Cellular Consciousness and Conception

An Interview with Dr. Graham Farrant

Thanks to Steven Raymond,
first published in Pre-& Perinatal Psychology News, vol 2, issue 2 (Summer), 1988

Graham Farrant is an Australian psychiatrist whose work was launched into greater international prominence with his presentation at the 2nd International Congress on Pre and Perinatal Psychology in San Diego 1985. He is currently the Director of the Primal Institute in Melbourne, Australia, and in the past has established birthing centres in hospitals and was the founder of the Australian Birth Foundation, an educational, research and fund raising arm of the Childbirth Education association. Graham is currently the PPPANA Regional Chairman in Australia.

The interview was conducted in Los Angeles, Graham's first stop on a round-the-world tour, conducting weekend experiential workshops in many cities in The US and Europe.

S: Graham, why don't we begin by having you give us a bit of personal background information, leading into how you became involved with Primal Therapy?

G: Well, I grew up in Melbourne, Australia, in an upper middle class family and attended wealthy prep schools there, later going to Melbourne University where I received my medical training and an MD. Then, I attended McGill University in Montreal and received a Diploma in Psychological Medicine, after which I received a Fellowship in Child Psychiatry from Harvard, and another Fellowship in Psychiatry back in Melbourne. I had held a senior professorial Appointment at Melbourne University Hospital until 1973, and then in 1973 to 1975 I came to the United States for my first experiences with Primal Therapy.

S: How did you become interested in Primal Therapy?

G: I had a client who basically told me, "Graham, you're a very nice man, but you need to go to the States to experience Primal Therapy so you can come back here and do it with me." Of course, it wasn't quite as simple as that, but that's basically what happened.

S: Your particular expression of Primal Therapy is different than most in that you give a lot of attention to conception experiences in addition to your work with prenatal and birth trauma. As Arthur Janov is the founder of Primal therapy, would you mind comparing your model of therapy with his?

G: I almost don't even like using the word "primal" because there are so many connotations that have become attached to it during the evolvement of Primal Therapy but "primal" is the best word to describe the kind of experiences that come up in therapy as I practice it.

In the early years, when I did some therapy with Janov, his view of the Primal experience was primarily of experience derived from the infancy. He didn't include prenatal or birth experiences in his understanding of what was occurring in Primal states at that time. It has actually only been in very recent years that he had acknowledged birth trauma, and I doubt that he includes cellular experiences of conception experiences as part of his model of understanding, where I have found those experiences to be quite relevant and capable of evoking tremendous healing.

S: What do you mean by "cellular memory"?

G: Cellular memory refers to a kind of preverbal memory, contained within the physical body of experiences that occurred when we were gametes. That is to say, there is a body memory, a cellular memory, of our experience as a sperm, and also of our experience as an egg.

S: Why do you consider these experiences so important?

G: I never tried to emphasize conception experiences or cellular consciousness in my work, ALThough I personally and professionally have had extremely profound experiences working in that area. I consider the natural unfolding of the psyche to be important in therapy, with birth trauma, prenatal experiences, infant bonding or non bonding or later traumas all being important to deal with. But since my presentation at the 2nd Congress in San Diego, I have received so many questions regarding cellular consciousness that I realized it was one of my unique contributions to understanding human consciousness.

S: How was it that you first became interested in conception experiences?

G: In the States you may not have heard of Professor Carl Woods. In Australia he is almost a historic figure, because he was one of the early pioneers of the test tube baby program at the Queen Victoria Hospital in Monash. There was a period of time when he worked with me as a client, and when some members of his team worked in group experiences at my centre in Melbourne. I was fascinated by some of the slides and photographs he showed me, as they posed concrete images of experiences I was having in therapy.

My peripheral fascination with conception was triggered by him being a client, however, almost dogmatically, with the passage of time my own regression experiences have gone back to conception anyway, and that process had already begun long before I met him. I see this as a completely natural process.

If you really spend enough time exploring your own psyche, the experiences seem to naturally progress to dealing with cellular memories of your conception. Usually, one has had to work past childhood traumas, the birth trauma and the prenatal imprinting of the mother's psyche to get to these states, but occasionally the rare person will spontaneously regress into deep cellular memories of conception without having prior Therapy experiences.

