Pre and Perinatal Psychology

If you want to know where your heart is,
look where your mind goes when it wonders.

Starting from the consideration that everything stems from birth, or better still, from conception, the intra-uterine period of life is a crucial period of psycho-biological imprinting during which our personality and our style of attachment are determined. It is in this sensitive and unique stage that our brain and our nervous system of future humanity are developed. Conception is our ‘true’ birth – vertical and individualized, while, when we leave our mother’s womb and draw our first breathe we are born into a family – the horizontal birth, which, later on, in puberty, will be followed by our social birth.

On the basis of thousands of scientific studies, it appears obvious that appropriate attention and care for the conditions of pregnant women and the prebirth relation between mother and child represent the only true primary preventive approach. Any other program of prevention or cure in any other period of life, no matter how useful, will, inevitably, suffer a time gap and can only have a reparative function of pathological mechanisms, structured long before.

Today many recognize that the prenatal stage of our life in the mother’s womb and in her consciousness constitutes our first ecological environment, where we are engaged in a creative dialogue with our mother and, through her, with her biological, psychological and social environment. The quality of this dialogue and of this relationship will be fundamental for the health and for the psycho-physical and social development of the child after its birth, but in order to be well informed and to be able to choose freely, family planning education should start long before pregnancy. Responsible parenthood is not a gift of nature. Parental abilities often need to be taught , but this requires in-depth research  regarding their correct socio-pedagogical implementation  in the family, in society and in our educational systems. The integration of pre and perinatal studies in medical and psychological study programmes would be most useful. We would need to create a new educational system, which would prepare the couples for conscious and responsible parenthood. Psychotherapeutic research has shown how important negative emotional influences and prenatal disturbances in the mother-child dialogue can be on the mental and physical development of the individual in all phases of life and, therefore, on the life of society.

We know that an organism fights naturally to maintain a state of health and against illness and destruction, it tends naturally towards homeosthasis and turns away from disorganization and the same goes for any community and society, but the world can change only if we can bring about profound change in our understanding and respect for life, from its very beginnings, even before conception.

Considering that everything stems from birth, intra-uterine life is a fundamental period of psycho-biological imprinting of personality traits and of the style of attachment, but also of potential foetal pathogenic nuclei. It is in this delicate and unique phase that the brain, the whole nervous system is formed and this is actually the true birth of the individual, while the physical birth is being born to society.

It appears obvious that that any real prevention must take place before or, at the latest, during the pregnancy and that any intervention in later years can have only a reparative function.