The History of Prenatal Psychology

Abstract

The history of prenatal psychology began during the last century with the slow development of the insight that birth is not only an external event but also an elementary experience at an affective level which not infrequently could also be associated with traumatic aspects. These insights also broadened the horizons of empathy for the fact that our relation to the mother before birth, or our prenatal relationship, is, from the point of view of life history, the starting point for our later life experience. These insights are an expression of the expansion of our empathy for our history as a child, as a baby, and the preceding time. This expansion is the result of the historical development of modern mindset since the Enlightenment with its new possibilities of reflecting one’s own experience and empathizing with the experience of others.

In practice, this history begins with the publication of two books in the context of psychoanalysis in 1924, the “Trauma der Geburt” (“Trauma of Birth”) by Otto Rank and “Die Ambivalenz des Kindes” (“The Ambivalence of the Child”) by Gustav Hans Graber. Both books reflected for the first time the prenatal and perinatal origins of basal elements of our individuality. After a slow progress in the following decades in the 1970s, there were founded scientific societies as a stable interdisciplinary framework within which it was possible to combine the data from internal experience, developmental biology research, socialization research, psychotraumatology, and brain research.