Journals

Recent research across various disciplines, including attachment theory, neuroscience, developmental psychology, and pre and perinatal psychology, suggests the importance of redefining parenting effectiveness to include empathic attunement. In light of this research, the importance of prenatal education and training for mothers in body-centered contemplative practices, due to the resulting potential for the development of empathic attunement and the corresponding impact on the developing mind/brain of their children, is discussed.

Pregnancy as a feminine initiation becomes conscious to a woman when she engages with her pregnant imagination through dreams, art, emotions, and somatic changes. If the woman acknowledges her emotional and psychological reactions arising from core archetypal patterns, a “conscious pregnancy” occurs. Three stages of the initiation are outlined: Gateway, Attending, and Passage. Focusing on the Attending stage, three key psychological components are explored: shadow, syzygy, and simultaneity. Viewing the prenatal psyche through C.G.

In order to validate external perceptions there are clear criteria in the natural sciences as to what is known and what is not known. In psychology we are dealing with internal perceptions, where the boundary between knowledge and non-knowledge cannot be so clearly defined due to the subjectivity of the observer. However, during the past hundred years, a culture of validation of internal perceptions has been developed in psychoanalysis and other psychotherapies by means of controlled self experience and supervision.

In this issue of JOPPPAH we connect strongly with one of the primary ancestors of our field, psychoanalysis, and find there relevance and wisdom that informs and challenges us to consider all perspectives in what constitutes pre- and perinatal psychology today. We find that psychoanalysis is not only an ancestor, but a current explorer in this realm. Nora Swan-Foster brings the Jungian perspective in with an in depth look at pregnancy as feminine initiation.

Repairing the broken bond between a mother and her child is relatively easy when one knows how to do it. The four-stage protocol presented here involves (I) suspecting that there is a bonding problem, (II) searching for the cause, (III) metabolizing the painful feelings, and (IV) creating an alternative birth. The therapy is short, quick, and effective. Eight cases are presented as examples.

This article identifies an issue within the discipline of prenatal and perinatal (PPN) psychology, namely that the field currently consists of individual practitioners’ modalities without empirical validation around treatment efficacy. The goal undertaken was to integrate the PPN literature related to adult psychotherapy into a coherent and practical model to serve as a guide for students and professionals that could also be empirically tested.

Dr. Bobbi Jo Lyman passed away on May 4, 2011. For nearly two decades, she passionately devoted her life work to the field of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology (PPN) and the message that our earliest life experiences are of vital importance.

This paper will focus on the infants and young children who underwent surgical procedures without anesthesia prior to 1987, the standard of practice at the time, and the lifelong consequences that remain unrecognized and untreated in this population. Relevant historical context unique to this phenomenon in the human story is critical to understanding the protocol by which the medical profession determined care for the infant. The review of the neuroscience of trauma and memory focuses on primary sensory and affective capacity.

The somatoforn cluster of behavioral disorders is the single most frequent class of unexplainable problems found in primary care medical settings today. What is known about these disorders is that there are physiological, social, and psychological variables that need to be considered. What is not known is how a person develops a propensity toward having physical symptoms as their primary complaint. The author suggests that human beings are classically conditioned when faced with intolerable emotional experiences in the womb or during birth.