Birth

Definitions

The words physical and psychical allow us to distinguish between body and mind. The body is physical, while psychical, from ‘psyche’ refers to the mind. Briefly, the two match in that the body is objective material; the mind is subjective mental.

body n. Old English bodig Old Norse buthke box

matter n. from Latin materia cause, from Greek mater mother, having mass and occupying space through time.

mind n. Old English gemynd Old High German gimunt memory. The immaterial context of materiality.

physical adj. Latin physica from Greek, phusika natural things. 1. Of or related to the body as distinguished from the mind or spirit. 2. Of related to or resembling the material things of nature: the physical universe.

psychical adj. from Greek, psukhikos ‘of the soul or life’. Appertaining to the mental as opposed to the physical world.

The body is a box, whilst matter, to the ordinary understanding, is that which is common to all forms of tangible existence. Mind is not anchored at this level, but philosophically, it contains matter within itself in the form of objects, and is itself contained within God, being our sense of the durability and oneness that overreaches all existence and change.

We need the words physical and psychical, but unfortunately they look confusingly alike, so here I am defining them at the beginning. Physical refers to the world of material things, everything from polar bears to coke bottles. Psychical refers to their ideal representation in the mind, along with other mental products such as intellect and emotion. So far everything matches: now the important part. Physics is the science of physical things. Psychology is the science of mental things (e.g., ideas).

Physics and psychology are the extremes, corresponding to body and mind, with physical and psychical as their working adjectives, but there are three sciences, physics physiology and psychology. Fortunately, it all comes together.

Physics comes first. Physiology, a word modeled on physics, comes second. Then comes psychology, which we use to analyze human behavior. Now, although the word physiology is modeled on physics, there is a gulf between them, in that as a science, physics grounds the inanimate or non-living world. Physiology is the basic science of conscious life, the world of living things, and in particular, physiology grounds psychology, the science of human behavior. Physics tells us why rockets take off, physiology why wounds heal, and psychology why we think and behave as we do. The Introduction adds to the discussion of these relations.

Grammar

As the 20th Century advanced writers became aware that misuse of the pronouns he him and his, more than an abuse of truth and sense, pointed to a psychosocial imbalance in relation to gender and sex. It was flagrant, especially in relation to babies, infants and children in a blatant expression of sexism that excused itself on the ground that it was the done thing and would never change. It runs even through the Bible:

A woman, when she gives birth to a child, has grief because her hour is come; but when the child is born, she no longer remembers the trouble, on account of the joy that a man has been born into the world. John 16:21

It has changed however, even though many writers find it difficult to fall into step with the dawning spirit of the age. Its persistence dwells in the fact that the paternalism involved falls as a shadow across the writings of more than two thousand years, biased and continually impinging upon the present. The answer is to stay with reality and use the neutral ‘it’ or plural ‘they’ when necessary. If something has to suffer, let it be the grammar, which after all is governed by fashion.

Abbreviations:

E.J. Progressive Relaxation, by Edmund Jacobson, The University of Chicago Press 1929, Second Edition 1938, Midway Reprint 1974.

2nd Ed. Childbirth Without Fear, by Grantly Dick Read, Wm. Heinemann Medical Books Ltd., 1942, Second Edition, Heinemann, 1943, reprint 1951.

4th Ed. Childbirth Without Fear, by Grantly Dick-Read, Wm. Heinemann Medical Books Ltd., 1942, Fourth Edition, Pan Books Ltd., London, 1963.

5th Ed. Dick-Read’s CHILDBIRTH WITHOUT FEAR first published 1942 by Wm. Heinemann Medical Books Ltd. First published 1963 by Pan Books Ltd, London. Fifth Edition published 1969 by Pan Books. (A ghosted work not under Read’s hand.)

The Birds and the Bees

Asleep in the dawn, a flash of white light vividly lit my dream world. Again, a flash, and sleep resumed; but so did the flashes. My mind, finally responding, rallied from the cave of sleep to become aware that the light was coming from an open eye. However, I had not opened it. As my eyelid closed, and then fluttered open again, I looked to see what was causing it.

