On the Onset of Human Fetal Behavior

Abstract

Psychoanalysts in their daily practice can find themselves confronted with adults who have seemingly regressed to a fetal stage. In these circumstances, the analyst is often treated as a nurturing “container” having to fulfil any need and function of the patient, including thinking and verbal communication. These exceedingly passive patients simply expect the analyst to “do it all,” as a highly idealized uterus would. Some of the most regressed patients seem to live as if they are still in an unborn state, enclosed inside a “mental womb” which renders them almost totally impervious to life in the outside world. The negative facets of this kind of extreme regression can be manifested in claustrophobic feelings: the patient feels trapped inside a container which has turned into a persecuting object robbing him or her of any ego functioning. Many other features typify this kind of “fetal transference.” However, even less regressed patients can report dreams and fantasies that seem clearly related to intrauterine life. All this inevitably elicits in the analysts a retrospective interest in the actual facts characterizing fetal life, but at the same time makes him or her realize how distant these patients are from the concrete reality of the intrauterine past and how this past is inextricably colored by all sorts of feelings and events pertaining to later stages alone [1].