Babies and the wounded mother

THE most powerful spiritual and emotional event a woman may go through in her life is marked in our "civilised" 20th century society by her being encouraged to lie down, a foetal monitor inserted into her cervix, her legs splayed apart in stirrups, as a medic shouts instructions over her head.

That's the view of Benig Mauger, an Irish Breton psychotherapist specialising in the psychology of childbirth and pregnancy. Mauger, who has worked in London for many years and is just finishing a major study of the subject entitled Giving Birth and Being Born: The Wounded Mother and the Emerging Child, has recently returned to live and work in Dublin.

Pregnancy, she believes, is an archetypal experience: the way in which a woman experiences it will leave an imprint on her soul. To Mauger, being pregnant is a transformational process during which a woman's "inner mother" emerges to inform her emotionally for motherhood.

Modern medicine, on the other hand - with its emphasis on the physical - sees pregnancy as a condition to be managed by external means. The priority is the end product - ". . . getting the baby out" - with little concentration on the spiritual and psychological needs of the mother. All the paraphernalia of modern obstetrical care can alienate women from deep primal instincts from which the real power to give birth is actually derived.

"The drugs, etc., may be good and necessary for some women but often they cut women off from their own instincts. Their inner mother is wounded."

From Mauger's Jungian perspective, modern society draws on a simple rational view of the world, seeking always to impose logic on its environment: women, on the other hand, tend to draw on their soul for guidance. The process of pregnancy is governed by natural, primal, and exclusively feminine instincts which cannot be understood or controlled by rational logic.

"The denial of these has resulted for many women in psychological and other difficulties in giving birth."

"The patriarchal control of medicine denies to women the ability to be in touch with their feminine spirits during pregnancy, resulting in women experiencing childbirth as traumatic and devaluing at a soul level.

"Emotionally a woman will never be as vulnerable as when she is pregnant," says Mauger who refers to this state as Primary Maternal Preoccupation (PMP).

"It is natural and necessary. A woman's emotional defences are broken down so that she will be able to sense the needs of her baby. The baby cannot ask when it wants something so the mother has to be able to naturally intuit its needs. She has to be abnormally sensitive."

Many women feel dreadfully alone in their hyper vulnerability. Discouraged to acknowledge it, they are unable to express or explain their innermost feelings, and so cannot fully embrace their emergent mother role. The "wounded mother" is inherent in our childbirth culture, says Mauger, and it is only by placing birth in its archetypal and spiritual context that we can begin to heal the wounds inflicted by modern medicine.

"I once had a woman referred to me by her GP who was worried about her because she was suicidal. She didn't want to take anti depressants because of the baby. And she was fine in the end. But she needed to be able to get in touch with what was troubling her, to get it out," says Mauger.

"A WOMAN might be expecting a difficult birth and so be anxious all the time, which will make for a difficult birth. Or she might be expecting a good birth and encounter problems and so feel disillusioned with, or inadequate in, her mother role.

"These problems are all normal aspects of pregnancy. This needs to be understood."

Women that are not emotionally nurtured, she adds, have a higher incidence of miscarriage and postnatal depression.

It is not enough though, just to listen, she stresses, if the underlying attitudes remain unchanged - if pregnancy continues to be regarded as just a physical condition to be managed by men".