It was Jena, our pet magpie. She was lifting my eyelid by the lashes in her strong beak. I shied back violently and fixed her with an alarmed glare. She could have had my eyes for breakfast!

It was her custom to fly into my room in the early morning. This time she was standing on my pillow, lifting my eyelids by the lashes and letting them fall back again. Was it just curiosity or did she sense that I was asleep, for had she squawked I would have known she was there!

She was the gentlest of birds, at least with those she knew. One morning she walked into the kitchen and called for attention, wanting to be fed. I was sitting at the table writing, and I ignored her. She flew onto the table, walked across and stood on the page I was writing. Still ignoring her, I continued to write around her feet, whereupon she fell onto her back, grasping a finger of my left hand in one strong claw, and the pen and finger of my right hand in the other. With both hands locked in her strong grip and her on the paper I could not continue. There was nothing voluntary about it. She had my attention!

On another occasion she did something whose accidental consequence led me to a new awareness. My hobby was keeping bees, and I happened to be standing by when a hive began to swarm. I watched as a packed torrent of bees flew from the entrance in a broad band, not walking out and then taking off, as was their usual practice, but literally hosing forth in free flight, begun while they were still in the hive. Soon the air was full of bees, a great yellow cloud of circling insects fifty yards across. Staying where they were thickest, I found the queen as she landed and had her run onto my hand. The swarm concentrated around me and began landing on my body. Soon they were all settled and I was a walking swarm.

It was an interesting thing to do, something I had seen in a picture. The trick is not to wear gloves or veil, which makes one clumsy, and to move with deliberate caution. The bees remain peaceful and you have someone take a snapshot before shaking them off into a waiting box; but as I crouched down for the photo, Jena, who was usually terrified of them, let out a squawk, or should I say war whoop, and rushing forward snapped a bee in half. She then retreated, but of all the millions of bees on offer, she had to choose the queen! Her sharp eyes had singled it out and she swiftly took her revenge on the stinging terrors, leaving it severed into two parts.

I was dismayed when I realized what she had done. It was a terrible blow, for it was equivalent to destroying the colony. Unfortunately, this was not just any queen, but a special purebred, acquired after much procedure, letter writing and cost. However, I could do something.

Without a queen the bees returned to their hive. They would raise a new queen, but in the meantime I would graft queen cells from her eggs, which were still in the hive, and re-queen the whole apiary. The situation was that most of my hives were wild stock, chopped from hollow trees and the walls of derelict buildings. They were hybrid strains, such that, with the slightest bump on a hive, they would pour out as winged furies; but from the one good hive, I would raise twenty.

I never did understand Jena's behavior. How did she find the courage to rush into the thick of the bees and snap the queen in half, and why did she single it out? She had accompanied me to the hives one day, and running too close to an entrance, they had got into her downy tail feathers. Her loud squawk and sudden jumping flight across the grass indicated that they had found their mark. She never came back to the hives, and I knew that, not surprisingly, she was frightened to do so.

The rest of the story is technical. Following book instructions I prepared the special equipment needed to raise queens; an egg implanting tool made from a bicycle spoke, pipettes and a wooden former to shape the special queen cells from melted wax and so on. The big thing was to arrange a hot room where I could carry out the operation without a chill occurring, for bees maintain a high temperature in the brood chamber. A sunroom at midday with all the windows closed did the job. I collected royal jelly from a brood comb, grafted in the selected embryos and set the queen frame into a colony prepared for the purpose.

Each hive then had its own plan and all went well. The ‘take’ was a surprising hundred percent, twenty-three out of twenty-three as I recall. I would shortly have queen bees and to spare.

On the morning of the anticipated hatching, I removed the unwanted hybrid queens from the previously drone-trapped hives, and at 10 a.m. opened the brood colony. The yet non-hatched queens were talking to each other in high-pitched ‘pip, pip’ sounds, being their challenge, I presumed, to the shortly expected fight for possession of the hive. However, there was not going to be a fight. Each would find itself in possession of its own colony.

