The Significance of Birth Memories

: Increasing numbers of people, from age two and upward, are remembering
their own birth. They are doing this with a variety of methods and sometimes no method at all. Although
controversial for a century, these memories can now be set in a broad empirical framework for the first time.
Narrative memories of birth are minidocumentaries of potentially great significance. Four dimensions are cited:
1) Clinical. A growing literature indicates the importance of birth in the creation of many psychological problems.
In birth memories we can see the onset of pathology and devise appropriate methods of treatment; 2)
Humanistic. Birth reports are first-person accounts of human feelings, values, virtues, and shortcomings. They
reveal how babies are affected by parents, doctors, and nurses; 3) Wholistic. Memories indicate a fully sentient,
cognitive newborn, capable of communication and intimacy; 4) Transpersonal. Because birth memories contain
so much wisdom and caring, analytical thinking and perspective, and other manifestations of higher
consciousness, they raise fundamental questions about the nature of persons.