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INTRODUCTION

Roger Neighbour, MA, FRCGP

I recently heard the novelist Margaret Drabble and her husband the biographer Michael Holroyd discussing the rival claims of fiction and non-fiction as paths towards understanding. The debate was entertaining, but only in the sense that a firework display is entertaining. Then at question time someone in the audience stood up and wondered whether, in their search for truth, human beings are capable of anything other than fiction. Doesn’t everything we express, no matter how “truthful” we intend it to be, come out distorted by virtue of having passed through our individual and unique minds?

People often say they want to know “the truth”. But even more than truth, we crave meaning. Unless we can make our experiences “mean something”—and that’s what our brains are for—we flounder and drown in a torrent of overwhelmingly arbitrary circumstances. Truth is just whatever, for now, gives events enough meaning for us to get by on.

So truth comes in different flavours, according to whatever experiences would be meaningless without it. Scientific truth, judicial truth, literary truth and mystical truth can all be different, yet equally valid.

Fifteen years ago, early in my career as a general practitioner, I thought I knew a lot of psychological truths. I’d had training in counselling and psychotherapy, Jungian analysis, Gestalt and family therapy. All can be good ways of imparting meaning to a wide range of human distress. But the distress of one young man, who slashed his wrists in a lonely thicket and could no more tell me why than could a newborn baby explain why it cries, would not be coaxed into any of these frameworks. It was powerful and violent; nonverbal. Preverbal. Then one day as I was trawling through his memory for clues, his voice trailed off. He drew his knees up to his chest, and his head inclined more and more to the left until his head was almost down onto his shoulder. Something infantile about his appearance made me ask, “How old do you feel right now?” The reply came at once: “No age at all”.

In Zen there is a saying, “When the pupil is ready, the Master appears”. At that time, the end of the 1970s, humanistic psychiatrists such as Arthur Janov, R. D. Laing, Bill Emerson, Stan Grof and Frank Lake were developing concepts of birth trauma, intra-uterine memory, “the hostile womb”. And what gave value to their ideas was that they led to what the hard language of science calls “therapeutic interventions”—ways of working with the victims of embryonic trauma that might, if not rewrite the prenatal record, at least spring the lock on the prison of its effects.

Well, I tried. And the rest is history.