| Ellie Epp workshop index | Embodiment Studies web worksite index |
The cognitive significance of birth We're mammals. We come into being cell by cell inside an already existing human body. As we grow from two cells to many, the means by which we perceive and feel construct themselves in reference to a small, tight, wet, and instantly provident bedroom. Then comes an extraordinary passage, violent and outrageous, in which immensely strong waves of force bear down upon us to eject us into what must seem a cataclysmically foreign world. How does this central fact of human embodiment inscribe
itself in our physical and thus our psychological being? Can we detect its
traces in our intuitions, our metaphors, our habits of feeling? Our religions
and philosophies? As a root both of brutality and of hope, structural traces
of birth and prenatal life are visible in poetry, philosophy, science, spirituality.
This workshop is an introduction to a form of self-investigation which thus
also becomes cultural investigation.
The cognitive significance of birth Around 1981-1982, when I was in my early 30s, I was back in the city after three years living alone in a farmhouse in the country where I grew up. It had been quite a deep, desperate time, trying to be an artist - trying to be a much better artist - and now I was rounding up what I had found in that time. As always, I had piles of journals and notebooks. In them I had been writing dreams, reading notes, notes about times with friends and lovers, notes about place and weather, and notes about my visual work in film and slides. When I went back over these journals I picked out phrases that had a particular glow about them. I collected long lists of these phrases, and as I worked through these lists a realization formed. I had a breakthrough that was the beginning of a lot of my work since then. The realization was double. One part of the realization was about the common meaning and origin my set of collected phrases seemed to have. I saw in my materials evidence that we are conscious before and during birth, and that our existence before and during birth is registered strongly but often unconsciously in our physical structure. The other part of the realization was about human cultures in general: that a lot of what persuades and attracts us in religion and philosophy and other abstract domains is hidden or coded reference to bodily experiences such as prebirth, birth, sex, and so on. I understood these realizations to be a strong feminist resource. Religious and philosophical ideas are mostly formed and promoted by men, who have used them to maintain hierarchies in which they can dominate. If the prestige and plausibility of these abstract ideas is actually given by everyone's unconscious memories of bodily experience, learning to decode these ideas can give women a confident clarity in face of a lot of forms of cultural prestige. My guess also was that whatever it is that keeps the actual sources of prestige and persuasion in abstract ideas unconscious is the same thing that needs to suppress women and children domestically and politically. Needing to suppress prebirth and birth memories will carry with it a need to suppress those who are associated with those memories: women and children. Understanding the embodied roots of abstract ideas can carry us into understanding dissociation in human bodies and human cultures. - So the two workshops I'm giving this residency may seem to be about two different topics but they are really two parts of one topic. This workshop, The cognitive significance of birth, is about a particular aspect of the cognitive significance of embodiment, and the next workshop, Metaphor on Thursday afternoon - 3 o'clock in the media room - is more generally about how body-minds form their abstract ideas on concrete templates which are hidden structures of bodily memory. This workshop begins with an overview of the astounding ignorance of fetal and infant cognition that has been promoted in Western and other medical theory. The fact that this ignorance has maintained itself against easily observable evidence tells us there must be very powerful dissociation going on, dissociation not only in individual practitioners but culture-wide.
Investigating the cognitive significance of birth is one way of investigating embodied/embedded epistemology: that is, of investigating how to understand mind and knowledge as functions of physical bodies who are part of the physical world.
What I mean by structure is an orderedness of physical materials. A cell or a flower is/has a structure. We accomplish cognitive tasks - perceiving, imagining, thinking, reading, making art, etc - by means of structures of our physical bodies. In psychology 'cognitive structure' tends to be used to speak metaphorically about patterns we can notice in ways of speaking or writing, or of making images, or of conducting personal relations, etc. These 'structures' are results of actual physical structures in the body. The structures we are come from of evolution, from developmental events, and from environmental/social learning. Structures may be retained through time (memory), and they may be re-evoked through speech or other representational means.
The structures by whose means we have conscious experience are a subset of the structures by whose means we know and are intelligent. Physical structures that are the means of nonconscious knowing may include tissue, organs, etc, as well as parts of the nervous system including the brain. What we say and write can sometimes show evidence of these nonconscious structures that are the means of our thinking, feeling and expression.
Basic assumption: babies are conscious long before they are born. Different parts of the nervous system mature at different rates. Sensory structure matures early enough so babies are able to see, hear, and feel touch before they are born. The unborn's capacity for these activities can be seen in [his or her] physical development. At the sixteenth week of pregnancy, for example, the child becomes sensitive to light, though vision develops slowly in the dim, confined prenatal environment. By the fourth month [*] has developed basic reflexes and a repertoire of facial expressions. At five or six months [*] is as sensitive to touch as a newborn. From the 24th week on she hears all the time -- listening to the noises in [*] mother's body, and to voices, music, etc. Between 28 to 34 weeks [*] brain's neural circuits are as advanced as a newborn's and the cerebral cortex is mature enough to support consciousness; a few weeks later brain waves, including those of REM dreams, become distinct. Thus, throughout the third trimester she is equipped with most of the physiological capability of a newborn. During the 1995 APPPAH Congress in San Francisco, David Chamberlain shared a case that exemplifies the consciousness of prenates. In this case, a baby was undergoing amniocentesis. Videotapes of the amniocentesis showed that when the needle was inserted into the uterus, the baby turned toward the needle and batted it away. Thinking that they had seen an aberration, medical staff repeated the needle insertion, and again, the baby batted the needle away. There are other anecdotal reports that babies routinely withdraw from needles as they are inserted into the uterus. From these observations, it is safe to conclude that babies are very conscious of what is happening around them, particularly with respect to events that have impact on them personally.
