Every time I speak to groups unfamiliar with this topic, I explain what PPN Psychology is and what those in the field have learned over the last hundred years. That’s right. Almost one hundred years ago Otto Rank, a favored disciple of Sigmund Freud, wrote The Trauma of Birth. Although Freud first praised the book and called it a great advance in the realm of psychoanalysis, he later withdrew his support for Rank’s ideas which he came to consider outside the boundaries of orthodox psychoanalytic theory and practice.
In the introduction to the Dover Edition of The Trauma of Birth (1993), Dr. E. James Lieberman states that Rank’s “basic point is psychological: expulsion from the blissful intrauterine state—separation from the mother—is inevitably traumatic (p. xi).” Today we know even more about the consequences of birth particularly from biological perspectives; but the psychological effects—the lasting imprints left by one’s experience both in the womb and during birth—are persistent, life-shaping and (unfortunately) little regarded among medical professionals.
PPN psychologists have been pointing to the striking number of issues that adults present that stem from experiences they had during their pregnancies (conception and gestation), at birth, and, of course, during early childhood. Dr. Thomas Verny, himself a psychoanalyst, wrote The Secret Life of the Unborn Child in 1981 telling readers that “the unborn child is a feeling, remembering, aware being, and because he is, what happens to him—what happens to all of us—in the nine months between conception and birth molds and shapes personality, drives and ambitions in very important ways (p. 15). In 1988 Dr. David Chamberlain, a psychologist, penned Babies Remember Birth and followed this book in 2013 with Windows to the Womb: Revealing the Conscious Baby from Conception to Birth. Decades of research are documented in these magnificent books, but society continues to think that babies are unfeeling, unconscious beings, incapable of remembering their earliest experiences. Therefore, those unremembered experiences must have no influence.
On the contrary PPN psychology says: babies are astonishingly awake, aware, and conscious. Babies’ perceptions and beliefs are given voices much later in life when the brain has developed to the stage when thoughts can be communicated to others in words and in ways that adults can literally understand. In the meantime, personalities have evolved to believe fundamental concepts about themselves, others, and the world itself.
Examine your own thoughts, ideas, and beliefs. Have you had the thoughts: I am not good enough. I don’t’ feel safe. I can’t trust anyone. I feel helpless. I don’t get the love that I’d like. I can’t do this by myself. . . and other self-deprecating thoughts? PPN psychologists would agree that those thoughts and beliefs began in the womb and at birth.
Your whole life, including your thoughts, feelings, and actions today, took root earlier than you may have realized. Your life has been directed by your womb and birth experiences! It’s your psychology.