Interview with Haptonomic Contact – a journal for Haptonomy & Haptotherapy. In March 2025, Harry van Nie and Astrid Mols (editors) interviewed me via Zoom about a seminar I had given.
No body without a soul, no soul without a body
Interview with Jaap van der Wal about our soul, the body, in short, the whole human being.
By Astrid Mols en Harry van Nie
Harry van Nie and Astrid Mols spoke with Jaap van der Wal, physician, anatomist, embryologist and philosopher. On November 14, he was ‘interred’ in the Hall of Honor of Prenatal Science. His mission and passion mean that, although he is advanced in years, he still gives courses and webinars worldwide about his philosophical view of the embryo. He also has podcasts in which he talks about this. It was a very fascinating meeting, in which Jaap animatedly shared his views with us.
As a doctor, anatomist, embryologist and scientist,we understand that you have increasingly embraced phenomenological biology and human science in order to build a bridge to complementary care.
‘Yes, that’s right. I started out with anthroposophy. Rudolf Steiner was my first source of inspiration. I started asking myself questions such as: what kind of beings are we humans, just bodies or more: mind and body? In that context, I was introduced to his circles by Dick van Romunde, at the time an important phenomenological scientist and anthroposophist. That’s how it started, initially it was mainly about developing anthroposophical or spiritual embryology.
Then it became apparent that many professional groups were concerned with questions about ‘mind and body’ and ‘what exactly is spirit?’. The opening line of my courses is therefore usually: “I am Jaap van der Wal. I am a scientist, an anatomist and an embryologist. I am also searching for the spirit and have found a way to do so. I would like to tell you about it and so we will build a kind of spiritual science of humanity through the embryo.”
What is “mind and body”? And does an embryo have anything to do with that? What about consciousness?
“I don’t teach anthroposophical embryology, I teach the embryology of someone who is searching for a spirit in the body. It is a search for spirituality. The question that set me on this path came from prenatal psychology in the 1970s. Professor de Batselier, a Belgian professor, asked me: “What about the brain in an embryo? How can a being with a barely present and functioning brain still have consciousness or experiences, while in prenatal psychology we notice that a human being, in the case of prenatal collisions or injuries, later develops deep unconscious traumas or blockages? What exactly happens to an embryo with a ‘mindless body’?” I learned from embryologist Blechschmidt that consciousness (or soul, or spirit – whatever you want to call it) is already at work in the embryo in a subconscious, dormant way.
It has therefore become my main theme: the search for the spirit. We are a being of soul (or spirit) and body. This idea elevates this branch of human knowledge above DNA and brain research. To reconcile a more spiritual perspective with science, you have to put on a different pair of glasses and learn to look at things differently.
As a physician, I became somewhat familiar with haptonomy through lectures by Frans Veldman and learned about it as a therapy, a treatment or a philosophy. I met him myself. That was in the ’70s, when people in medical training were still open to so-called alternative medicine. I was at the forefront of all that back then. There was a growing interest in groundbreaking thinking in medicine. That is very different now. Nowadays, the spiritual side of people is hardly recognized. In so-called neuro-genetic determinism, everything is explained in terms of DNA and the brain. And so these days I feel like I am engaged in a rearguard battle with mainstream science.
As a scientist, I know how to look for explanations and causes, but the phenomenologist looks for meaning. In psychology and psychiatry, you sometimes see a phenomenological approach. This is about the patient’s experience. It is also part of my mission to familiarize people with phenomenology. That you base your actions more on what you perceive, not on what you think. And ‘take for truth what you perceive’, so also that you take what you feel and experience seriously as a source of knowledge. Phenomenology is more of a ‘science of the heart’. As opposed to ‘the science of analytical thinking’ after Descartes.
How did you come to the soul, then?
“If you get questions like: ‘What about the mind and nervous system, and consciousness in the embryo?’, then that is the question about the soul. People often ask: ‘When does the soul come into it all?’. First we have to define what the soul is. Then you can talk about it. Is the soul something that is added or something that is created and ‘produced’ by your body, as professor Erik Scherder says: “Your brain produces your soul, your personality, your consciousness.” We used to have a mind and a soul, then we had a psyche, then we had behavior and finally we had a brain. And now mind and soul have been reduced to the concept of ‘consciousness’. We are searching for something inside us that must be different from our body.
There must be something in me that is more than just the physical brain, genes and body. That something else in you that works, thinks and feels, that something that is you, that is your soul and it is indeed something other than the body. It cannot be produced by the body, by definition. Descartes made us aware of the duality within us. And that is not something you think, he did not mean it that way, he means that it is something you experience and live within yourself. There is something in me that must be of a different order than ‘body’, otherwise I could not be aware of and experience my body. Every child asks: “Where do I come from?”. The child apparently also experiences that there is something in me that must be different from my body. Over the years I have learned that if there is such a thing as a spirit or soul, it is not a duality, but a polarity with your body. Polarity is a duality, but it is more than that; it is also a dual unity in which one pole cannot exist without the other. You can only know light because there can also be darkness. One is the reversal of the other: an opposition, but also a unity. Likewise: no spirit without a body, no body without a spirit.