Against all evidence it has been assumed that fetuses and newborns don't feel pain. In fact they feel pain very acutely. Body movements demonstrate a frantic discomfort, struggling, squirming, trying to get away. Vital signs confirm that the system of the baby is in an uproar, with heart racing, respiration galloping. Hormonal changes confirm the stress alarm: cortisol and beta endorphin streaming into the blood stream and saliva. II. Perinatal events and consequences >>> Leboyer's image of the newborn being held upside down by a doctor who is showing him to observers in the delivery room. The adults are smiling obliviously and the baby is very obviously in agony <<<
The process of birth is a blend of compression, contractions, torques, and traction. When fetal size, presentation, or neurologic immaturity complicates this event, such intrapartum forces may lead to tissue damage, edema, hemorrhage, or fracture in the neonate. The use of obstetric instrumentation may further amplify the effects of such forces or may induce injury alone." There may be skull fractures, cranial nerve damage from pressing against a bone, hemorrhages, shoulder dislocations, broken collar bones, in breech deliveries bruises to the scrotum or labia.
(Caesarian sections produce a very sudden birth for the baby, which can be very shocking. One moment they're in the familiar comfort of the womb, the next they're being pulled out into the bright clinically lit operating room, while the mother (who is still supplying them with oxygen, blood and hormones) is anaesthetized and cut, causing her to produce the hormones of stress.) Surgery without anesthetics (Instead of anesthetic, the babies had typically been given a form of curare to paralyze their muscles for surgery, making it impossible for them to lift a finger or make a sound in protest.)
There is a growing body of empirical studies showing significant relationships between birth trauma and a number of specific difficulties; violence, criminal behaviour, learning disabilities, epilepsy, hyperactivity and child, alcohol and drug abuse. Thomas Verny, the Canadian psychiatrist, notes some of these in The Secret Life of the Unborn Child: WASHINGTON (AP) - For years, doctors operated on premature babies without anesthesia in the belief that even if the infants felt the pain, they would not remember it. New research with rats suggests that the body does remember the pain and is forever changed. A study using newborn rats at the National Institutes of Health found that painful trauma that mimics medical procedures commonly performed on premature infants caused the rats to become much more sensitive to pain as they grew older. The reason is that pain causes the developing nervous system of the very young to grow more nerve cells that carry the sensation of pain to the brain, NIH researcher M. A. Ruda said. "We found that there are more nerve endings that fire and transmit the (pain) information," said Ruda, the first author of a study appearing Friday in the journal Science. "These animals later were more sensitive and had a greater response to pain." neurobehavioral observations confirm how much the pain disturbs behavior. Normal sleep cycles can go into reverse. Seizuring, tremoring, spitting up, trunk arching, finger-splaying, fisting, and refusing consolation are just some of the specific measures which manifest the reality of pain. Student example: asphyxiation when i crowned, it became evident that something was wrong. i was blue. the umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck. eerie when you consider that my biggest problem is my inability to talk and that i most frequently use the metaphor "it's like i'm being choked" to describe the phenomenon. i also forget to breathe, or find myself breathing so shallowly that i get headaches and throw up. Student example She stoned me in her womb Hippy children. There's a science fiction book by Mary Staton, an Ace paperback, called From the legend of Biel. It is about a girl given an overdose of psychogenic chemicals in the womb, which make her both more brilliant and more confused. My student was a powerful intuitive, a sublime writer, but often found herself lost in very dark states. Fetal alcoholics and drug addicts, crack babies. Acting out 1998 Medline abstract: Swedish study, males with complicated births 5 times more likely to commit suicide violently http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/317/7169/1346 [The mother] attempted several abortions, most often by using the hooked or curved end of a coat hanger. As a child, her baby was periodically sadistic and self-destructive. The manifestations of his sadism bore a striking resemblance to his mother's abortion attempts, although he was consciously unaware of them. He burned himself with cigarettes and gouged private parts of his body with sharp metal objects. His favorite sadistic instrument was a fishing hook, but he complained he could never buy ones that were big enough. As a young adult he was arrested thirty times for assault, and his modus operandi was reminiscent of his mother's attempts to abort him. He usually assaulted his victims when they were sleeping, by using heavy braided wire with a wire hook welded on the end. Alice Miller, web Anyone addressing the problem of child abuse is likely to be faced with a very strange finding: it has been observed again and again that parents who tend to maltreat and neglect their children do it in ways which resemble the treatment they endured in their own childhood, without any conscious memory of their early experiences. Fathers who sexually abuse their children are usually unaware of the fact that they had themselves suffered the same abuse. It is rather in therapy, even if ordered by the courts, that they can discover, sometimes stupefied, their own history. And realize thereby that for years they have attempted to act out their own scenario, just to get rid of it. The explanation of this fact is that information about the cruelty suffered during childhood remains stored in the brain in the form of unconscious memories. For a child, conscious experience of such treatment is impossible. If children are not to break down completely under the pain and the fear, they must repress that knowledge. But the unconscious memories of the child who has been neglected and maltreated, even before he has learned to speak, drive the adult to reproduce those repressed scenes over and over again in the attempt to liberate himself from the fears that cruelty has left with him. Former victims create situations in which they can assume the active role. In this way the emotion of fear can indeed be avoided momentarily-but not in the long term, because the repressed emotions of the past don't change as long as they remain unnoticed. They can only be transformed into hatred directed towards oneself and/or scapegoats, such as one's own children or alleged enemies. I see this hatred as a possible consequence of the old rage and despair, never consciously felt, but stored up in the body, in the limbic brain. Student example I worked with a student who was using art-making to learn principles of art therapy in her own case. She would make paintings that brought up preverbal memory, then would have an emotional crash and work through it in various ways that included writing about it. This is from my notes: This morning it hit her worse than ever - she called it being mangled - bones crushed - I suggested it might be birth memory - she said she just needed to be quiet - I said yes that's what newborns need - she wrote back much later and said she wasn't sure it was birth and sent an image that had a ragged womb shape with bits like sickle moons floating in it. I said had her mother attempted an abortion. She said she didn't know but the story in the cognitive significance of birth notes about the man who lacerated himself because his mother had tried to abort him had struck her. She had actually lacerated her own cervix with a knife. Then she sent an astonishing image of what looks like womb as blast furnace. Her mother later confirmed that she had attempted abortion more than once.
