Significant studies of the psychological effects of birth trauma began in the fifties, but even now after many decades, the idea that people have lifelong psychological and physical problems due to a traumatic birth is rejected by the overwhelming majority of obstetricians and psychiatrists.
What does the future hold for such acceptance? It will be years and perhaps decades before the realities that birth traumas can cause physical and mental ills are accepted by either professionals or the general public.
But even if these difficult truths are recognized, the solution to the problem -- the re-living of birth traumas in regression therapies -- will probably continue to remain on the fringes of medicine and psychiatry for the foreseeable future.
-- From the Fear of Death: Dying in the Birth Canal by John A. Speyrer
Controversial new truths in science are at first laughed at -- then vehemently argued against -- they often are finally accepted by new generations and even occasionally considered as being self-evident. Such was the case of the reality that persons can relive their pre- and peri-natal traumas. This hesitancy of acceptance by many psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, neurologists and obstetricians is frustrating, but it is the normal process in the history of science [ See Primal Therapy: A Revolutionary Shift in the Paradigm of Psychology by Agustin Gurza ].
Will the history of the recognition of the reality of psychological birth trauma follow that course? The idea that repressed pain from birth trauma can be processed by a patient in psychotherapy is still being argued against, but some pioneers have already made it to the third plateau. I wonder, however, if the concept will ever have more or less universal acceptance in the professional community.
Understandably, it remains difficult to believe that such traumas are so potent despite the massive evidence already available. The usual way one accepts such a truth is to have the experience itself. But this can only be self-assuring and lacks scientific proof which would convince others. It is similar to having a religious conversion experience in that it is difficult to convey the personal meaning of the experience to others. For example, the religious or God experience is only subjective reality which some scientists explain as a neuro-biological event. [See Neuro-Electromagnetic Fields, Osama bin Laden and the Regressive Psychotherapies ]
Early psychologists and physicians who reported that their patients were reliving birth and intrauterine trauma included Otto Rank (1929), David Winnicott (1958), Nandor Fodor (1949), D. B. Cheek, Leslie LeCron (1968), William Emerson(1979), David Wambach (1978) David Chamberlain (1980), Raikov (1980), Stanislav Grof (1981), Frank Lake (1978), Arthur Janov (1971), Thomas Verny , Leonard Orr, Ray Feher, Ron Hubbard, David Cheek, Leslie Lecron, Liley, Mott, Bowlby, Peerbolte, Winnicott, Fairbairn, and many others.
I had originally planned this article to be about the three major theoreticians of regressive psychotherapies who initially were reluctant to accept the fact that birth trauma could be re-experienced in therapy despite the insistence of their patients that they were indeed reliving their births. However, I was unable to determine if Stanislav Grof had been initially reluctant to accept pre- and peri-natal regressions as "real."
Psychiatrist Stanislav Grof began using LSD with his clients in his native Czechoslavakia in the late nineteen fifties. Perhaps I could find no early material by Grof about this issue because, like his clients, he had also experienced his own birth and intrauterine events during LSD training sessions. [Details of his personal LSD pre- and peri-natal regressions are in his book, The Adventure of Self-Discovery, 1988, in the section, Encounter With Birth and Death: Dynamics of Perinatal Matrixes, Chapter One, pps. 11-37]
Dr. Grof was initially reluctant to report his and his patients' findings in LSD research. He writes that he shared ". . . the data in their true form, including the challenge that they represent to our common sense and to scientific thinking." In Realms of the Human Unconscious (1975), he "decided to take the risk of attacks, fierce criticism, and possible ridicule for the sake of integrity and accurate reporting." (p. 242). His research covered not only reliving aspects of one's birth and pre-birth experiences , but also other transpersonal (a term he coined) experiences.
When all use of psychedelics was declared to be illegal in the 1960s, he began using a form of non drug therapy he named holotropic breathwork. The therapy engaged, to a lesser degree, these same types of experiences of which pre- and peri-natal trauma is a major component.
Dr. Grof wrote:
"Current neurophysiology denies the possibility of birth memories; the reason usually given is the lack of maturity of the not yet fully myelinized cerebral cortex of the newborn. However, the existence of authentic perinatal experiences cannot be denied; the frequency of their occurrence and paramount clinical significance should serve as an incentive for brain researchers to review and revise their outdated theories."
-- The Adventure of Self-Discovery , p. 8.