The sperm cell and the egg cell are also an immense polarity. They are completely different principles and yet they belong together and in that sense are a unity. They fulfill each other and make each other whole again. You could also see mind and body as a duality-polarity: a body without a mind is inconceivable. Could it be that at conception something connects with your body, that something enters, something incarnates that apparently lets go again at the deathbed, ‘goes away’? Conception and dying are inextricably linked, only where conception connects, dying is about letting go. Dying thus appears to be the reversal of the connecting. The only difference is that at the deathbed you know who is going and at conception you do not know who or what is entering. You have to wait for the biography and it is not finished until a person dies. Only then do you know who it was. We are thus an apparition through the body and not a product of the body.
Embryology then becomes a science of incarnation. That concept is still frowned upon in science, but ’embodiment’ is often still allowed. So let’s look for ’embodiment’. You can see that an embryo gradually develops a mind and soul. It is therefore possible that mind and body – as a duality – together form the soul. Your soul, your person, your consciousness is always present as a kind of third dimension, namely an interaction of something spiritual in you and the physicality in you and that together, you could say, is your person. That is your soul! The soul as the dimension of mind AND body.
We always have a soul and a body. We are soul and our soul is psychosomatic: our soul is both spiritual and physical. But you could take that even further: could that spirit or soul possibly exist without a body? That is an option that seems logical, but of course you cannot prove it as a scientist in the sense of demonstrating it and making it ‘hard’ and measurable. You cannot prove that reincarnation exists, but as a phenomenologist you can demonstrate, and this is clearly visible if you wish to see it, that an embryo is a ‘connection’ and that conception is also a ‘connection’, and that dying is characterized by a ‘letting go’. So you see the soul as the tableau in between. My slogan is: the unity of being human is not your body, it is not really your soul either, but it is certainly not your genome, nor is it that damned brain. It is your biography, that which you bring into being, physically, socially and spiritually. That which you bring into appearance: your body is an appearance and you appear through your body.
Central to your view of the embryo is how it comes into being (incarnation), how the soul directs it and how it prepares actions for postnatal life.
‘In my view, we are an apparition based on the body. I do not come from my brain, but I come through my brain. That is why if you start tampering with my brain with medication, my personality and appearance change. If my brain is attacked by a tumor, for example, I will behave differently and become a different person, but that does not prove that my brain produces my person. Body, genes and brain are necessary but not sufficient conditions for spirit, consciousness and soul.
At conception you are not made, but you rise up, you connect, and your embryonic existence is therefore a ‘coming into being through your body’. Then I come to Rumi’s famous statement: “The body develops out of us, not we out of the body. We created our body ourselves, cell by cell we created it.” But that has been completely lost these days. You are caused by your genes and your brain, and that brain produces your personality. We now live in what I call the neuro-genetic dogma. We are the product of a brain, the brain is a product of the body.
Do you say that the soul is created in the connection in the womb or is there already a soul present?
“From the outset there is a soul (spirit), at conception, at the unification. This implies that there may even be a pre-birth, a pre-conceptional existence. That is conceivable, you can also see it if you want to. It is just as conceivable and visible as you can see someone ‘pass away’ on their deathbed. And then of course it is not about objective, let’s say Cartesian seeing, but about being able to experience the gesture phenomenologically. If you embrace this idea, then the entire embryology is in harmony with it and you see a process of embodiment, of realizing, of connecting the soul or spirit with the body, ever deeper and more intense. And there are also steps in this. The third week, for example, when you form a heart. These are all important steps in that embodiment. So you could say that during that prenatal existence you are already in the process of incarnating in your soul, in your body, and then you eventually arrive at a very important point. That means that birth is not a beginning or a starting, but that birth is (also) an end, a dying; that you die of your own accord and that a placenta is left behind. Birth can be seen as a beginning, but of the next phase.
You say in one of your podcasts that the soul also directs development.
Yes, the soul is not just that which thinks and feels in your body, a consciousness, but is also the principle that creates the body and maintains it. You created the body yourself, you maintain it and you reward your brain, ‘thread by thread’. Your body is not a spatial thing, it is a lifelong process in time. This is the most important lesson I have learned from dealing with the embryo.
I started out as an anatomist and I am an anatomist through and through, so a scientist. I made a very conscious decision to become an anatomist because I wanted to see the human being in its entirety. And thanks to the embryo, I have learned that we are not anatomy. The body is not something static and anatomical, the body is a lifelong process. That was an eye-opener for me and that is how I have overcome my anatomy through embryonic thinking: we are still embryos. I now call my course ‘The Embryo in Us’, because anatomy is thinking in terms of particles, taking things apart and reducing the whole to its elements (cells, molecules, organs) and then thinking that the body is made up of those parts. That is not true. And I am not one to say that something is not true. It is actually the embryo itself that makes it clear to anyone who wants to understand that it is not true that you are not made up of your parts, your organs or your cells. You do not start out as a cell, you start out as a single-celled body or organism and throughout your life you organize that body into organs, parts and cells.