It is not only the mother who is releasing hormones during labor and delivery. During the last contractions, the fetus is also releasing a high level of hormones of the adrenaline family. One of the effects of this is that the baby is alert at birth, with eyes wide open and pupils dilated. Mothers are fascinated by the gaze of their newborn babies. It seems that this eye-to-eye contact is an important feature of the beginning of the mother-baby relationship, which probably helps the release of the love hormone, oxytocin. Both mother and baby are in a complex hormonal balance that will not last long and will never happen again. Physiologists today can interpret what ethologists have known for half a century by studying the behavior of animals: where the development of the capacity to love is concerned, there is a critical, sensitive period just after the birth. In conventional birth procedures this bonding period has often been consequentially interrupted.
Leboyer's advocacy of birth with minimal violence, low light, silence, soft fabrics, letting the umbilicus finish pulsing, care with touch, massage, the Leboyer bath. See notes from Leboyer's Birth without violence in the appendix to this handout.
III. Cultural evidence of birth-related structure >>> [poem] what will we know <<< What sorts of more abstract cognitive structure are evidence of pre and perinatal physical structuring events? What are the culture-wide consequences of suppression of birth-related and prenatal memory? Ineffable structure and cultural elaboration: art, philosophy, ideology, torture, war, gender relations Ineffability and early somatic memory Memory of early events can be quite different in character from later memory: We have only the physical body state and we are unconscious of the rest of the event. All the aspects that we as adults past the age of five call memory are missing visual recall, nor auditory, nor smell, nor taste components of a memory from that time, but instead we experience a change in the state of our physical body: some muscle tension, some autonomic nervous system change (e.g., respiration or heart rate change), or some proprioceptive sensation of a change of position that corresponds exactly to the original event. (This is doctored quote:) Given our natural propensity to create meaning to an event that happens to us, when these structures arise in us, we create plausible explanations and act on those symbolic replacements for those seemingly un-retrievable original events. Many childhood phobias can be traced to the effects of intrauterine and birth trauma, including fear of the dark, of elevators, and of entering tunnels. The author believes that a large proportion of psychosomatic illnesses, including headaches, asthma, etc. can be directly traced to such traumas as can suicide, criminality, psychosis, and anorexia nervosa. Likewise, the process of humanmankind's cultural development has its origins in repressed pre and peri-natal traumas. Coming of age ritual puberty rites and the roots of mythology are also traced to these unconscious beginnings, as are the movements of yoga exercises which represent states of fetal consciousness. Much poetry, literature, philosophy, and art also have such origins.
Garden of Eden story. "a suckling's symbiosis with mother as a social or religious ideal" Is hope of an afterlife a memory of the last time there was an afterlife we died to one world and were born into another? Artaud from Art and death: Who, in the depths of certain kinds of anguish, at the bottom of certain dreams, has not known death as a shattering and marvelous sensation unlike anything else this suctionlike rise of anguish whose waves cover you and fill you to bursting as if driven by some intolerable bellows. An anguish which approaches and withdraws, each time more vast, each time heavier and more swollen. It is the body itself that has reached the limit of its distension and its strength and which must nevertheless go further. It is a kind of suction cup placed on the soul, whose bitterness spreads like an acid to the furthest boundaries of perception. And the soul does not even possess the ability to burst. For this distension itself is false. Death is not satisfied so cheaply. In the physical sphere, this distension is like the reverse image of a contraction which must occupy the mind over the whole extent of the living body. 121 The fear that swoops down on you tears you apart to the very limit of the impossible, for you know very well that you must cross to that other side for which nothing in you is ready, not even this body, above all this body which you will leave behind without forgetting either its substance, or its density, or its impossible asphyxia. - just then some unknown moisture from a lake of iron or stone or wind refreshes you incredibly and consoles your mind, and you flow, you create yourself by flowing to your death, to your new state of death. This water that flows is death, and from the moment that you contemplate yourself with tranquility, that you register your new sensations, it means that the great identification is beginning. You were dead and now once again you find yourself alive - ONLY THIS TIME YOU ARE ALONE. In any case, dreams like these cannot lie. They do not lie. And these sensations of death placed end to end, this suffocation, this despair, this torpor, this desolation, this silence, don't we see them in the magnified suspension of a dream, with this feeling that one of the faces of the new reality is perpetually behind one? But at the bottom of death or of the dream, the anguish begins again. this anguish, like a rubber band that is stretched and suddenly hits you in the throat, is neither unknown nor new. The death into which one slipped without being aware, the fetal contraction of the body, that head - it had to pass, that head that carried consciousness and life and consequently the supreme suffocation, and consequently the most excruciating pain - it also had to pass through the smallest possible opening. But it torments to the limit of the pores, and this by dint of shaking and writing with terror, has as it were the idea, the feeling that it is swollen and that its terror has taken shape, that it has burgeoned under the skin. Belief in hell From Leboyer: The infant howls aloud. And why should this surprise us? Its eyes have just been burned. Newborn babies arrive in our world as if on a carpet of thorns. They'll adapt to it. By withdrawing into themselves, by deadening their senses. But when they first land on these thorns, they howl. This hell does not come at the end of our life. It is here. At the beginning. Hell is what the infant must suffer through to arrive here among us. The infant is crazed with pain. And for a simple reason: suddenly nothing is supporting his back. If our deliberate intention was to teach the child that it had fallen into an indifferent world, a world of ignorance, cruelty and folly, what better course of action could we have chosen? í Intimations in mythology and spirituality: the notion of an underworld or an 'inner world' The idea of an underworld associated with darkness. the depths of the grounds of their being Lucid art is the visual expression of an artist's inner world that opens to the viewer a perspective of their own inner world. Talk of an 'inner world' contrasted with the world around us which is thought of as the 'outer world'. This manner of speaking is very common, and I've wondered why that is. What is the actual contrast being referenced when we use the two-worlds metaphor? How does this metaphor set us up to think in one way rather than another? What we mean by 'inner world' is, in simplest terms, imagining experience, simulational experience, which strictly speaking is not located the way perceptual experience is - not placed. So why do we conceive of it as 'inner' and 'a world'? 