ANXIETY AND THE BIRTH PROCESS
By Lenny Gibson, PhD
The notion that human life begins at birth is historically common in the West. In modern medical history John Locke, an English physician and major Western philosopher in the 17th century, described the mind of a baby as an “empty cabinet” that only gets furnished after birth with experiences from the world. Locke’s doctrine prevailed up to the middle of the 20th century. Stanislav Grof revolutionized medicine by suggesting that a baby’s experience begins earlier than at birth, at least during late stages of gestation. What happens before and during the birth process, he further claimed, can have consequences for people’s later psychology.
Since Grof’s largely psychological discoveries, others have added some physical ones, such as that the human biome grows from bacteria a baby picks up when passing through its mother’s vagina. Enlightened obstetric nurses now know to wipe a mother’s vagina after birth with gauze and then wipe the baby with it. If this is not done, children are prone to partial deafness and asthma. Researchers have also established that babies seem to become familiar with the sounds of their mother tongue as well as develop taste preferences in utero.
For most of human history birth was a supremely dangerous time. Modern medical practice, including teaching doctors to wash their hands, has alleviated considerable birth mortality. But medical intervention has also altered the historic experience of birth. Since the 1950s for births in the United States, the incidence of C-section has increased from 3-4% to currently more than 30%. In Brazil, among the wealthy, C-section is above 60%.
This essay emphasizes Grof’s discovery from psychedelic research that anxiety is an inescapable accompaniment of human birth. It disagrees, however, with the common characterization of anxiety as a psychological disease. Rather, it sees ordinary anxiety as a more or less normal human condition. Various meditative and psychotherapeutic methods have been developed to ameliorate anxiety. Holotropic Breathwork offers a method that notably is not a prescription for a disease but is a therapeia with classical philosophical significance.
Grof says that the influence of birth experience on later life depends on how a growing child is treated by family and environment. Further research, especially on Cesarean birth, must address that question. This essay maintains that the metaphysical paradigm that models scientific cause will importantly govern success of future studies.
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