Looking at the nearly mature queen cells I could see a dark ring near the top of each, where the queens, working from within, turned around and around, cutting a groove for the lid to pop open. In about two hours, they would hatch, and a fight to the death would begin, but before that could happen, I would have distributed just one ripe queen cell to each hive. Curiosity tempted me to open a cell to see the queen. Yielding to impulse, with the tip of my hive tool I touched the delicate top of a cell where I could see an exit ring forming. It flipped open and I watched, rewarded by the sight of a beautiful creature emerging.

Sleek, large and light yellow, she eased herself out of the opened cell and stood on the comb while I admired her color and markings. She was radiant, more beautiful than I had seen, perhaps because she was so newly emerged. Her wings gleamed in the sunlight. I looked again. They seemed slightly crinkled. Were they perhaps a fraction short? As I watched, I felt like rubbing my eyes, unable to credit what was happening. They steadily shriveled until, like wax touched by fire, they had become useless black stumps.

My mind reeled in disbelief. A wingless queen, she would never fly. Unable to mate she would become a drone-laying queen, a catastrophe for any hive. Not yet realizing why it had happened, and struggling to stay abreast of the on-going sequence of events, I thought, in a moment she will disappear into the thick of other bees in the combs. She will search out the other queens and sting them to death before they could hatch, spelling ruin to my apiary. Sensing the danger, with a feeling of horror I pinched out her life. There was no time to lose. I had to distribute one queen cell to each waiting queenless hive immediately

Finally putting the events together, gloom descended on me like a cloud. Yielding to temptation, I had assisted nature in its task, giving aid where none was required. My help was a work of destruction. The lesson burned itself into my mind. Exposed to sun and dry air a few hours too soon, her wings, wanting just that extra time to mature, had shrivelled into useless stumps. Curiosity and interference had created the opposite of what I intended. Nature had planned for every detail except my unwanted help. It was a lesson I was never to forget.

Preamble

This book began as a simple manuscript on natural childbirth endorsing the teachings of Grantly Dick Read. It was overtaken by Read’s death in the late nineteen sixties and the sudden reversal in the natural birth movement that followed. It had been a simple text describing methods and results, but the new situation called for a response to his posthumous editors who had thrown his teachings overboard. This required a massive research into particulars when I had scant time and resource for such work.

My own theory of mind had come to me in the form of a vision some years earlier. I had become intensely interested in the study of hypnosis, which dominated my attention for more than two years and the vision interrupted this. As a subject hypnosis crossed my conventional understanding of medicine at right angles. It quite amazed me. A simple statement made to a subject in trance, I found, could bring about results that ordinary methods could not approach. To give but one example, induction of trance and a simple statement would stop an asthma attack in its tracks. Through the stethoscope one could hear the wheezing simply fade and vanish away. How could the mind, I wondered, a virtual nonentity, exert such a powerful influence upon an individual’s bodily functions?

It began when a patient tossed a book onto my desk, said, read this, and walked out. It was about hypnosis. Challenged by his self-assurance I did so, skeptically thinking, What nonsense. However, I also thought I should give it a try, so more as a joke than anything else I suggested to my wife that if she would like to be a subject I would hypnotize her. She agreed and I followed the steps outlined in the book.

Nothing occurred except that I felt a fit of laughter coming on. Trying to suppress it I was about to lose control when something strange about my wife’s demeanor penetrated my consciousness. Was this, in fact, trance? As quickly as I saw that this was indeed the case my impulse to laugh gave way to the seriousness of observation. Hastily I switched to the required steps laid down in the book for ending a trance without mishap.

It marked a turning point in my life. It was not my wife and patients who had been under a cloud of incomprehension, but me. The power of speech to command, control and communicate dawned upon me, not only in the context of trance—which is simply a depth in consciousness—but all the time, in everyday conversation and consultation. My medical knowledge, until then a dry-as-dust burden, useful I thought, only in a mechanical sense for removing particles from eyes, fish bones from throats and of course the occasional appendix, suddenly became a valuable resource. What medical school had failed to teach me was that I was the agent, the one who had to use this, and most importantly, how to do so. That required an ego awakening within.