'Outer world' - what's it outside of? Our own body, presumably. But what's inside our body is part of that world, made of the same kind of stuff, not a different world at all, and not experienced as being outside the world we see; instead, experienced as being immersed in it. So what makes the 'inner world' metaphor compelling to us? What is the intuitive source of its plausibility? For each of us there was literally an innerness where we found ourselves beginning to be. We leave that interior womb-place and emerge into a world startlingly, overwhelmingly, different from the one we have known as we formed, and that is literally outside. Intimations in psychology Talk about the 'threshold of consciousness'. Jung "As far as I can see there is everywhere this idea of two orders." Talk of a 'buried self'. Intimations in cultural ritual
Intimations in art - from Virginia Woolf's diary (thank you Sheila Spremulli) Oh, it's beginning it's coming - the horror - physically like a wave swelling about my heart - tossing me up. I'm unhappy, unhappy! Down - God, I wish I were dead. Pause. But why am I feeling this? Let me watch the wave rise. I watch. Failure. Yes; I detect that. Failure, failure. (The wave rises.) Wave crashes. I wish I were dead! I've only a few years to live I hope. I can't face this horror any more - (this is the wave spreading over me). This goes on; several times, with varieties of horror. Then, at the crisis, instead of the pain remaining intense, it becomes rather vague. I doze. I wake with a start. The wave again! The irrational pain: the sense of failure; generally some specific incident. At last I say, watching as dispassionately as I can, Now take a pull of yourself. No more of this. I reason. I take a census of happy people & unhappy. I brace myself to shove to throw to batter down. I begin to march blindly forward. I feel obstacles go down. I say it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. I become rigid and straight, & sleep again, & half awake & feel the wave beginning & watch the light whitening & wonder how this time, breakfast & daylight will overcome it. Does everyone go through this state? Why have I so little control? It is not creditable, nor lovable. It is the cause of much waste & pain in my life From Mishima's semi-autobiographical Confessions of a Mask, recounting his birth (thank you Mike Alvarez): However that may have been, there was one thing I was convinced I had seen clearly, with my own eyes. That was the brim of the basin in which I received my first bath. It was a brand-new basin, its wooden surface planed to a fresh and silken smoothness; and when I looked from inside, a ray of light was striking one spot on its brim. The wood gleamed only in that one spot and seemed to be made of gold. Tongue-tips of water lapped up waveringly as though they would lick the spot, but never quite reached it. And, whether because of a reflection or because the ray of light streamed on into the basin as well, the water beneath that spot on the brim gleamed softly, and tiny shining waves seemed to be forever bumping their heads together there.
Politics: the practice of power relations. The power relations surrounding birth reveal an extraordinary cultural blind spot. Eg: Leboyer's image of the newborn. Question: why do we damage people's intelligence at the gate? Why were people willing to believe what they were told about infants, rather than noticing what's completely visible if they are willing to see it? Why are medical practitioners still so callous to infant suffering and functional damage? Are these blindnesses themselves results of dissociation from birth memory? Is the general derogation of children, women and nature a consequence of such dissociation?
Ecopsychologist Paul Shepard talks about environmental disregard in terms of developmental crippling: The outdoors is also in some sense another inside, a kind of enlivenment of the fetal landscape 26 ontogenetic [developmental] crippling pragmatic success culture feeling its way to support itself by perversions of development, "manipulating anxiety in the child in a hundred ways" 31 "To what extent does the technological/ urban society work because its members are ontogenetically stuck?" "The culture of urban technicity works out its own deformities of ontogenesis. Some of these are legacies, while others are innovative shifts in the selective perpetuation of infantile and juvenile concerns." 33 "the child perceives poor nurturing as hostility a perception that is either denied and repressed (as in idealists) or transferred in its source so as to be seen as coming from the natural world instead of from the parents (as among cynics) there arises an opposition that is itself an extension of infantile duality. Fear and hatred of the organic on one hand, the desire to merge with it on the other; the impulse to control and subordinate on one hand, to worship the nonhuman on the other; over differentiation on one hand, fears of separation on the other all are two sides of a coin." 34-5 "the private cost is massive therapy, escapism, intoxicants, narcotics, fits of destruction and rage, enormous grief, subordination to hierarchies that exhibit this callow ineptitude at every level, and, perhaps worse of all, a readiness to strike back at a natural world that we dimly perceive as having failed us." 35 The West is a vast testimony to childhood botched to serve its own purposes, where history, masquerading as myth, authorizes men of action to alter the world to match their regressive moods of omnipotence and insecurity." 36-7 Psychology of self-actualization, group dynamics and personal therapy antagonistic to the modern state, which needs fearful followers Thus, the culture counters these identity therapies, and the philosophical realism of a cosmopolitan and sophisticated kind that could result from them, with prior wounds damage to the fetus and neonate in hospital birth, through the anxieties of the distraught mother; asphyxiation; anesthetics; premedication; the overwhelming shock of bright lights, noisy surroundings, and rough handling; impairment of delivery by the mother's physical condition and delivery posture; and separation of the infant from the mother all corroding the psychogenic roots of a satisfactory life in a meaningful world." 38
IV. Personal implications: coming through The ecologically harmonious sense of self and world is latent in the organism, in the interaction of the genome and early experience. Shepard 39 Taking an interest in the facts of embodied life. Cultural critique. Recognizing evidence of unconscious memory and dissociation. Dissolving holding structures by feeling dissociated pain.
