However, the training in pastoral counselling, which he began in 1958, eventually enlisted professional and lay people in various fields from various denominations.
With missionary work in mind, he trained in parasitology at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and took up an appointment with the Church Mission Society to serve in India.
Lake changed directions from parasitology to psychiatry after he was appointed as superintendent of the Christian Medical College in Madras.
In the early 1950s, he undertook retraining as a psychiatrist, first at The Lawn, Lincoln, then at Scalebor Park Hospital in Burley, Yorkshire.
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.