Frank Lake

Frank Lake (1914 to 1982) was one of the pioneers of Pastoral Counseling in the U.K. In 1962 he founded the Clinical Theology Association, whose primary aim was to make clergy more effective in understanding and accepting the psychological origins of their parishioners’ personal difficulties. However, the training seminars in pastoral counselling, which he began in 1958, eventually enlisted professional and lay people in various fields, of both sexes, and of every denomination. Many thousands of people have passed through the seminars.

Dr Lake   was born on 6 June 1914 in Aughton, in Lancashire. His parents were strong Christians. His father, John, was both a stockbroker in Liverpool, and the organist and choir master in their Parish. His mother, Mary, had trained as a teacher. Frank was the eldest of three sons.

He studied medicine at Edinburgh University, graduating with diplomas in medicine and surgery in 1937. With missionary work in mind, he trained in parasitology at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and took up an appointment with Church Mission Society to serve in India. As World War 2 went on, he was recruited into the Indian Medical Service, from which he emerged with the rank of lieutenant-colonel in 1945. His fiancée, Sylvia Smith, joined him in 1944, and they were married in Poona, where the eldest of their three children, David, was born. In 1946 Frank was posted to the parasitology department of the Vellore Medical Centre.

Dr Lake changed directions from parasitology to psychiatry  after he was appointed Superintendent of the Christian Medical College in Madras. When setting up a psychiatric unit there, he became concerned with ‘a variety of imponderable emotional factors which I had never been taught to think about seriously before’. In the early fifties, he undertook re-training as a psychiatrist, first at The Lawn, Lincoln, then at Scalebor Park Hospital in Burley, Yorkshire. His allegiance was to the Object-relations school of psychoanalysis. He believed that the first trimester of embryonal development was the most important part of one's life. He was encouraged by the exploration of pre- and perinatal influences of Fodor, Peerbolte, Mott, Winnicott and Swartley. He was critical of Freud's about face having first backed Rank's emphasis on the birth trauma.

Lake was a contemporary of Stanislav Grof and both were researching the abreactive qualities of LSD. LSD 25 was invented by a Swiss pharmaceutical company in 1943 had been sent to a number of psychiatric research clinics for study. He witnessed frequent abreactions of birth trauma in his patients and this was to guide his research for the rest of his life. He said,

"I was assured by neurologists that the nervous system of the baby was such that it was out of the question that any memory to do with birth could be reliably recorded as fact. I relayed my incredulity to my patients, and, as always happens in such cases, they tended thereafter to suppress what I was evidently unprepared, for so-called scientific reasons, to believe. But then a number of cases emerged in which the reliving of specific birth injuries, of forceps delivery, of the cord round the neck, of the stretched brachial plexus, and various other dramatic episodes were so vivid, so unmistakable in their origin, and afterwards confirmed by the mother or other reliable informants, that my suspicion was shaken... At the end of the sixties the value of Reichian and bio-energetic techniques broke upon us, and we discovered that deeper breathing alone was a sufficient catalyst for primal recapitulation and assimilation. Nothing more 'chemical' than that was necessary, so we stopped using LSD. Clinical Theology, xx, quoted in Maret, op. cit."

His LSD research was conducted from 1954 to 1970. In the later decade he evaluated many new techniques including transactional analysis, gestalt therapy, and re-evaluation counseling.

Frank Lake died from pancreatic cancer in his early 80's.

In 2006, Emeth Press reprinted Lake's Clinical Theology: a Theological And Psychiatric Basis to Clinical Pastoral Care which is now available at www.emethpress.com.