Cognitive significance of birth workshop - bibliography
APPPAH Newsletter and the Journal of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health Prenatal cognition
The experience of birth
Impacts and therapy
Birth trauma historical material
Cultural effects of birth structure
Reading notes for The cognitive significance of birth workshop - many of these quotes are taken from the web and unattributed Artaud [1896-1948], from Art and death: Who, in the depths of certain kinds of anguish, at the bottom of certain dreams, has not known death as a shattering and marvelous sensation unlike anything else this suctionlike rise of anguish whose waves cover you and fill you to bursting as if driven by some intolerable bellows. An anguish which approaches and withdraws, each time more vast, each time heavier and more swollen. It is the body itself that has reached the limit of its distension and its strength and which must nevertheless go further. It is a kind of suction cup placed on the soul, whose bitterness spreads like an acid to the furthest boundaries of perception. And the soul does not even possess the ability to burst. For this distension itself is false. Death is not satisfied so cheaply. In the physical sphere, this distension is like the reverse image of a contraction which must occupy the mind over the whole extent of the living body. 121 The fear that swoops down on you tears you apart to the very limit of the impossible, for you know very well that you must cross to that other side for which nothing in you is ready, not even this body, above all this body which you will leave behind without forgetting either its substance, or its density, or its impossible asphyxia. - just then some unknown moisture from a lake of iron or stone or wind refreshes you incredibly and consoles your mind, and you flow, you create yourself by flowing to your death, to your new state of death. This water that flows is death, and from the moment that you contemplate yourself with tranquility, that you register your new sensations, it means that the great identification is beginning. You were dead and now once again you find yourself alive ONLY THIS TIME YOU ARE ALONE. In any case, dreams like these cannot lie. They do not lie. And these sensations of death placed end to end, this suffocation, this despair, this torpor, this desolation, this silence, don't we see them in the magnified suspension of a dream, with this feeling that one of the faces of the new reality is perpetually behind one? But at the bottom of death or of the dream, the anguish begins again. this anguish, like a rubber band that is stretched and suddenly hits you in the throat, is neither unknown nor new. The death into which one slipped without being aware, the fetal contraction of the body, that head it had to pass, that head that carried consciousness and life and consequently the supreme suffocation, and consequently the most excruciating pain it also had to pass through the smallest possible opening. But it torments to the limit of the pores, and this by dint of shaking and writing with terror, has as it were the idea, the feeling that it is swollen and that its terror has taken shape, that it has burgeoned under the skin. Childhood knows sudden awakenings of the mind, intense prolongations of thought which are lost with advancing age. In certain panics known to childhood, certain monumental and unreasonable terrors which are haunted by the sense of an extra-human menace, it is incontestable that death appears like the tearing of a nearby membrane, like the lifting of a veil which is the world, as yet formless and insecure. This manacled death in which the soul writhes, straining to regain a state that is at last complete and permeable, in which everything would not be shock, the sharpness of a delirious confusion that ratiocinates endlessly upon itself, tangled in the fibers of a mixture that is both intolerable and melodious, in which everything would not be sickness, in which the smallest place would not be constantly reserved for the greatest hunger for a space that is absolute and this time definitive, in which this pressure of paroxysms would suddenly be pierced by the feeling of a new level, in which from the bottom of a nameless confusion this stirring, snorting soul would sense the possibility, as in dreams, of awakening to a clearer world, after boring through it no longer knows what barrier and would find itself in a luminosity where at last its limbs would unfold and where the world's partitions would seem infinitely fragile. This soul could be reborn; yet it is not reborn; for although soothed, it feels that it is still dreaming, that it still is not used to that dream state with which it does not manage to identify itself. At this instant in his mortal reverie the living man, having arrived at the impasse of an impossible identification, withdraws his soul with a violent gesture. There he is, thrown back on the bare level of the senses, in a bottomless light. Outside the infinite musicality of nerve waves, exposed to the boundless hunger of the atmosphere, to the absolute cold. ---- [note to text] everything that promotes confusion without destroying the surging force of thought, everything that upsets the relations between things by giving the subverted mind an even greater vision of truth and violence, all these things provide access to death, put us in touch with those more refined states of mind which are the proper ambience of death. Dreams are true. All dreams are true. I have a sense of asperities, of landscapes that seem sculptured, of undulating stretches of ground covered with a kind of cool sad, whose meaning is: "regret, disillusionment, abandonment, separation, when shall we meet again?" Nothing resembles love so much as the appeal of certain landscapes seen in dreams, as the encircling of certain hills, of a kind of material clay whose shape is as if molded to the thought. When shall we meet again? when will the earthy taste of your lips come again to brush the anxiety of my mind? The earth is like a whirlpool of mortal lips. What are we to do with this angel at our side who has never been able to appear? Will all our sensations remain forever intellectual, and will not our dreams succeed in igniting one soul whose feeling will help us to die? What is this death in which we are forever alone, in which love does not show us the way? * Pioneers [Leboyer's introduction] Behind this book are many influences undisclosed in its pages. The work of Arthur Janov, Stanislav Grof, and others who allow to happen whatever is going to happen when people let go has unearthed many (I imagine thousands by now) experiences in adults in which they go through the experience of being born. In what ways this adult birth sequence, which I have personally witnessed over two hundred times, is connected with one's physical birth is almost entirely unknown. But connected it does seem to be. * Leboyer Birth without violence 1974 But aren't cries always an expression of pain? Isn't it conceivable that the baby is in anguish? What makes us assume that birth is less painful for the child than it is for the mother? And if it is, does anyone care? we're all so determined to believe that this 'thing' can't see, can't feel Something in us resists, doesn't wish to hear, refuses to believe. We close our eye, we guard our precious peace of mind. Clearly we find it intolerable to look to see Birth is a tidal wave of sensation, surpassing anything we can imagine. The infant howls aloud. And why should this surprise us? Its eyes have just been burned. Newborn babies arrive in our world as if on a carpet of thorns. They'll adapt to it. By withdrawing into themselves, by deadening their senses. But when they first land on these thorns, they howl. This hell does not come at the end of our life. It is here. At the beginning. Hell is what the infant must suffer through to arrive here among us. The infant is crazed with pain. And for a simple reason: suddenly nothing is supporting his back. If our deliberate intention was to teach the child that I had fallen into an indifferent world, a world of ignorance, cruelty and folly, what better course of action could we have