Clinical psychologist Arthur Janov, the discoverer of primal therapy, had acknowledged, but not emphasized, the reality of birth trauma in his first book, The Primal Scream, 1970. When more and more clients claimed they were reliving they birth in therapy he had consulted professional experts in the field. Birth primals were not possible, he was assured.
Janov wrote in his latest book, The Biology of Love:
The notion of birth trauma may seem completely fanciful, whimsical, or mystical to outsiders; I also found it hard to believe at first. Years ago I told one patient that if he ever again mentioned that he relived birth, I would discharge him. I observed it in patients for two years before I came to accept it, mostly because I had discussed it with neurologists who told me such a thing was impossible. p. 219
One unfortunate effect of this appeal to experts was a serious rift (circa 1974) which occurred at Janov's Primal Institute in Los Angeles, between those therapists and patients who believed in the reality of birth primals and those who did not. Some who left the L.A. Institute opened the Denver Primal Center and other primal-oriented therapy centers. This division was almost inevitable as it is difficult or impossible for therapists who have not experienced their own birth traumas to support their clients during pre- and peri-natal regressions.
LSD was discovered by a Swiss pharmaceutical company in 1953. In the early fifties, samples were sent to various psychiatric research units. Physician and theologian, Frank Lake enthusiastically embraced its use because he noticed that the impact of the drug helped spill the contents of the unconscious mind. He noted that the drug specifically helped to lift repressed memories of infancy. But, it was the reliving of birth trauma which he witnessed in his patients which was to guide his research for the rest of his life.
He explained:
"I was assured by neurologists that the nervous system of the baby was such that it was out of the question that any memory to do with birth could be reliably recorded as fact. I relayed my incredulity to my patients, and, as always happens in such cases, they tended thereafter to suppress what I was evidently unprepared, for so-called scientific reasons, to believe. But then a number of cases emerged in which the reliving of specific birth injuries, of forceps delivery, of the cord round the neck, of the stretched brachial plexus, and various other dramatic episodes were so vivid, so unmistakable in their origin, and afterwards confirmed by the mother or other reliable informants, that my suspicion was shaken." Lake. Clinical Theology, p. xx - quoted in Maret, op.cit.
In his article, Birth Trauma, Claustrophobia and LSD Therapy, Lake wrote:
"I am confining this report to a summary of the statements made by these patients when they believed themselves to be re-experiencing their actual birth. The exact status of this experience as "reality" of "fantasy" is obviously an open question. Most of you here are familiar with the way in which under LSD patients will themselves distinguish between the facts and sensations of infancy, and the interpretations, often quite mistaken, which they put upon those events at the time. This distinction between sensation and interpretation is fairly clear in their accounts of birth abreaction."
He continues:
"I confess that from 1955 to 1958 under the sway of neurological opinion about the a priori impossibility of sensation and memory being served by an as yet undeveloped nervous system with unmyelinated tracts, I resisted my patients' attempts to tell me that they were re-experiencing birth, almost as if they were trying to bring my scientific work into disrepute. In any case, we were keenly following up under LSD the roots of separation anxieties, dread and the schizoid position, going for confirmation and elucidation to Bowlby, Winnicott and Fairbairn."
Referencing an LSD therapy followup questionnaire made by Dr. Donald Ball and Prof. K. Rawnsley, Dr. Lake writes:
"These statements made by patients who believed themselves to be re-experiencing their actual birth, cannot convey the sense of immediacy and actual re-enactment which are so vivid and realistic as to be compelling, particularly to some of my obstetrical colleagues who have sat with me."
Lake did not seem as interested in the access of transpersonal material as did Grof and in 1970 he discontinued the use of LSD in his clinical work with patients. He had experimented with Arthur Janov's primal therapy with its then deep breathing techniques and had found them as effective as, or superior to, LSD therapy.
Of possible interest is that, Dr. Lake in, "The Work of Christ in the Healing of Primal Pain" writes that Grof "began to work with LSD-25 in 1956, two years after I did myself." In "Studies in Constricted Confusion", Lake writes that "We both began to use LSD as a catalyst to psychotherapeutic insight in 1953."1
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1In a
web video, Dr. Grof mentions that in 1954, before he had completed his medical studies, he was a volunteer "sitter" in the psych ward clinic for others undergoing LSD sessions. In 1956, after graduation, he was able to have his own LSD sessions at the medical school. In the video, he explains that the experiences he had during his LSD sessions at the Prague clinic were to change both his future personal and professional life.
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