Janov's Reflection on "More on the Imprint"

I have written a lot about the imprint. On the deepest level of our existence, womblife, the imprints are urgent because so much of what goes on is a matter of life and death. A mother smoking, drinking, taking drugs. A mother deeply depressed or manic. All this impacts the fetus and is coded and registered for eternity; it is imprinted everywhere in the system. That is why when patients relive the imprint there are changes everywhere in us.

As the brain evolves each new higher level of brain function represents the imprint in its own way; that is important. We add emotions and images on one level and then add ideas to represent the imprint on a higher level. Think now. Ideas are representing the imprint of the fetus on an ideational level. And those ideas make no sense because the imprint makes no ideational sense. Ideas here are trying to accommodate to the force of the imprint. And oh yes, the imprint down low is not just sending neutral, banal information upward; it is also sending the valence, the energy and the force of that imprint upwards. So the idea/thinking level now has an urgency to how it responds to current situations. And the response can be over the top because the current situation has resonated with the lower level imprint and its force to produce inordinate and off-the-wall reactions. And those reactions can be hyper-suspicious, paranoia because the imprint that has been triggered off is one of terror; the mother manic and superexcited terrifies the baby, and when he is old enough to form beliefs he will no doubt be paranoid. And anything that weakens the defense system such as LSD or marijuana can lead right away to paranoia. Now you see why?

Let’s go over this a bit more. The spokes radiating from the fetal and birth imprint are re-represented in their own way on higher levels. The dream level tries to cope with it but soon the dream cannot contain the pressure and the force and it leads to a nightmare. We wake up terrified, not because the Nazis or the tigers are chasing us, but because the feeling is!! The imprint is unrelenting. It contains the pain and the terror and forces us all of the time to deal with it. There is no respite. The second level manufactures the Nazis to justify the fear in the same way that when awake we manufacture enemies to justify our rage and our fear. And when we are in a weak state, it bursts through and produces a panic or anxiety attack. That anxiety is no more than the imprint forcing its way out. And we take painkillers and tranquilizers to deal with it; those pills work on lower levels and then calm or suppress our strange ideation for the moment. The bizarre ideation is not the problem; it is the imprint. That is why it seems like such a mystery in the real of psychiatry. No therapy has a method of getting down deep to deal with the imprint. And worse, no therapy has a theory that includes it. So how can they ever understand it?