Pamela Weintraub - Nurturing the Unborn Child: A Nine-Month Program for Soothing, Stimulating, and Communicating with Your Baby

One of the most frequent questions I am asked is how I became interested in the psychology of babies and pregnancy. It happened through my psychotherapeutic work. As a psychiatrist, I would, every once in a while, witness a client spontaneously regressing to an earlier time in his or her life. Sometimes an individual would actually seem to go back to birth or even to the womb. This invariably occurred without drugs or hypnosiswithout my leading the client in any way at all.

I still vividly remember one of the first incidents, though it happened more than fifteen years ago. In the midst of discussing his dream, Paul, my twenty-five-year-old patient, changed his expression, curled up like a little baby, and started to sob. After about ten minutes he came out of this state and told me that he had just experienced himself lying in his crib and crying for his mother. Then, being a skeptical young professional, he said, You know, I must be making this up because I saw myself in a white crib just now and yet I have seen pictures of myself as a baby taken in a blue crib.

I suggested that Paul discuss the matter with his mother. At his next appointment I was astonished to hear that according to his mother, he spent the first two months of his life in a borrowed white crib. His parents later bought him his very own crib, which was blue. The same crib was in all the photos he recalled.

As I continued to witness this sort of flashback in patient after patient, I began to question the accepted academic notion that babies do not remember anything before the age of two. To see whether my doubts were founded, and whether the very early memories I recorded were in fact real, I began an extensive six-year search of the scientific journals of the world. I read everything I could find in the area of embryology, with particular emphasis on the development of the nervous system and the hearing of the unborn child. I also collected clinical case studies of adults reliving post-and prenatal traumasespecially painful experiences that could be traced to events occurring during and even before birth. On the basis of this huge compilation of data, I wrote, with John Kelly, The Secret Life of the Unborn Child, published in 1981.

I have continued working in this area by founding the Pre- and Perinatal Psychology Association of North America (PPPANA), serving as its president from its inception to the present. I also started the Pre- and Peri-Natal Psychology Journal, the official scientific publication of PPPANA, and served as editor for four years.

In the course of hundreds of radio, television, and newspaper interviews, as well as public lectures, I was always asked the same question: What practical measures could pregnant women take to implement the principles I proposed in The Secret Life of the Unborn Child. Another frequently raised concern was the pregnant mothers ability to deal with the stresses of pregnancy and relate to the father of the child.

These issues were very much on my mind when, in the winter of 1989, I met Pamela Weintraub, editor-at-large of Omni magazine. She was writing an article on pre- and perinatal psychology and had come to interview me in Toronto. Following the interview, we had several more telephone conversations about issues related to the article, and Pamela suggested that perhaps we could write a book together on babies. The mother of two small children, she had profound respect for the intellectual and emotional development of the unborn, something that appealed to me. Whats more, sharing the load of writing would save us both a lot of time, a commodity always in short supply. Finally, in the spring of 1989 we sat down to write a straightforward, practical guide to help mothers and fathers soothe, stimulate, and most important, love, the unborn.

Thomas Verny, M.D.

I remember sitting behind my editors desk at Omni magazine in the early 1980s and reading the latest material on prenatal psychology. I was skeptical, to say the least. Not yet a mother myself, I questioned whether a baby still in the womb could possess the emotional sensitivity or sheer intuitive power to grasp anything about the mothers inner or outer life.

All that changed in 1983, when I became pregnant myself. The tiny baby in my wombnow my first sonwas obviously sensitive to my emotional state. In fact, because I was often anxious during this pregnancy, my child registered my emotions in a particularly powerful way. When I was calm, he seemed to lie peacefully, making tiny, gentle movements every now and then. When I worried about his health, which I often did (needlessly, I now know, because he was perfect), I felt the movements strengthen. And one night, when I thought we would be forced to give up our apartment, I felt my baby rush from side to side for hours with the wild abandon of a monsoon.

The birth was complex as well. After fourteen hours of labor, the doctor decided my baby was just plain stuck and performed a cesarean. That was fortunate, because it turned out Id had a streptococcus B infection; the infection could have caused serious damage in a vaginal birth. But because of the fever the infection gave me, the hospital wouldnt let me hold my baby for almost a week. I should have been ecstatic with my beautiful, healthy little boy, but I couldnt help feeling upset at being able to see him only from a distance, through the nursery glass.

My second pregnancy was far easier and less anxious than the first. After all, I now knew how irrational it was to worry about a few allergy pills, aspirin, and beers consumed before I even knew I was pregnant. We lived in a secure, pleasant place. My second baby moved consistently but calmly; he was a gentle, reassuring, life-affirming presence within. After the birth, also a cesarean, I was able to keep my baby by my side.

I now believe that my two sons, the products of two different pregnancies, have been at least partially influenced by their experience in the womb and immediately after birth. My firstborn, Jason, is at once exquisitely sensitive and a hothead. He has a tremendous creative drive: For instance, he was writing his own small books in kindergarten. He cries at the sad parts of movies. Not yet seven, he endlessly ponders the deeper issues: birth and death, the origin of people and stars. Yet he is quick to anger, becoming indignant if he even suspects a slight.

My second child, David, is steadier and more intrepid. Independent and self-possessed at the age of two, he insists on doing everything himself, from fastening his car seat to pouring his drink to carrying his books and toys. He routinely climbs to the top of his dresser and jumps to the floor without pause. A loving child, he easily gives and receives hugs and kisses. And his adjustment to a playgroup in which I would not be present was smooth indeed.

It was soon after the birth of David that I began to consider the implications of pre- and perinatal psychology once more. I was, I now realized, open to the ideas of this discipline in a powerful way. I had just finished writing a couple of how-to books with a psychologist, and so it was only natural for me to think of creating one based on pre- and perinatal psychology as well. If only, I thought to myself, I had had such a book, how much easier my own two pregnancies might have been.