And Now, Love is a biographical documentary with an appeal to psychology students and patrons interested in World War II. Although its patient-testimonial scenes edge into an infomercial, filmmaker Jill Demby Guest’s handsomely produced biographical documentary pays tribute to the largely unsung “holistic psychoanalysis” of the late author and therapist Dr. Bernard Bail. He had an extraordinary life, as a centenarian, healer, philosopher, painter, World War II vet, and POW. Demby Guest’s film strives to tie those disparate threads together—holistically, one might say.
As a bomber navigator over Europe, Dr. Bail saw astounding brushes with death, including his own. After his second bailout from a crippled warplane, Bail was captured by the Axis, and he feared for his life as an American Jew. But he was treated well in a German hospital and had a secret, platonic affair with a nurse named Irmgard (recounted in his memoir Irmgard’s Flute).
After liberation from a concentration camp, Bail studied to be a psychotherapist. His Los Angeles-area work—teaching at UCLA and elsewhere, in addition to his own practice—coincided with an interval in American medicine comparable to McCarthyism, when a traditional Freudian establishment (whose high-profile patients included Marilyn Monroe) hunted and ousted “Kleinians,” the Sigmund deniers, from academia. Bail said he fell victim to such a purge, despite not being formally Kleinian (but he did defy tradition by treating the terminally ill, formerly dismissed as a fruitless endeavor).
Rather than the stale “Oedipus Complex” dear to Freudians, Bail conceived of a universal syndrome in which a mother’s inherited pain, centuries of female abuse and oppression, are passed genetically to every developing fetus, creating pathologies in adulthood—and this in a world where power grabs and greed guarantee more wars like the one Bail witnessed. Bail himself had an unsuccessful relationship with his own mother, who, to his recollection, was trapped in an arranged Orthodox marriage.
Supporters speak glowingly of Dr. Bail’s compassion and insights (and the old guy dances the tango well, closing on his 99th year). Considering how his theories synergize with feminism, it is strange no voices from that realm are heard, nor does anyone raise religious doctrines of original sin or Judaism’s “Shekinah,” the sacred feminine (early on someone told Bail he should be a rabbi, which Bail took as anti-Semitism). One might even say, without disrespect if possible, that a similar therapeutic concept underlies Scientology—only those are slain aliens inside you, not untold female trauma.
Peter Coyote narrates, cementing a relation to Ken Burns’ iconic chronicles of wartime and peacetime. Considering how few titles in the psychoanalytical field have crossover appeal, not to mention romance, war, and tango dancing, And Now, Love merits attention, whether Dr. Bail’s theories become widely accepted or not.