Healing, I learned, is more than diagnosis and prescription, but as this dawned upon my consciousness so did my desire to learn more about it, to explore its depth. What is trance and how does the mind ‘work’? I plunged into its study, spending all my spare time in the hospital libraries with no other subject in sight, and in practice devoting all my energies to this one end, what is hypnosis and why does it work.

One day, sitting in a theatre audience with a group of professional hypnotists watching a Franquin hypnosis show, intrigued by the display and striving to understand what I saw, I noticed that the theatre was shaped like the inside of a skull. Then, the spotlight on Franquin, the colored lights, music and other features, including the group on stage dancing the can-can to Franquin’s baton, began to fit themselves into the anatomical shell. The picture then transformed into my textbook understanding of the brain itself, its function and process.

Possessed by the vision I leaned forward and cupped my head in my hands and it continued. Instead of the theatre and its play, I was now observing my conception of the working brain picked out in a 3D multitude of colored points. For a moment I examined the details, then as I watched it began to demonstratively change. Sequentially, in area after area it realigned itself, and then the vision was over. For me it was a moment of enlightenment, a ‘eureka experience’ that had me wanting to get up and leave. There were more important things to do than to sit there watching a stage show. I wanted to return to my books and review my knowledge. I knew. That was the important thing.

What I knew was something vague. Importantly my previous bewilderment had fallen away, but I needed to make a fresh start. In upshot I ceased my practice of hypnosis. As against conventional medicine it had begun to claim so much of my time that I would have to choose between one or the other. I now realized that hypnosis is superficial, a paralysis of the conscious will induced by an unconscious memory. It is only an aspect of mind, which as the greater entity is central in our attention. I decided to give it up. I would have more time to devote to the task of understanding my patient’s problems in terms of their lives and beliefs. Trance is a quick fix, a patch remedy in an area that deserves a more serious approach.

My interest in the psyche remained unabated, and I now began to study religion; its beliefs teachings and divisions and its expression in other areas such as philosophy physiology psychology and physics, where I felt the more profound answers relevant to a science of mind must reside.

This occurred early in my career. My interest in natural birth arose only some years later, at a time when I had left the practice of hypnosis behind, along with my former views and habits such as smoking and drinking. I came to see the various religions as message-bearers, each having a specialist role in one or another area of society. What we believe is not negotiable. What we do, and how we behave, are negotiable. Belonging to no religion I felt that they must belong to me, providing me each with a pattern in some or other social domain to which I must conform. What is set forth as binding for the adherents of each, I would ask, as distinct from what is marginal? and I would adopt that core teaching and move on. Taking from all, but belonging to none provided me with a guide for my social outlook and practice; religion as a pattern for this world, leaving the other quite alone, for I did not sense them as apart.

My interest in a theory of mind eventually led me to the study of Hegelian philosophy, and this in turn to the study of mathematics, not as such, but in terms of its ‘in mind’ foundation, which I perceived as circular. Success ensued, and I came to see that all mathematics traces back to a circular framework.

Mathematics is not a product, that being in a given form it could take no other. It is the reification of the laws of the universe, which our mind, being of the same distillation, accurately reflects. It is thus intermediate between our thinking and the world, and this is one side of mind.

Science had always been my first interest, beyond which resides the general social and political milieu; but within this mix, as a specialty in its own right, is the question of natural childbirth. This took my attention, not only in the course of my practice in obstetrics, but also from my interest in the generation of mind in every individual life cycle. Increasingly I began to see that the subjugation of birth to medical dominion turns the truth and reality of the world on its head; that instead of being the answer it is itself becoming the best part of the problem. For this reason I now give it the best of my attention.

Introduction

This introduction defines some terms and looks at some of our subject’s more basic ideas. If it seems like jumping in at the deep end initially, it should begin to read more easily once its theme, terminology and ideas are grasped.

A natural birth is one that takes place in an advanced society with medical care available, but unused, the mother accomplishing the whole task without assistance, there being no injury or pain, drugs being neither required nor used.

