S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 2 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 1 6 9 Stanislav Grof spective of academic psychiatrists who do not consider birth to be a psychotraumatic experience and fail to see that it has any implications for psychopathology, unless it causes irreversible damage to the brain cells. As I have suggested earlier, there is a general belief in official academic circles that the newborn child lacks consciousness and that the neonatal cortex is incapable of registering the birth process and store the information about it, because it is not fully myelinized. Ken has essentially accepted this position and incorporated it into the main body of his work. At the time when he did most of his theoretical writing about psychology and psychopathology, his theoretical speculations about psychological development and its vicissitudes had their starting point in the pleromatic stage of the newborn. Even today, he does not have an adequate understanding of the perinatal dynamics, its deep connection with the transpersonal realm, and its role in psychopathology, as well as spiritual development. For this reason, he has not been able to notice this deficit in his sources. And although he has a deep and extensive knowledge of the transpersonal realms, he sees them as being essentially irrelevant for the development of the common forms of psychopathology. Ken’s conclusions are in sharp conflict with the experience of the practitioners of various experiential approaches, such as rebirthing, psychedelic therapy, and holotropic breathwork, who witness dramatic reliving of the birth process daily in their work. However, one does not have to have such firsthand clinical experience to be able to see the logical inconsistency in current academic thinking concerning the psychological impact of birth. The representatives of all the schools of dynamic psychotherapy attribute a critical psychological role to the early mother-child relation and to the subtleties of nursing. A good example is Harry Stack Sullivan who claims that the nursing infant is able to distinguish between the “good nipple” (the breast of a loving mother that gives milk), the “evil nipple” (the breast of a rejecting or nervous mother that gives milk), and the “wrong nipple” (a thumb or big toe that does not give milk at all). He sees such experiences as instrumental in the future development of emotional and personality disorders (Sullivan 1955). And yet the same dynamic psychologists who attribute to the infant such sensitivity and discrimination deny that it can be in any way influenced by the experience of biological birth. We are asked to believe that it is possible for the infant not to experience and/or register in memory many hours or even several days of a highly taxing and life-threatening situation and then immediately after birth become a “connoisseur of female nipples” capable of differentiating nuances in the experience of nursing. This is hardly an example of rigorous logical thinking or a well-grounded scientific conclusion. It is much more likely a result of psychological repression and denial of this extremely painful and frightening event, rationalized by the use of scientific language. The justification of this position by references to incomplete myelinization of the cerebral cortex of the neonate can hardly be taken seriously in view of the fact that the capacity of memory exists in many lower organisms that do not have a cerebral cortex at all, including unicellular life forms that possess primitive “protoplasmatic memory”. The image of the newborn as an unconscious being who is incapable of registering and remembering the process of biological birth is also in sharp conflict with extensive research data showing extraordinary sensitivity of the fetus already during intrauterine life (Verny 1987). Ken, who is usually extremely astute, sharp, and discriminating, does not notice these extraordinary discrepancies and takes all the psychodynamic schools at their face value. According to psychoanalysis and ego psychology, psychogenic disorders can be adequately understood in terms of postnatal biographical events and related psychodynamic processes. Different psychopathological syndromes are explained as resulting from problems in specific stages of postnatal libidinal development and from the difficulties in the evolution of the ego and of the object relationships. Psychoses thus allegedly have their origin in early infancy while neurotic or psychosomatic disorders are anchored in later childhood. Accepting this way of thinking, Ken sees psychoses (autistic psychoses, symbiotic infantile psychoses, most adult schizophrenia, and depressive psychoses) as results of regression to early developmental stages of postnatal development, and thus as fully pre-personal and pre-rational disturbances. He then associates various psychoneuroses with later fulcrums of postnatal development. By contrast, difficulties of spiritual development are for him transpersonal and post-rational disorders. As I have already indicated, in the recent modification of his model Ken makes some concessions to perinatal dynamics by creating for it a new fulcrum (F–0) and briefly outlining his ideas about the implications of this revision for psychopathology (Wilber 1995, 585–6). According to him, the new fulcrum (F–0) would participate in the development of psychopathology in a way similar to all the other fulcrums. Developmental malformations of its specific subphases (disruption at the dissociation, differentiation, or integration subphase) would result in specific pathologies.
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