Pre- and Perinatal Experience: an extract from Rowan’s The Future of Training in Psychotherapy and Counselling

It seems clear that there is such a thing as pre- and perinatal experience. Let us just present some of the evidence for that. Some people still do not believe that babies can remember their own birth, but this is because they have not read the research by people like David Chamberlain (1998), a highly respected psychologist who has written very helpfully about these matters. Similarly some people still do not believe that the foetus has personal experiences in the womb, but this is because they have not read the research by Alessandra Piontelli (2002), which uses camera evidence to show that twins react to one another in the womb in ways that feature later in the conscious interactions of the same individuals as infants and children. Some people still do not believe that the effects of the birth experience cannot affect later life, but this is because they have not read the research by Stanislav Grof (1980) or Frank Lake (1980) which shows with a wealth of detail how there are four different stages in the birth process, and how traumas at any of these stages produce observable effects in adult life.

What tends to happen is that some very early event causes panic. This panic gives rise to a form of defence. This defence works sufficiently well at the time, and the person gets by for the moment. When the next emergency arises, panic is again dealt with by the same defence which worked before—but this defence then becomes part of the character structure of the person, and they are stuck with it. It gets to be too good. It protects all too effectively, cutting the person off from their real experience.

Because of the emphasis of much of this work on early trauma, people sometimes think it is going to put all one’s problems down to one trauma, happening just once in one’s life. Of course traumas are seldom as dramatic as this. The most common causes of mental distress are simply the common experiences of childhood—all the ways in which our child needs are unmet or frustrated. This is not necessarily a single trauma, in the sense of a one-off event—that is much too simplistic a view. Rather, we would say with Michael Balint (1968) that the trauma may come from a situation of some duration, where the same painful lack of “fit” between needs and supplies is continued.

Historically, this approach is close to early Freud, the early work of Reich (who placed great importance on the body being directly involved in therapy), and Arthur Janov (1983). But all of these adopted a medical model of mental illness, which Primal Integration rejects. As Thomas Szasz (1961) pointed out long ago, neurosis is only a metaphorical sickness, not a disease in the true sense of the word.

As soon as one gets down into the early roots of mental distress, deep and strong feelings come up because the emotions of early life are less inhibited, less qualified, and less differentiated than they are later. In other words, they are cruder and clearer. And so the whole question of the importance of catharsis in psychotherapy arises here.

Catharsis means the expression of strong emotions. It makes sense to say that catharsis has two related but separate components: one is cognitive, and relatively intellectual—the recall of forgotten material; the second is emotional and physical—the discharge of feelings in deep sobbing, strong laughter, or angry yelling. But in the kind of work we are interested in here, it seems better to be more specific, and to say that catharsis is the vigorous expression of feelings about experiences which had been previously unavailable to consciousness (Nichols & Zax 1977). This lays more emphasis upon the necessity for the emergence of unconscious material.

Much of the thinking behind Object Relations theory in psychoanalysis (Gomez 1997) is compatible with this. The internal objects of Melanie Klein (Hinshelwood 1989) are very much the product of very early experience, and since the idea was proposed, a vast amount of work has been published about it.

Most of the trainings available today ignore pre- and perinatal experience, and they should not. Anyone who believes in the unconscious and has not read the book on it by Stanislav Grof (1979) can have only a very limited notion of what riches are to be found in the unconscious.

Extract from Chapter 9 “Dangerous Omissions” in John Rowan (2005), The Future of Training in Psychotherapy and Counselling, London: Routledge.

This article appeared in the Summer 2005 IPA Newsletter.