One becomes two; two becomes one. The pregnant mother (one) becomes two (mother and baby). The mother and baby (two), become one in a mutual bonding response. The ‘1 becomes 2’ is physical; the ‘2 becomes 1’ is psychical. Mind-affecting drugs (psychoactive or psychotropic) damage the bonding process.

If we define the unity of complementary opposites as signifying a perfect and complete whole, then in viewing the mentioned symmetry we are looking at the spirituality of birth, which is as much devoted to preserving the mind as the body across the generations.

Cultural childbirth is the norm for our society. It is a disease peculiar to our human kind; a birth in which tension occasioned by the play of conscious and unconscious psychological forces disturbs the desired course of labor. Delay, accompanied by a marked increase in complications results for both the mother and baby.

Our mothers are susceptible to the cultural influence because they are human. That in the nature of mind, which makes us human, opens the door to cultural childbirth. It is a disorder of the individual birth, but a disease of our species. Because we have an advanced mind we are prone to this defect. Known as the curse of Eve it is the oldest disease on written record:

To the woman he said, I will greatly increase thy travail and thy pregnancy; with pain thou shalt bear children; and to thy husband shall be thy desire, and he shall rule over thee. Ge 3:16

Before it was written it belonged to the oral tradition of ancient Egypt, while tracking the other way it is the central theme about which the Biblical narrative develops. The ancients saw it as significant, not only from the point of view of our nature, but as determining our very experience as conscious living beings.

The condition has a peculiar relevance for us today for it escalates with civilization. The more advanced our knowledge and technology, the more severe it grows, canceling out the good results of our human state and adding a marked disadvantage. The world’s houses and huts better serve birth today than the biggest of hospitals. Those who do not believe this either do not have, or are not using the relevant information.

Genesis tells us that Adam (meaning earthy or formed from dust), and Eve (mother, so men and women), became human by eating ‘the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’. The affliction of cultural childbirth was the immediate consequence. It tells us the cause, but the more knowledgeable we become, the less we understand it or ourselves. Science is weakest where it should be strongest, namely in mathematics, and medical knowledge draws a blank where it should be full, in our knowledge of thought as the brain’s special product.

Cultural childbirth is a disease of society and an affliction of civilization, and beyond this it is the paradigm type for the class of reflective illnesses whose disorder is peculiar to our human kind. This includes the neuroses and more deep-seated mental disorders, of which cultural childbirth is the archetypal manifestation.

Paradigm type refers to the model upon which these afflictions rest. If the model is present, as it is said to be in all progeny of the fallen Adam and Eve, but no consequent disease accrues, nevertheless the mind, beyond first childhood, is also affected fallen or unenlightened. If a consequent disease is present, and these are legion, this is an added burden. Enlightenment, which may be of one or another degree, surmounts the original paradigm, at which time any consequent affliction lifts, even though not specifically addressed.

The trance of hypnosis corresponds to a temporary collapse of the mind, consequent upon conditioning, where the latter is taken in its Pavlovian sense. The sense of space and time is lost, as in a return to a stage wherein it was not yet present. This is in contrast to the higher state of enlightenment wherein a sense of space and time is present but as superseded. Because in both this sense is absent, the two conditions are remarkably similar.

From the 18th Century on, coincident with the onset of the scientific revolution in medicine, man has invaded the temple of woman’s hegemony, the birth chamber. Along with this invasion, cultural child¬birth has escalated beyond control, capped and supplanted by medical childbirth, eroding the human foundation of the nations involved. A predominantly male workforce has replaced the midwife in the industrialized world and nature’s process has been trampled underfoot.

If birth were a simple physical act, which the unenlightened male commonly supposes, and the cultural influence did not exist, about five percent of births would call for some degree of medical intervention. To put it another way, in this imagined circumstance, about five percent of births would falter or fail if every mother were left to her own devices. This rate is high. No other human occupation is so fraught with hazard, but we are left with a problem. It leaves ninety-five percent of births free of defect, without damage or disorder. Why then do all births in modernia end up on the operating table?

They are brought to this pass by the affliction we have been discussing, the intrusion of a cultural influence — the essentially male ethic of domination help and interference — into a self-sufficient process, where Nature has planned for every detail except unwanted help. This, indeed, is the curse of our human kind.

