Welcoming Consciousness: Supporting Babies’ Wholeness from the Beginning of Life, An Integrated Model of Early Development
by Wendy Anne McCarty.
First ePrinting, 2004. Available from the author at www.wondrousbeginnings.com. 171 pages.
Brief review by David B. Chamberlain, Ph.D., Nevada City, California
This unique work is an intellectual milestone--the first attempt to update and integrate current developmental theories with the clinical data of prenatal and perinatal psychology. She does this in just 129 pages plus 34 pages of topical bibliographies for further study.
A warm biographical thread runs through this work as McCarty shares the career path, academic training, and personal experiences that led to this synthesis. She credits our conference at Newport Beach in 1988 as a turning point in coming to see birth from the baby’s point of view. A second thread readers will enjoy are the sparkling clinical samples in chapters II and IV that compelled her to outline a larger paradigm of baby mind and spirit.
Her major objective is critical analysis of current theory and practice in early development and infant psychiatry which appear out of touch with clinical findings in prenatal psychology. McCarty honors the special contributions of somatic psychology, transpersonal psychology, and Ken Wilber’s integral psychology, and further asserts that from conception babies have both transcendent and human perspectives, learn and communicate using nonlocal consciousness, and interact with omni-awareness of parent’s feelings and intentions. Based on early conditions held in implicit, subconscious memory, babies form holographic blueprints of trauma that cry out for resolution.
McCarty finds a continuity of the sense of self as shown before conception by Elisabeth Hallett, during children’s Near-Death experiences by Melvin Morse & Paul Perry, and validated in children’s recall of past lives by both Ian Stevenson and Carol Bowman. An intriguing Table compares the characteristics of the transcendent human with the biological human, exposing the shortcomings of the Newtonian model which has had such a profound effect on medicine, psychology, and early development models.
Acknowledging the multidimensional nature of ourselves and our babies has profound advantages, she writes, allowing for richer levels of connection and communication--in contrast with earlier interventions that were parent-oriented and babies were “talked about” or “done to.” In the baby-centered therapy that McCarty has helped to create there is the promise of greater resonance with more of who the baby is as a whole person.