An embryo is already human, it is not a ‘not-yet being’ but a fully-fledged human being. Just as much as a child, an adolescent or even a demented elderly person. Why is the third week so important? In that week you really arrive in your spatial body for the first time. Until then you more or less live around it. But in the third week you get what every animal has. Then you create an inner self, an inner self that can be distinguished from the outside, that is autonomous and where the soul comes into play. Where perception and consciousness become possible. That is the animal existence in us. Of course, like animals, we have a soul. This inner self is present both anatomically and psychologically. Standing upright is unique to humans. We can already see this uprightness in the embryo when the head moves backwards in deflection from its curved shape. Then you see the embryo morphologically straighten up. This straightening up returns later when you physiologically stand upright as a toddler, but it is also a psychological ‘standing up for’.
In the same way, you can interpret arm and leg movements as the physiological beginnings of later actions. You can analyze the separate parts, but they never form the complete whole – that whole is held together by the soul. Blechschmidt calls it: “The soul is not something that is added later, but from the very beginning the soul prepares itself for the creation and gestures of the body.” Your body is also behavior. Everything that you now pre-practice morphologically becomes a physiological possibility later on and even later a psychological or mental possibility. You start out as a single-celled organism and everything is already present in you in terms of possibilities. You develop throughout your entire life and must die from the previous stage in order to move on to the next. You see that the embryo must stop behaving in a certain way and then die in order to enter the next phase.
It seems to me that the concept of soul is difficult to pin down in the scientific world; you can’t point to it, you can’t grasp it?
“That is indeed the drama of Cartesian dualism and I say that honestly. The body is ponderable (weighable), hard, evident, measurable and objectively demonstrable. Spirit and soul are imponderable, which you can only experience subjectively. I can never prove that the spirit exists, but I can help you to see it, if you dare to accept it. It is quite conceivable that something works in you that manifests itself and that at a certain point also leaves that body. You even pre-practiced that at birth. For nine months you carry that placenta around with you, you live in that placenta. And, very important, that placenta is not something that has been added. No, at the end of the first week your body divides into an ‘actual body’ and a placental body. You exist in your placenta, you live and breathe there and from there you are busy shaping your body all the time. If you want to continue, you have to die out of that placental body and that is called birth. In German this is called ‘Entbindung’ (to dissolve, to separate, to let go). You do not simply come from your mother, you come from yourself. Your mother is your backup who stands behind you and helps you make that movement to die from yourself. In this way, birth is the act of dying, and dying is the act of UN-folding – dying of the previous in order to be born into the next and be able to move on. A little word joke: a German ‘unfolds’ at birth, while for the Dutchman the letting go – unfolding – only begins after dying.
You make a connection between the soul and the fascia, which also connects our entire system. Is the soul in the fascia?
‘Actually, it is Andrew Taylor Still, the founder of osteopathy, who says: “In the water and the fluids of the fascia, the soul is dwelling”. The fascia comes from the mesoderm – one of the three so-called embryonic germ layers, which I believe has been misunderstood for decades. In the third week, a “third space” arises in the embryo: the meso(derm), which is not a skin (derm), but presents our inner self. The inner weave, as Blechschmidt calls it, the primordial connective tissue from which organs later develop and in which all organs (including those from the ectoderm and endoderm) are embedded. The connective tissue, which both gives space and connects (think of body cavities and blood), thus also forms the basis of the inner self. It is also the dimension in the embryo from which embryonic processes are regulated and organized. You should not try to locate the soul, it is not somewhere, but lives and weaves in that fascia. I also always say that we should include the blood. In ancient anatomy, blood was not seen as a fluid but as a tissue, a very special connective tissue that can indeed behave like a fluid. The best organ, according to Rudolf Steiner, to incarnate in a body is of course the blood because with the blood you can go anywhere and anywhere. The blood is therefore also a fascia, a dynamic fascia.
Is that your mission, to return to the whole, in every respect?
‘We grow from the zygote, a single-celled body, in three days to the morula and two days later to the blastula of 120 cells, from which we continue to grow. Then we are already a whole and not just a collection of separate cells. The morula is not a clump of cells but a multicellular body. Just as the separate parts of a Christmas tree do not form a Christmas tree, the parts must be organized by us into a whole. We must learn to realize that in addition to the anatomical body, there is another truth that can be experienced on a daily basis. That is the truth of the whole. The whole is the primate and the (sub)parts are derived from it, not the other way around! Unfortunately, modern medicine – and therefore science – is no longer based on this. Goethe, the great phenomenologist, said it best: “To study life, you have to take it apart, but in the end you have ‘die Teilen in der Hand und fehlt ja leider nur das Geistige Band” (‘the parts in the hand and unfortunately only the spiritual bond is missing’). Nowadays, we look away from spirit, soul and life. The phenomenologist brings these elements back into focus.
1 Seeing from the perspective of René Descartes, a French philosopher. It is about seeing in dualism. I do not think thjat body and mind (spirit) are duality. they are polarity and that is One and The Third.
jaapvanderwal@embryo.nl
info@haptotherapiedehagen.nl
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