Grantly Dick-Read wrote in his Childbirth without Fear:

… this theory is only possible in normal and uncomplicated labor, and as that comprises probably over 95 percent of all labors, unless made abnormal by attendants, its influence may be very considerable. 2nd Ed. p.9

and:

… the course of nature… leads 95 per cent of women, at least, to motherhood without accident or injury to themselves or their babies. 4th Ed. p.12

Born in 1980, Read qualified in Medicine and went on to become a member of the Royal College of Surgeons and a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine. His books published in multiple editions and reprints and translated into many languages brought him to fame, because he was qualified and because he was uniquely at variance with the practice of his colleagues and profession.

In contrast to his approach he observed sagely:

The teaching of abnormal midwifery is so stressed in our student days that as beginners we lose sight of the normal and natural, and unless we observe for ourselves, we may easily fall into the trap of searching only for the abnormalities in antenatal care and suspecting some subtle ambush in every labour from which the devil himself may leap at any moment. 2nd Ed. p.144

The quoted 95 percent figure, which he maintains throughout his writings as a criterion and standard, is significant because no such figure existed before his work, and none has emerged since, for the simple reason that his colleagues could not duplicate his method and results. Including all forms of surgical intervention, from Cesarean section to incision of the outlet, it quantifies the limit of medicine’s legitimate interest in birth. However, given 5 percent, the profession will take no less than a 100. It sees birth as man’s business.

Birth as a frightful ordeal began in the hospitals of 17th and 18th century Europe with the spread of puerperal fever carried unknowingly by midwives and doctors from one infected woman to another. The existence of germs was unknown, and those causing sudden death when introduced into the parturient womb, particularly ‘staph and strep’, were carried from one woman to another by attendant’s dirty hands and instruments. Multiplying explosively in the newly vacated womb they killed the mother at short notice. Over a monitored six-year period at the Vienna maternity hospital, one in ten women delivered died of this single cause alone. Birth came to be feared as tantamount to a death sentence, and knowing mothers would dally and give birth under a bush before entering the hospitals.

With the advent of the microscope and aseptic technique medical science discovered the bacterial cause and the means for preventing sepsis, but the psychical aspect of birth continues to evade the understanding of a male-dominated profession, whose role would be transferred to other hands, if they admitted the cause and the consequence.

Birth does not initiate the personal memory that makes us uniquely human beings. This sits characteristically as a ‘first memory’ at about two or three years of age. The varied nature of these memories for different individuals is indicated below.

My mother was sitting in a chair with a baby on her lap. It was my first awareness of my younger brother.

I was sitting in the sand looking in a drain to see where the dog had gone.

There was this pink ball. I was pulling at it. It was me, dressed in an angora wool jersey.

I was in long grass looking at the flowers. One floated away. It was a butterfly.

Usually mundane, these experiences strike a nostalgic chord for their possessors. Some claim to remember being born, and even earlier, but our enquiry asks for a spontaneously volunteered first memory in response to a request, not something that came to the claimant’s attention in the context of a therapy session, religious process, in reverie or under hypnosis. Our interest is simply in the first ordinary memory indicating the onset of childhood.

Coinciding with the time of a child’s first memory, its mother will become aware of its quickening interest in details and keenness to learn. In nature she is the first teacher as described in Hindi culture, a term which means more than just the fact that children learn from everyone, and the mother happens to be there. It applies for every child and all humanity. The mother becomes, by imprint, the deity or genius in the child’s mind, which not only develops in her presence, but from her presence, incorporating the latter, her psychical nature, as the mind’s formative template. Through this channel the tide of life flows for all humanity from generation to generation.

To whatever she draws its attention the child will attach significance throughout its life, especially learning from activity she shares with the child. The baby learns from the mother and does so rapidly, not in the way we learn, for there is no mind there initially to ‘learn’, but imprinting, a mental photograph forming the mind’s pattern, as distinct from something ‘re-membered’. It founds and shapes the mind that will later ‘learn’. This is nature’s way. The baby draws its nourishment from the mother, and so also