Prenatal and perinatal psychology
Prenatal and perinatal psychology are often discussed together to group the period during pregnancy, childbirth, and through the early stages of infancy.
The role of prenatal and perinatal psychology is to explain the experience and behavior of the individual before birth, postnatal consequences, and the lasting effects on development that occur during this time period.
[1] Although there are various perspectives on the topic, a common thread is the importance of prenatal and perinatal experiences in the shaping the future psychological development.
Meanwhile, there is a great number of scientific studies which show clearly that behaviour, perception and learning is already developed before birth.
The hindbrain regulates unconscious automatic functions, the midbrain is a relay center for sensory and motor nerve impulses, and the forebrain is essential for processing incoming information.
If this neural tube does not close completely, the fetus may have a birth disorder called spina bifida.
In the case of spina bifida myelomeningocele, the fetus may experience changes to their brain structure among other developmental problems.
By week 20 of pregnancy, the area of the brain that is responsible for the awareness of the fetus's five sense begins to develop.
While the other structures and organs of the fetus are mostly formed by this point, the brain continues to develop and only weighs two-thirds of what it should at birth.
This not only causes the fetus to be vulnerable to negative physiological and psychological effects as a result of no prenatal care, but it also creates insecure attachment of the mother towards the fetus during the prenatal stage which can then translate to insecure attachment in the perinatal stage.
Parents and guardians who are in stable relationships have greater capability to respond to infants needs and provide more secure attachments in turn.
Parents and guardians who are depressed are less likely to make eye contact with their infant, show variety in facial expressions, or convey emotional activity.
When the new stimulus is identified by the fetus as different from the old one, it releases a new pattern of reaction, e.g. accelerated frequency of the heart.
In 1991 a study demonstrated the acoustic habituation by recording the heart frequency of foetuses in the 29th week of gestation.
Nevertheless, some psychoanalysts explicitly write that pre- and perinatal aspects are responsible for certain symptom formations, among them Otto Rank, Nandor Fodor, Francis J. Mott, Donald Winnicott, Gustav Hans Graber and Ludwig Janus.
They assume the existence of perception in several sense modaliaties, states of asphyxia, fears and stress, which are stored and can be remembered after birth under certain circumstances.
The manifest prenatal content of dreaming or fantasizing of swimming under water while breathing, being inside of a cave, fighting with underwater monsters – are interpreted as re-projections in time onto the early phase.
[28] Janus assumes that in many psychoanalytical approaches there can be found contentual and phenomenological aspects close to prenatal psychology – but without explicit references.
Janus wrote of the "hidden attendance of the prenatal existence" in the works of psychoanalysts such as Sandor Ferenczi, Carl Gustav Jung, Melanie Klein, Bela Grunberger, Françoise Dolto and others.
In the light of such assumptions he interpreted cultural aspects, e.g. he understood Christian fantasies of the hell as being based on aversive intrauterine situations.
Rank believed that a "primal fixation" with the prenatal state is the root of all neuroses and character disorders[33] and developed a process of psychoanalysis based on birth experiences.
[37] Also psychosomatic symptoms (headaches, breast- and breathing problems and feelings of getting choked) were interpreted as possible consequences of birth experiences by Winnicott.
In his book The Search for the Beloved: A Clinical Investigation of the Trauma of Birth and Prenatal Condition of 1949 the British-American psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor (1895–1964) traced certain forms of anxiety back to unprocessed and repressed birth experiences following Rank's assumptions, who had been his psychoanalyst.
[38] Fodor interpreted dreams, experiencing the lack of oxygen, claustrophobia and sexual disorders and their etiology, which he explained by assuming specific pre- and perinatal experiences.
Francis John Mott (1901–1980) was a disciple of Fodor and the first author who concentrated on the placenta as the first object of the fetus.
Material emerging from sessions of psychedelic psychotherapy using LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs was the foundation for research into the enduring effects of pre- and perinatal experiences in adult life conducted by Frank Lake, Athanasios Kafkalides (1919–1989) and Stanislav Grof.
Lake and Grof independently developed breathing techniques, following Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) as an alternative to the use of psychedelic drugs, which was subject to considerable legal difficulty from the mid-1960s onwards.
A related technique called Rebirthing was developed by psychotherapist Leonard Orr in the 1970s, and Core Process psychotherapy trainees relive presumed birth trauma as part of their training.
The US-American social scientist Lloyd deMause (born 1931) compiled in his essay from 1981 the psychoanalytic approaches to prenatal mental life as well as the physiological findings of the human ontogenesis concerning fetal development.
Her study use equally the methods of academic psychology together with the hermeneutics of psychoanalysis, what makes it unique in the scientific landscape.