My first experience of my life as a sperm had already happened by 1976, but so unaccepted was this in my intellectual mind, let alone my peer medical group, even my staff, that I did not let on for a few years that what I seemed to be experiencing was existence as a sperm until I read an article by a spiritual guru on his belief that you could relive your life as a sperm.

In 1979, I made a video of myself in a regression therapy session where I was in the cellular consciousness of my own conception. Four years later, in 1983, the"Miracle of Life" film came out of the Karolinska Institute, confirming two phenomena that I had experienced during those early primals that were not accepted as medically true.

When I had these experiences in a Primal session, my intellect kept battling what my body wanted to do. First, I experienced that the sperm did not necessarily penetrate the egg, but rather, two "arms" could extend from the egg and selectively embrace a particularly chosen sperm into its substance. This seemed strange to me because the common wisdom was that the sperm competitively and aggressively penetrated the passive egg. However, my Primal experience, and the film four years later, revealed that the egg was much more active, even, you might say, selecting a sperm. The film confirming a personal experience to which I was so intellectually resistant was a tremendous convincer to me.

Secondly, I also experienced that I, as the fertilized egg, did not speed up my movements and rotations counter-clockwise in my descent down the fallopian tube. Indeed, I felt I stopped several times in my journey, and I've always thought I stopped not simply to take a breath, but to decide whether to live or not. It felt like a crucial moment of truth, a sensing of the world around, the maternal environment, and the physical, mental and spiritual state of mother as a symbolic partner and whether or not life was to be on this occasion. Now, this was my emotional interpretation of my physical experience. However, I was intellectually convinced that the physical reality of the egg was a continuous and progressive rotation and movement down the tube. When the film showed my physical experience to be accurate, it was another incredible confirmation of an experience that I had so resisted accepting as true. So the film from the Karolinska Institute had a great impact upon my belief systems and my intellectual acceptance of memories of conception during therapy.

Is it ridiculous to think of fertilized eggs as making decisions about life? I certainly know it sounds that way, but it is interesting to contemplate upon the fact that the attrition rate of fertilized eggs is enormous. Over 60% die in the fallopian tube, and many more die in implantation, and then many more are spontaneously aborted in those first weeks of life. So its feasible to say that those of us who are adults are survivors. We have made it, where many of our zygotic colleagues did not.

Feeling the absolute truth of my own body experiences of cellular memory confirmed by the Karolinska Institute's electron microscopy work encouraged me to approach the test tube baby team and invite them to my clinic for a personal experiential experience, which they did, but the resistance and reluctance of all of them, except for professor Carl Wood, was enormous. I could only understand at that time that this was an adult expression of the resistance in their own respective conception, that they did not want to "let in" new ideas or new knowledge. Besides, it really challenged pails of their work, for example, eggs fertilized in vitro are implanted in the uterine wall, not having the three day "float" in the body of the womb. My experience of this float, totally and personally, was that it was the time of spiritual reappraisal, as I mentioned previously. It's another kind of breathing space where the fertilized egg takes stock of its origins, its pre-gamete truth as a spirit or soul.

Conception is a trilogy, not a duality. It's a threesome: body, mind and soul; the egg, sperm and soul come together and unite. The pre-conception consciousness of the gametes has the predominant quality of spirit. Sure, its chemical and biological and physical and its human, but there's more of a spiritual ethereal quality to it. Once fertilized, there's a kind of looking back to take stock of truth. Jung called it "oceanic bliss," where the human zygote is not attached to the womb wall. It's detached, in the spiritual connotation of"detachment."

Lots of people meditate to get back into that same spiritual sense of detachment, seeking to relinquish attachment to money or sex or people or fame, power and glory, and to live more within the consciousness of God. I accept these zygote experiences as being a truth of that part of human existence, but it was difficult for the members of the test tube baby program to think that the embryos they had fertilized and implanted might have difficulty being spiritual as adults. There were many other reasons for their discomfort, but the end result was, we did not continue our intimate dialogue. They went back to their test tubes, and I went back to my sound proof rooms, and never the two met until infertile couples began to drift into therapy, not referred, but by chance. They would usually come for other reasons, but infertility was part of their life's problem.

S: Do you feel that the soul always attaches to the zygote at conception?

