Broken Brains or Wounded Hearts solves the nature/nurture controversy behind mental illness by using solid scientific data to challenge the current disease model. Relying on the same data researchers use ot conclude that mental illness has a biological basis. Dr. Colbert clearly shows that such conditions as schizophrenia, depression, mania, and compulsive behaviors are not caused by genetic defects, chemical imbalances, or any other physiological defects in the brain.
By introducing the "emotional pain model" and such concepts as the protective subconscious" and a "forced choice" condition, Dr. Colbert presents an alternative that quickly brings clarity to even the most difficult-to-understand emotional conditions. using several case histories of diagnosed schizophrenia, and biographies of such well-known figures as Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahlmer, Dr. Colbert shows that behaviors such as hallucinations, compulsions, and the need to hurt others results from a forced choice condition.
Dr. Colbert's model does not seek to blame the patient or his or her parents, but to show how we all, to some degree, suffer from emotional problems. We all hurt and at times lose our ability to act in responsible o productive ways. This compassionate approach allows the reader to develop proper understanding of any an all emotionally troubling conditions.
In the book's final section, Dr. Colbert opposes a three-phase model for eliminating emotional disorders and developing emotionally healthy children.
Broken Brains or Wounded Hearts offers more than a new viewpoint. I offers a definite way out of the dark and growing problem of mental illness in our society.
Dr. Colbert's data and conclusions completely coincide with my own: there is no abnormal bevaviour diagnosed as autism, psychosis, or paranoia, or other constructs used in psychiatry stemming from spurious modifications of brain chemistry, wrong genetics, or disruption of cell behaviour (see DSM IV and the article by Kutchins and Kirk, 1998). All difficult emotional conditions and severe disorders, when thoroughly analysed, have only one origin: early mistreatment. All therapies similar to what I have been practising for over twenty years (based on reliving the original recorded events by emotional release) evidence the same pattern: disorders and dysfunctions come from early shocks. All individuals under spontaneous revelation conditions attest of feats of violence experienced in the past, which in most cases have caused a disruption of the psychic processes and a hasty restructuring which became the observable condition of today.
There is no question as to whether the re-living of such events is real or invented (as claimed by detractors of psychotherapies). Emotions are recorded in the body in such a way there is no possible doubt neither for the therapist nor for the person in process. The events come back with all sensations, attitudes and mobilisation according to age, and are obvious real reactions to real events, as one can observe in newborns and children submitted to such situations. A significant number of them can be also be testified by witnesses and records.
The early events are somehow hidden to conscious thinking in our normal state, but the present attitudes and reactions are vivid images of those events. They can be enticed to emerge, sometimes surprisingly easily. All neurotic/psychotic and psychiatric conditions are but emotional or structural disorders which can be traced to such events.
Most surprisingly to conventional medicine and psychology, the dramatic events leading to such disorders are mostly discovered at birth and have taken place at the onset of life by shear mistreatment (see for instance David B. Chamberlain, What babies are teaching us about violence, Pre-Perinatal Psycho. J. 10, 2, 57-74). Most of the time, action has been taken to prevent the mother to deliver in a natural way, to impede the propulsion of the child by some procedure, including epidural or global anaesthesia, and to separate the child from the mother's body at the criticla time of bonding. This anomalous way of giving birth prevents the succession of essential bio-psychological reflexes to occur (in both mother and child) and the build-up of the corresponding psychic functions. The result of such practice is regularly a child with an incomplete or a broken psyche and a mother too disturbed to be in the necessary symbiotic state for the child. She may even turn to a dismayed, depressive and/or anxious and destructive mother, not understanding herself anymore.
As Grotstein, 1997, has shown, the collective mind of the occidental society, acting behind the directly involved parents and medical personnel, enforces such rites of birth detrimental to the newborn, which becomes a sacrificial figure. The purpose of this rite is to destroy the "innocence" of the child, on the ground "we have all been corrupted [at birth], you [the child] should be corrupted as well". It would be unbearable to face child and mother in a happy symbiotic relationship to individuals having been deprived of such blissful state. Hence the collective jealousy/envy rage towards this natural innocence, and its derivation the instituted sacrificial rite.
I have also shown elsewhere that owing to these rites of corruption, the postnatal stages display frequently an strong aberrant attachment, based on the void of early mutual nurturing, which contrary to the natural symbiosis does not dissolve in time. Therefore, the separation of mother and child which ought to happen around the third year for the child to mature, is bound to be difficult and/or never happen, leaving child and mother in a dead end forced bond situation. Furthermore, the insistence of our society in making us dwell in narrow families [instead of the necessary community] and cities [instead of an immersion in nature] is a device which produces the worst conditions for the indispensable separation imprint, and makes any recovery of the early trauma a dream.
Jean-Michel Fitremann, Dr.