chosen? The torture of an innocent. What futility to believe that so great a cataclysm will not leave its mark. Its traces are everywhere in the skin, in the bones, in the stomach, in the back. In all our human folly. In our madness, our tortures, our prisons. In legends, epics, myths. In the scriptures. How is it to be accomplished? Only with the most passionate attention. Oxygenated by the umbilicus, sheltered from anoxia, the baby can settle into breathing without danger and without shock. In addition, the blood has plenty of time to abandon its old route (which leads to the placenta) and progressively to fill the pulmonary circulatory system. During this time, in parallel fashion, an orifice closes in the heart, which seals off the old route forever. Entering life, what the baby meets is death. And to escape this death it hurls itself into respiration. The act of breathing, for a newborn baby, is a desperate last resort. Already the first conditioned reflex has been implanted, a reflex in which breathing and anguish will be associated forever. What should our hands say? exactly what the mother and her womb have been saying. Not the womb as it was during final labor, not the violent womb that expels and banishes. But the womb of the early, happy days. The womb that pressed slowly, tenderly. The womb that embraced. The womb that was pure love. What we are doing here is softening the pain of an almost total upheaval by carrying the past forward into the present. We are giving the child company on its journey. At this point, out of consideration for her child, out of real not egocentric love, a woman will simply place her hands on its body. And leave them there, immobile. Hands that are not animated, agitated, trembling with emotion, but are calm and light. Hands of peace. Through such hands flow the waves of love withich will assuage her baby's anguish. What the baby feels is intolerable anguish: "I am alive, but I have killed my mother. I am here, but my mother is gone." This seems incredible to us. and yet it is so. Those who have relived their birth can testify to it. [the woman touching a baby that has come out of her Schammstelle] The old distinction between good and bad, clean and dirty, permissible and forbidden, has dissolved. The hands supporting the child in the bath soon feel the little body relax in complete abandon. Everything that was fear, stiffness, tension, now melts like snow in the sun. everything in the infants body that was still anxious, frozen, blocked, begins to live The child opens its eyes wide Immense, deep, grave, intense, these eyes say: "Where am I? what has happened to me?" We feel in this baby such utter concentration, such astonishment, such depth of curiosity The child is playing. And not ten minutes have gone by since it was born. Later on, every time it is reminded of this sudden sense of total immobility, of this solitude, the same panic will seize it again, and it will start to howl once more, its anguish stemming not so much from being left alone as from believing that the world is once again dead. Birth without violence breeds children who are strong, because they are free, without conflict. Free and fully awake. * Chamberlain In 1988 David Chamberlain, an American psychologist practicing in San Diego, California, published his groundbreaking book Babies Remember Birth. Also translated into many languages it has now been reprinted and updated under the title The Mind of Your Newborn Baby providing scientific evidence that in the womb fetuses experience a wide variety of emotions; that the random noises newborns make are conscious attempts to communicate; and that cognition and reason in newborns are more highly developed than we previously believed. During the 1995 APPPAH Congress in San Francisco, David Chamberlain shared a case that exemplifies the consciousness of prenates. In this case, a baby was undergoing amniocentesis. Videotapes of the amniocentesis showed that when the needle was inserted into the uterus, the baby turned toward the needle and batted it away. Thinking that they had seen an aberration, medical staff repeated the needle insertion, and again, the baby batted the needle away. There are other anecdotal reports that babies routinely withdraw from needles as they are inserted into the uterus. From these observations, it is safe to conclude that babies are very conscious of what is happening around them, particularly with respect to events that have impact on them personally. * Emotional communication Communication between mother and her unborn child takes place in several ways: physically (through hormones, for example), in behavior (the child's kicking, the mother's job and environmental situation), and sympathetically or intuitively (through love, ambivalence, dreams). One of the main means for communication of maternal attitudes and feelings is the neurohormones the mother releases, which increase when she is under stress. These substances cross the placenta as easily as nutrients, alcohol, and other drugs do. In moderation these hormones cause physiological reactions in the child which stimulate [*] neural and psychological systems beneficially, but in excess they can affect the developing body adversely. Increases in maternal neurohormones -- such as adrenaline, noradrenaline, and oxytocin -- do, however, heighten the child's biological susceptibility to emotional distress by altering the portion of the child's autonomic nervous system which controls physiological processes affecting personality structure. An excess of such maternal hormones has been related to low birth weight, reading difficulties, behavior problems, and gastric disorders. * Remembering and forgetting birth memories retrieved from the sixth, and particularly the eighth month, showing that the brain is operating near adult level. One of the hormones which induce labor, oxytocin, has been found to wipe out memory. Animals given oxytocin, for instance, were unable to remember tasks they had been trained to perform perfectly before. During labor the child's system is flooded with this chemical which acts as a hormonal waters of Lethe. Another maternal hormone, ACTH (adrenocorticotropin hormone), which regulates the flow of stress hormones, has the opposite effect, helping to retain memory. Thus, each time the mother becomes frightened or stressed, "large amounts of the hormone flood into the child's system, helping [*} to retain a clear, vivid mental picture of her upset and its effect on [*]" (p. 187). State-dependent learning -- events experienced along with specific physical and emotional arousal which can be recalled if those same emotions or physical circumstances recur -- is also involved in the retrieval of prenatal memories. * Paraneurological memory? ... what I am postulating are two separate but complementary systems serving our memory faculties. One depends for its functioning on the establishment of the mature neurological networks that comprise the CNS-ANS [central nervous system -- autonomic nervous system] and is operative by the sixth month after conception The other is a paraneurological system. We are not as yet cognizant of the laws governing this system. It seems to me that the sympathetic modality predominates at the beginning of one's life and then gradually diminishes. At times of great stress, such as for example danger to a loved one or imminent death, it reappears. It may also manifest itself in altered states of consciousness induced by, for example, hallucinogenic drugs, hypnosis or psychotherapy. -- pp. 191-2 * Birth and physical trauma Physical trauma as a consequence of physical stresses of birth include: 1st Stage Problems: (from the beginning of true labor to full dilatation of the cervix) - Often, the strong contractions will begin without sufficient cervical dilatation, and the exit from the womb isn't big enough for the babies head. The baby is forced, head downwards, onto the unyielding cervix and pelvic bones, and the large forces produced by such repetitive movements can traumatize the baby's soft, flexible cranium, as well as cause the infant physiological and psychological stress. 