G: Clinically, people have experienced that their soul may have attached anywhere from fertilization to when they took their first breath, however, the vast majority seem to experience that they became attached at the moment of fertilization. There's a subgroup that don't seem to want to come in. I refer to this as the "reluctant soul syndrome." They seem to take their time; they may come in at implantation or the first trimester, and many times they seem to go out again, and report experiences of feeling like they are sent back to a human existence, and they may do this several times. In adult life, they tend to be the meditative, contemplative mystics of the world, who perhaps find spiritual communities to work in, or places of employment or occupation where they don't have to be too much in the material world. They're always contemplating and philosophizing, but they hanker to be back with God.

S: There are a great many professional people, men and women of integrity, compassion and intelligence, who would feel that what you are saying about souls and gamete consciousness is utterly insane. Even if these experiences you describe do come powerfully and spontaneously from the human psyche, why should these people believe that they have any relevance for understanding the existential nature of human beings?

G: I originally had the same difficulty as a medically trained scientific person. I wanted double blind studies for "proof", but in psychiatry in general and in regressive therapies in particular, it is extremely difficult to achieve concrete studies. What I have come to rely upon more and more over the years is seeing profound and sustained clinical change in adults who prior to therapy had a multitude of problems. For example, being unable to conceive, or stricken with rheumatoid arthritis or ulcers or other psychosomatic diseases, or psychiatric syndromes that had been previously unresponsive to medication or psychotherapy. In cases such as these, when memories of conception were achieved, expressed, relived and integrated, and there followed a dramatic, sudden and sustained change in personality, behaviour and interactive life experiences, it became convincing to me that the experiences relived in therapy must have had some basis in a concrete reality.

S: Now I really must play devil's advocate here, because there is always this problem of what is "real" and "not real" in all of the regressive therapies. It's important to address these reality issues because many social issues hinge on whether or not, for example, it is reasonable to talk about an unborn child having consciousness, or whether or not it matters how an egg is fertilized.

Can we really assume the existential truth of experiences in therapy on the basis that the therapy produced change, even if that change is profound and sustained? There are whole systems of psychotherapy, namely Ericksonian hypnosis and some applications of Neuro Linguistic Programming, that are based upon changing the unconscious through fantasies and metaphors. Even dream states, which I see as kind of 'night school", can evoke change through symbols and metaphor.

It is possible to argue that all of these experiences in the regressive therapies whether they be experiences of conception or birth or prenatal experiences or past lives, or spiritual out-of-body-experience or the memory of a sperm or an egg are metaphors instead of memories of real experiences. They may be metaphors implicitly suggested by the therapist's paradigm, and then unconsciously acted out by the client, who projects his emotions into the structural framework of the metaphor.

For example, the client projects his emotions into the imagined experience of birth, goes through an intensely abreactive experience where his emotions fit the structure of the imagined birth, and in expressing these emotions, forms new unconscious beliefs about his experience, beliefs that may be far healthier than his previous beliefs. In that situation, the client would have resolved significant unconscious feelings through a metaphor as opposed to experiencing a truth of his own development. And if it were a metaphor, it may be good for therapy, but useless for assuming broad social or political interpretations.

So, my question is, other than clinical change in behaviour as a result of therapy, and other than the fact that the emotions expressed in therapy may be very deeply and physically felt, why do you believe there is a reality to cellular consciousness? Why can't these therapy experiences be explainable as strong emotions expressed through metaphor?

G: That's really an excellent and pointed question, and I agree, the whole reality issue is an important one to address when trying to draw social conclusions, ALThough it can become a limitation in the day to day practice of helping people to heal themselves.

I believe the reality of conception experiences in therapy because I have been able to identify specific movements of the body, especially the hands, in relation to specific sequential biologic phenomena. These are consistently and spontaneous present in different clients who don't know each other. In their regressions they believe they are re-experiencing various aspects of conception, like implantation or floating in the womb, or descent in the tube, or conception and pre-conception. It is true they may know my paradigm includes conception, but they do not know the various movements that I have previously correlated with different conception memories, and these physical movement come quite spontaneously, even uncontrollably. This is one reason I am convinced that their experiences are memories instead of metaphors.

However, not only have I discerned specific movements associated with specific conception memories, but I have also been able to link various clinical syndromes to the reports of specific therapy experiences within those first ten days between conception and implantation. There is a discernible pattern of certain kinds of life-problems associated with certain kinds of conception. Lastly, when talking about clinical change, I would see that these different life-problems and clinical syndromes would begin to change when the clients' bodies biologically and physically re-experience those specific conception moments, even though they may have had other meaningful therapy experiences prior to the re-experience of their conception.

