for the first time.
So to me that's an important aspect of
(33:59):
whether you can afford psychoanalysisor this kind of
theoretical insight into your life
that in a way just having thatand saying to your therapist, Hey,
I saw this film and they talked about thiswhen it had such an effect on me
viscerally.
And that's where it is.It's in your feelings.
(34:20):
And that's what Dr. Bail always said.
It's about feelings or everything.
And so if you get in touch with that,
just from seeing a film,you might want to explore further.
Yeah. So the curiosity is there.
If people will sit and watchand hear the story.
Through Dr. Bails life.
You say you saw this threadconnecting all of these things
(34:44):
and you, after the factin a way discovered that really
this film was about himdealing with his imprint.
So I'm guessing you never had anopportunity to talk with him about that?
No, I did, actually.
I absolutely talked to him about thatfact, because as we were getting
so starting
to get towards the end of the film,I said to him, I really feel like this
(35:06):
film is like
the arc of your whole imprint,that you're working out your imprint here.
And he agreed he's he didn't say yes,but he said,
Yeah, I think that that is a possibility.
But that's what it felt like to me,that he was really working out his own
print imprint in his life and in his work,which was pretty astonishing.
(35:27):
The story of Bernard
parachuting out of this planethat had been shot out of the sky
and how he made it to the hospitalis unbelievable and terrifying.
Share with us a little bit about that.
Well, when he was shotout of the plane on his 21st
mission, that was the timethey were shooting down Airman.
(35:49):
Like target practice.
Like target practice. Yeah,but he made it.
And he had to take off those dog tags.
That's right?
He had to take off his dog tagsbecause he was Jewish.
So the presence of mind to do thatwhile you're bailing out of a plane.
And being shot at and.
Being shot at takesa lot of presence of mind and courage
(36:09):
to do it, because you take that offand you have no idea.
Pretty much.
I mean, I guess he had a thingthat said Bernard Bail on him.
But and then, I mean, you saw it.
How am I going to make it out of here?
You know, he was in a field somewhere.
I made it to the earth.
Yeah, I made it to Earth. And now what?
And I think he was takenin by a family overnight
and then taken to a train station.
(36:31):
And where's that train going?Yeah, Stuttgart, Germany.
Taken to a train stationThere. And everyone's yelling.
Everyone's yelling and throwing rocks.
And I still feel likehe was born under a lucky star,
because even at that point,people were throwing rocks at him.
There was a German airman on the platformand he broke up the crowd.
(36:52):
Gosh. Stroke of luck.He broke up the crowd.
And in in the film know, Bernard said,I saluted him
because that's where it's a policyamong airmen.
You know, that's what you doeven though they're the enemy.
And that is such a poignant moment.
Also another kind of life saving moment
where he was just kind ofthere was something him.
(37:15):
So great,so perfect that he eventually listened
to all of those bitsthat were guiding him. Right.
And that he strung those together.
Right. And found his path on you do.
So that train
then eventually took him to the hospitalwhere I spoke about right guard.
And so that took him to the hospital.
And then he had the experience thereand was saved by the nurse pretty much.
(37:38):
But then in the film,
I thought it would be an interesting ideato take him back to Germany.
Was he pretty receptive to that?
Was very receptive to itbecause he was going to Europe.
So I said, You guys are going to Europe.
How about we go back to Germany,to the room You were incarcerated in?
And he thought it was a good idea.
So we went to Germanyand took him back to the room.
(38:01):
Boy, the anticipation of that.
Moment and well, one of the interestingthings is when I was researching
the room that he was incarceratedin, we had a German team
helping us with locationsand scouting from the book.
You know, we thought it was room number102 or something, the description of it.
And I was asking, Bernard, isit is it this room or that room?
(38:23):
And he would tell me.
So we scouted a few rooms there andwe picked one room that we thought it was.
But when we got him to Germany
and he walked up the stepsinto the hallway, the corridor
where those rooms were, it was likehe was like a sniffing dog.
And he, you know, because he couldn't seevery well at that point.
He had real macular.
(38:43):
I think degeneration very hardfor him to see,
but it was like he had a nose for it.
He just went down the hall.
We were going to go into this roomto the right.
He went down the hall,felt his way to a door,
opened the door and said,This is the room. Wow.
It's like he sniffed it out.
And we were like, you know, it was justlike this moment of, like, chills.
(39:05):
That trip,I think, really affected him good and bad.
I think terms of the, let's say,the imprint,
he had been traumatizedreally from where to drop the bombs.
So he knew he was stepping on ground,
where he basically had been in chargeof killing people.
So he was now on German ground.
(39:27):
He hadn't been there in 71 yearsand it was very difficult.
So I thinkwhile the German people were fantastic.
They were unbelievable.
Loving and welcoming.
It was very healing. Yes.
And they askedso many great questions. Right.
And they asked questions to him.
And he was so open and as were they.
(39:50):
So that was a real turnaround.
I mean, to go back to a placewhere you almost died
and relive it in a waythat the world has changed.
What a great thing to be touched by. Yeah.
After all of the experienceshe'd had over those 70 years.
Absolutely.
And he was talking about Irmgard, too,while we were there.
(40:11):
And we went outsideand he was talking about the room
and how he had survived and how lucky was,and then how Irmgard had been this gift.
And then as he was talking,church Bails started ringing
and he said, She's here,you know, she's here with me.
Who could have foretold, right?
(40:31):
That thing which once. Again, and.
How he was kind of fortunatein certain ways.
But a connection to his unconsciousthat I don't know somehow
even presents itself in the real world.
Yeah, it's like he brought it on.
It's likehe could foretell these situations almost.
We are so fortunate to have had this man
(40:52):
walk this planetand we have so much to learn from him.
Still,I feel like we need to carry this on. And.
And I so appreciate your film and now love
and there is a website and now love.
The movie and now love the movie. Dot com.
And if you go to our web siteand now love dot com,
(41:15):
we will connect you to the movie,which is fabulous.
And we just touched on elements and.
Absolutely the movie is on Amazonand Apple TV and a host of other.
To access. Very easy to access.
I know this story of coursebut it was really terrific for me
to kind of relive thisand talk about it with you
(41:35):
because you know more than anyoneabout all things
Bernard and I can't thank you enoughfor being here and sharing.
And if you have questions about thisor questions for Jill,
I'm speaking on your hack.
You can ask us and we'll answer.
I thank you so much for joining us todayand we'll see you next time.
Bye for now. Thank you.
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