2nd Stage Problems: (the period from full dilatation of the cervix to birth) - As the baby leaves the womb, it enters the birth canal where it has to undergo a number of twists and turns before it finally arrives into the world. These twists and turns help to mold the baby's head. Problems can occur if either the baby's passage is too fast, when the head doesn't have enough time to be properly molded, or if it becomes stuck and it's too slow, the head and body can be squashed and the baby can become quite stressed. * Forceps and Vacuum Extraction These delivery aids have particular problems associated with them. With forceps, often there is some degree of compression and bruising of the soft boned infant head, which can be very severe. With vacuum extraction, there is often a traction distortion of the head which can stretch the whole of the cranium and dura in a way that nature never intended. Caesarian delivery can present a number of problems: 1) If a normal delivery has been attempted, but not successful, the baby will have already gone through the problems associated with a difficult 1st stage 2) Caesarian sections produce a very sudden birth for the baby, which can be very shocking. One moment they're in the familiar comfort of the womb, the next they're being pulled out into the bright clinically lit operating room, while the mother (who is still supplying them with oxygen, blood and hormones) is anaesthetized and cut, causing her to produce the hormones of stress. 3) Caesarian delivery can also cause as many problems as a difficult 2nd stage, because the head never becomes correctly molded, missing the natural process that normally occurs as the baby passes through the birth canal. * RD Laing The environment is registered from the very beginning of my life; by the first one (cell) of me. What happens to the first one or two of me may reverberate throughout all subsequent generations of our first cellular parents. That first one of us carries all my 'genetic' memories" (p. 30). He goes on to say, "It seems to me credible, at least, that all our experience in our life cycle, from cell one, is absorbed and stored from the beginning, perhaps especially in the beginning. How that may happen I do not know. How can one cell generate the billions of cells I now am? We are impossible, but for the fact that we are. When I look at the embryological stages in my life cycle, I experience what feel to me like sympathetic vibrations in me now...how I now feel I felt then.(p 36) * Paul Shepard Nature and madness Why do whole cultures of people destroy their habitats Human institutions express in implicit philosophy of nature a change to a more hostile stance between five and ten thousand years ago A kind of failure in some fundamental dimension of human existence A kind of fury in the whole of christendom Turning everything into something human-made and human-used Seed of normal ontogeny present in all of us Shape of all otherness grows out of maternal relationship Its second ground, while in its mother's arms The outdoors is also in some sense another inside, a kind of enlivenment of the fetal landscape 26 pragmatic success culture feeling its way to support itself by perversions of development "manipulating anxiety in the child in a hundred ways" 31 Over the centuries major institutions and metaphysics might finally celebrate attitudes and ideas originating in the normal context of immaturity, the speculative throes of adolescence, the Freudian psychosexual phases, or even earlier neonatal or prenatal stages." 31 ontogenetic crippling a suckling's symbiosis with mother as a social or religious ideal changing the world becomes an unconscious, desperate substitute for changing the self. we then find animal protectionism, wild-area (as opposed to the rest of the planet) preservation, escapist naturism, and beautification, all of which maintain two worlds, hating compromise and confusing complicated ecological issues with good and evil in people." 32 "To what extent does the technological/ urban society work because its members are ontogenetically stuck?" "The culture of urban technicity works out its own deformities of ontogenesis. Some of these are legacies, while others are innovative shifts in the selective perpetuation of infantile and juvenile concerns." 33 "It's members cling to childhood, for their own did not serve its purpose. To those for whom adult life is admixed with decrepit childhood, the unfulfilled promise cannot be abandoned. To wish to remain childlike, to foster the nostalgia for childhood, is to grieve for our own lost maturity because then it was still possible to move, epigenetically, toward maturity." 33-4 "child perceives poor nurturing as hostility a perception that is either denied and repressed (as in idealists) or transferred in its source so as to be seen as coming from the natural world instead of from the parents (as among cynics) there arises an opposition that is itself an extension of infantile duality. Fear and hatred of the organic on one hand, the desire to merge with it on the other; the impulse to control and subordinate on one hand, to worship the nonhuman on the other; over differentiation on one hand, fears of separation on the other all are two sides of a coin." 34-5 "But the private cost is massive therapy, escapism, intoxicants, narcotics, fits of destruction and rage, enormous grief, subordination to hierarchies that exhibit this callow ineptitude at every level, and, perhaps worse of all, a readiness to strike back at a natural world that we dimly perceive as having failed us." 35 " much of the unconscious life of the individual is rooted in interaction with otherness that goes beyond our own kind, interacting with it very early in personal growth, not as an alternative to human socialization, but as an adjunct to it. the fetus is suspended in water, tuned to the mother's chemistry and the biological rhythms that are keyed to the day and seasonal cycles. The respiratory interface between the newborn and the air imprints a connection between consciousness (or wisdom) and breath. Gravity sets the tone of all muscle and becomes a counterplayer in all movement. The individual continues to act from some crucial moment of the immense concerns of immaturity: separation, otherness, and limitation. Wrestling with them in juvenile and primary modes, even the adult cannot possibly see them holistically. Some of these omissions and impairments enhance the individual's conformity to certain cultures, and the culture acts to reward them, to produce them by interceding in the nurturing process, and so to put a hold on development. In this way, juvenile fantasies and primary thought are articulated not only in the monosyllables of the land scalper, but in philosophical argument and pontifical doctrine. Traditional feelings may be escalated into high-sounding reason when thrown up against a seemingly hostile and unfulfilling natural world. The West is a vast testimony to childhood botched to serve its own purposes, where history, masquerading as myth, authorizes men of action to alter the world to match their regressive moods of omnipotence and insecurity." 36-7 Psychology of self-actualization, group dynamics and personal therapy antagonistic to the modern state, which needs fearful followers Thus, the culture counters these identity therapies, and the philosophical realism of a cosmopolitan and sophisticated kind that could result from them, with prior wounds damage to the fetus and neonate in hospital birth, through the anxieties of the distraught mother; asphyxiation; anaesthetics; premedication; the overwhelming shock of bright lights, noisy surroundings, and rough handling; impairment of delivery by the mother's physical condition and delivery posture; and separation of the infant from the mother all corroding the psychogenic roots of a satisfactory life in a meaningful world." 38 "The ecologically harmonious sense of self and world is latent in the organism, in the interaction of the genome and early experience." 