So, if the change was occurring through metaphor, why would those other meaningful therapy experiences not serve equally as well as a metaphor for creating change'? My observation is that clinical change would seem most dramatic and sustained after the deep psycho-physiologic re-experience of conception. It's not just the fact of change, but also the timing of the changes. So over the past fifteen years I have built up a series of syndromes and conditions that are referable to specific points of trauma in the ten days from pre-conception to implantation, and have come to trust the biologic reality of conception memories in therapy.

S: Why don't you talk a little bit about the film you produced, "Cellular Consciousness."

G: It's a film that shows a split-screen throughout it's entirety. In one screen, I regress and relive parts of my own biological truth, from pre-conception, through fertilization, through division of cells, and through implantation. This is the regression film I spoke of earlier, originally filmed in 1979. On the right side of the screen is the film "The Miracle of Life," produced it the Karolinska Institute in 1993. I referred to these two films at the beginning of our talk.

One day, I had the idea with one of my associates to view my video side by side with "The Miracle of Life." In one of those strange but fortuitous accidents that sometimes occur, the timing of the two projectors was somewhat off. Suddenly I was witnessing my physical movements as I relived my conception experience as an ovum synchronizing almost perfectly with the movements of a fertilized egg in the"Miracle of Life," which is really the first biological view of conception that we have been able to see as it occurred in a human body. (Editor's Note: The Miracle of Life is filmed in a human body through the use of fiber optic and electron microscopy, providing incredible in vivo views of human reproduction.) There were pristine moments of truth that appeared, knowing that my regression film was made in 1979, and the other made in 1983. As I described previously, the "Miracle of Life" provided validation for inner experiences of my own that I had great resistance to accepting because it did not agree with the general medical beliefs about conception at that time. So, seeing the impact of these two films side by side, I created one film that showed the two images together, which I named Cellular Consciousness.

S: You speak a great deal about physical experiences in therapy and in the film. Why don't you describe an example of these physical experiences and explain further why you believe the physical experiences validate the reality of cellular memories?

G: OK, you remember I described my experience as an egg welcoming a sperm rather than feeling penetrated by it. In my experience as an egg, as shown on my film, my arms create a circular kind of movement, going out from my body with the fingers turned towards my body in a sweeping motion. My emotion at the moment was a total welcoming, "Come here, Come in!" Physically, I felt deeply rounded; my legs were drawn up in a circular position and my arms moving in a circular position with the sweeping "Come into me" movement. It felt absolutely and totally a moment of preparation for the entry of the sperm.

There's no way that I experienced myself, either as egg or sperm, with the sperm thrusting into the egg as I was medically taught, namely that the head of the sperm elongates like an arrow and burrows and bores into the egg, thrusting and penetrating like a sword or a spear going into a fleshy orange. It wasn't like that at all. Again, because of my intellectual beliefs, I tried to resist this movement and turn it into something else, but the energy was just sweeping me along and had its own sequence and rhythm and position and so forth. So what was startling, was seeing the "Miracle of Life" film demonstrate the egg as I physically experienced, gathering the sperm into its substance quite actively, instead of being a passive target of the sperm.

S: You described another experience of the fertilized egg stopping to "take stock" of its environment. What was that like on the physical level?

G: My arm movements became rapid and vigorous, not at all like the prior gentle sweeping, but more like a criss-cross movement around my body, with my body gyrating left to right, and I'm feeling as if I'm hurtling down a long passage. Then I suddenly stop. I sweep up on my left hip, my right arm goes out towards the ceiling with my left arm on the floor, and my ankles and feet are off the ground. This is a position I have tried to imitate but cannot when in my usual daily consciousness. Gravity stops me from being able to sustain it, but in the film I am in that position for at least 30 seconds. Again, when I experienced this, it conflicted intellectually with my belief that the fertilized egg gathered continuous energy and momentum through cell divisions as it progressed down the fallopian tube. I tried to abort the stop and get the movements going faster as I thought they should, but it wouldn't. It started again when it wanted to, and later again stopped in the same way. This is what was physically occurring when I was in that state of taking stock of whether or not I wanted to continue my existence. This, too, was shown on the "Miracle of Life" film. The film clearly shows the egg stopping its divisions and movements, perfectly matching my spontaneous experience in the regression session. Since that time I have worked with other clients, though not all my clients, who have related a similar kind of stopping to the same feeling of sensing the environment and making decisions about living.

