Journal Abstracts
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Research has revealed that as early as the neonatal period infants possess innate capacities such as categorization and amodal perception that help them formulate representations of the "self and "other." This paper posits that in order to formulate these representations, the infant also requires exposure to a motivational environment that provides insight into the relationships between people.
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From memories of his prenatal life the author presents a recollection, in the form of a poetic narrative, of how he started his heartbeat. He then gives a personal and transpersonal interpretation of the narrative in the adult-life context and proposes a theory of how an unborn may start its heart and what it learns from the experience. In support of his ideas he draws on examples from mythology, a modern-day ritual and common beliefs about the heart.
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This paper focuses on the psychological aspects of prebirth and perinatal memories encoded for full term and premature infants and activated as possible pathology during adult life. It presents a brief recapitulation of the basic hypothesis that not only do human beings inherit the genetic coding of their mother and father, but also the mental and emotional states of their parents in the form of non-conscious emotional reaction patterns from the nine months of gestation including the continuum of the birth itself, as well as adjacent perinatal circumstances.
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Water has always been a powerful symbol for human beings. Water is critical to life. First, the human fetus grows in the amniotic fluid. Second, the scientific context of the 1990s suggests a new vision of Homo sapiens as a primate that, although genetically related to the chimpanzees, has adapted to a particular environment through a land-sea interface. In this paper the origins of the power of water symbolism is explored, particularly in the context of the birth process.
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In this paper, I examine narcissistic difficulties experienced by the handicapped youngster, especially to the extent that they are anchored in pre-, peri- and early post-natal experiences that were cast in the molds of parental narcissistic vulnerability and of impediments to the infantile attainment of a core sense of self. Considerations pertain to relatively generalizable consequences of infant handicap, encompassing the potential effects upon narcissism of a broad range of developmental disabilities.
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Only in the past 80 to 100 years have there been appreciable numbers of people walking on the earth without having been through the hitherto universal human experience of labor and delivery, the trip down the birth canal. In 1882 advances in surgical techniques made caesarean delivery a reasonably safe procedure for both the mother and the child. Before that, most of the mothers died.
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Many commentators have remarked that birth is a sexual experience, namely Niles Newton, Ph.D., Lewis E. Mehl, M.D., Michel Odent, M.D., N. Kalichman, M.D., Thomas Verny, M.D. and others. Thousands of young couples, too, have made the same discovery and have used their innate, sexual endowments during the conjugal act of birth in the dimly-lit seclusion of their bedrooms with delight and distinction.
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This paper presents the hypothesis that the woman's own experience of being born has an impact on how she will give birth. This impact is proposed to occur primarily through the birth story as symbol for a socialization process, in which the woman learns how to view her body and Nature and how to react to the sensations of labor. The more anxiously she reacts, the more likely that her body will hold "physiological expectations" of fear that will work against the process of birth.
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Medical and social attitudes and practices as they pertain to pregnant women and their unborn and newborn children are examined applying the scientific, the sociological, the psychosomatic and the pre- and peri-natal psychology perspectives. The case is made that hi-tech tests and obstetrical procedures adversely affect the pregnant woman and her baby. Medical interventions tend to be dehumanizing, disempowering and sometimes harmful.
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There is a growing awareness of the value of "irrational" or psychospiritual aspects of childbirth. Western psychotherapists and midwives are learning to take advantage of an openness to these aspects. These aspects are essential to shamanic healing worldwide. Shamanic tradition is explored and its advantages for pregnancy and childbirth are discussed. Healing practices among the Navajo, especially the Monsterway, are described.