39 * Orthodox views of birth trauma Janus Ludwig . . . the primal therapy pioneered by Arthur Janov has shown with what intensity perinatal primal pain is present within every one of us. "This trauma leads to feelings of fear, panic, anger, despair, and shame, and feelings of total shock and annihilation, as if one were being torn apart." Ludwig Janus [from web discussion of The Enduring Effects of Prenatal Experience: Echoes from the Womb ] Why should human births be traumatic while other species have relatively easy entries into the world? The author lays the blame on our evolutionary development which, he believes, necessitates that we are born earlier than otherwise would be good for us. It is our upright posture and large brain which demand an earlier birth. So, instead of the birth experience being an exciting adventure, our "coming into the world is regularly accompanied by a mixture of uncertainty, desperate aggression, and even fear of annihilation." These feelings reveal themselves in our mythology, fairy tales, and even our expectations of a hereafter. (Heaven equates to the intrauterine experiences while hell relates to sufferings of the birth process itself.) After centuries of denial that birth is traumatic, Dr. Janus believes, recent decades of research and experiential events have revealed to us elemental truths of pre- and perinatal life. Janus discusses how Freud, Otto Rank, and other early psychoanalysts viewed the effects of birth trauma on the human psyche. The literature of pre and peri-natal traumas stresses the biographical significance of early birth experiences. Many authors believe that our feelings of death are inevitably connected to our birth traumas. These effects, the author believes, can be compensated for by the way the child is received by its parents. By reenacting or reliving our peri-natal traumas in psychotherapy, the author claims that their effects may be ameliorated. While not all types of experential therapies have equal access to these traumas, interesting examples of various therapies which can access these early traumas are discussed, including psychoanalysis, primal therapy, hypnosis, psychoanalytic regression therapy, psychedelic (LSD) therapy, holotropic breathwork, and rebirthing. Much evidence that prenatal stress produces deleterious effects is presented. Many childhood phobias can be traced to the effects of intrauterine and birth trauma, including fear of the dark, of elevators, and of entering tunnels. The author believes that a large proportion of psychosomatic illnesses, including headaches, asthma, etc. can be directly traced to such traumas, as can suicide, criminality, psychosis, and anorexia nervosa. Even the story of Superman, he writes, and the real origin of wars, have peri-natal roots. Likewise, the process of mankind's cultural development has its origins in repressed pre- and peri-natal traumas, Janus writes. Coming of age ritual puberty rites and the roots of mythology are also traced to these unconscious beginnings by the author, as are the movements of yoga exercises which represent states of fetal consciousness. He also believes that much poetry, literature, philosophy, and art also have such origins. Since this book was originally written in German (in 1991), it contains many references to German sources which would not ordinarily be available to English readers. * Classical analysis Freud's statement that all anxiety goes back originally to the anxiety at birth. Some of the first indications that babies are conscious came from the pioneering work of Sigmund Freud and the practice of psychoanalysis going back to the beginning of the century. Freud was skeptical about how the infant mind worked, but client information seemed to link their anxieties and fears to events surrounding their births. Freud theorised that birth might be the original trauma upon which later anxiety was based. - Otto Rank, an early disciple of Freud, became convinced of the reality of birth trauma and devoted himself passionately to construction of a form of psychoanalysis which worked directly with birth (see The Trauma of Birth originally written in 1924). [page xiii] In attempting to reconstruct for the first time from analytic experiences the to all appearances purely physical birth trauma with its prodigious psychical consequences for the whole development of mankind, we are led to recognize in the birth trauma the ultimate biological basis of the psychical. When Freud's associate, Otto Rank, wrote The Trauma of Birth in 1923 it was inconceivable that research over the next seventy years would bring such an open window to the hidden world of the womb and substantiate Rank's ideas. Publication of Das Trauma der Geburt und seine Bedeutung für die Psychoanalyse (1924; The Trauma of Birth) caused Rank's break with Freud and other members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, which expelled him from its membership. The book, which argued that the transition from the womb to the outside world causes tremendous anxiety in the infant that may persist as anxiety neurosis into adulthood, was seen by many members of the Viennese society as conflicting with the concepts of psychoanalysis. Following the break, which became complete in the mid-1920s, Rank taught and practiced in the United States and Europe (chiefly Paris) for about 10 years, settling in New York City in 1936. - "The ultimate solution is the separation from the analyst wherein the male patient repeats with better success his separation from his mother." [page 5] But this is by no means to be taken metaphorically in any way - not even in the psychological sense. For in the analytic situation the patient repeats, biologically, as it were, the period of pregnancy, and at the conclusion of the analysis - i. e., the re-separation from the substitute object - he repeats his own birth for the most part quite faithfully in all its details. The analysis finally turns out to be a belated accomplishment of the incompleted mastery of the birth trauma. * Exercise for tracking perinatal feeling After each of the following questions is read, close your eyes and pause to let yourself experience the answer. The first intuitive reaction is the answer, so please just allow an answer to come to you, without thinking. Sometimes no feeling is the answer. If you get an answer that feels uncomfortable, please do not change it until you have explored it. Before you begin, please close your eyes for a moment and become aware of how you feel. This can be accomplished most easily through watching how you gently breathe in and out several times. Now I would like your Whole-Self to take you back to the time after your birth when you are in a crib or, if premature, in an incubator. I would like your Whole-Self to let you experience the emotional feelings you are feeling as this newborn infant in the crib or incubator. Question: Are these familiar feelings in your life? Yes or no? As this newborn infant, I would like your Whole-Self to let you experience what are your emotional needs-not your physical needs, but your emotional needs. Question: Are those still your emotional needs today? Yes or no? Thank your Whole-Self for giving you these answers. If it feels comfortable to do so, briefly share your experiences with another person. When we ask people to focus on the feelings experienced in the crib or incubator, there are several words that almost everyone mentions: cold, alone, isolated, abandoned, rejected, shock, helpless, hopeless and powerless. People who are very mental at the expense of the emotions make conclusions such as, "I am out of control!"; "No one loves me!"; "Mother abandoned me!" We find that when people have feelings they do not like, they naturally tend to oppose, resist, deny or suppress those feelings. We say that this creates the Law of Opposition: "Whatever I am opposed to, I have to experience!" When people are opposed to what they are feeling, at a non-conscious level they make judgments against themselves. The most frequently mentioned self-judgment words are: unlovable, unworthy, worthless, unacceptable, insupportable, not good enough, inferior, inappropriate, bad, wicked, terrible, horrible, despicable, disgusting, dumb, stupid, inept, incapable, incompetent, incomplete, insecure, helpless, hopeless, or powerless. These self-judgments trigger the Law of Confirmation: "Whatever I really believe about myself I will keep proving to myself!"
|