S: How did you sense your environment as you took stock as the fertilized egg?

G: In my case there was a horrible, rejecting: "Get out of me, I don't want you" kind of a feeling. As I paused to take stock, I felt I had to decide whether I wanted to continue, whether life was worthwhile, if this existence was worth the effort.

S: Part of what I'm hearing in your story is that there is not necessarily a direct correlation between the mother's emotions and the consciousness of the ovum, that they may be quite different.

G: Absolutely, very much so. Although mother's contribution in the energy of the ovum is profound, once the new human existence is there in the form of a fertilized egg, it is quite a separate and distinct entity. It is still strongly influenced by the mother's psyche, but has its own set of feelings as well.

S: I mean even prior to fertilization, because you experienced the ovum as welcoming the sperm wholeheartedly, "Come into me", while your mother's emotions were rejecting of the pregnancy, "Get out of me, I don't want you". So even before fertilization there was not a direct relationship between the consciousness of the ovum and the consciousness of your mother. This is quite differently than I have previously interpreted ovum consciousness, which I would have said is always emotionally resonant to the mother's unconscious feelings towards her pregnancy. I have perceived cellular memory as the cells being influenced by the emotional energy and environment surrounding the cell, in effect, that cellular memory is an imprinting of that environment. Is my interpretation incomplete or incorrect?

G: I personally feel that the energy of the arms welcoming me in, was the love of God, welcoming the spirit in the sperm. This is really way out, and I feel shy about sharing this aspect of what was a very deeply personal experience. But the egg and the sperm feel to me as though they were the forerunners of the me that evolved after my soul completed the trilogy of sperm, egg and soul. They were not simply the reflection of my mother's cell, though I was in her body. So cellular memory cannot be limited to emotional imprinting from the environment.

An ovum especially, seems to have a consciousness individual from that of the mother, much more so than the sperm, whose life is relatively brief compared to the ovum that has existed from very early in mother's fetal development. This prompts the concept of pre-conception spirit awareness. Maybe this is one explanation of the mystery, "Why do the gametes join'?" Why does the sperm search out the egg, the equivalent of 10 kilometers away from ejaculation? What is the attracting force, what's the purpose, what's the meaning?

In spiritual terms, in my adult life, I have come to believe that the meaning of life is to simply get back in touch with the truth that we are divine, that we are part of God. If He's the sea, then we are the waves, but we are the same essence. All of this transient experience in life is simply the vehicle by which we can get back to that absolute truth before we die, so that in our transition back to that state we achieve a conscious oneness with our original source.

S: Well, Graham, all I can do at this point is thank you for sharing your views so intimately and personally. I know it takes courage to do so when discussions that include the spiritual are so frequently criticized by those of a more strictly scientific disposition. But as our talk has been so far ranging, I wonder if you would have any particular advice about conception for average middle-class couples who may not have opportunities or the desire to deeply explore their own psyches?

G: In fact, I have encouraged the beginning of preconception and childbirth education classes in four capitol cities of Australia, so that on a practical, common-sense level, young couples can have the opportunity to discuss their own childhood, birth and even conception, for the sake of deeper understanding and release. This is a very natural process, and discussions may stimulate a release of deeper memories through dreams or daily life experiences. Many things can be worked through in a verbal sharing in a group. I think its always wise for young couples, considering having children, to reflect back on their own early lives and profoundly and with integrity communicate why they have chosen to share their lives together, and their fears, hopes and aspirations for a child that may join their family. These discussions can really help in dissolving many undesirable influences and allow for a much more conscious conception. More basic advice would include planning your conception during a vacation in a natural environment that appeals to you. Try to plan your vacation so that ovulation falls somewhere in the middle so you have had plenty of time to unwind. When you are desirous of conceiving begin talking with your baby as though he or she is already with you, even long before you will actually conceive. Understand that you are already becoming a threesome instead of a twosome, so that consciousness starts right at the beginning.

These practices make all of your child's later life transitions much, much easier. On a broader level, we are creating a generation of humans who will be much more aware of the universality of man, of the oneness of life, and of the connectedness of continents, races, creeds and colors. Then those things that divide us as nations will slowly melt away. I really believe that this is entirely possible, and that it starts with conscious conception.