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Birth, Our First Trauma

    If it is true that as infants we are indeed "born into trauma", is it possible that as adults we have the experience of trauma at the very foundations of our psyches and emotional lives? If so, does the degree of trauma vary from person to person?

   German psychotherapist Otto Rank wrote that all human beings suffer trauma by virtue of being born and of the inevitable, violent, physical and psychic separation we suffer at birth from our mother. Rank believed at birth, the infant moves from a state of perfect harmony and union with the mother into a painful state of separation resulting from the traumatic and violent circumstances of birth. This constitutes the earliest anxiety that a human being experiences. Rank said that anxiety forms the blueprint for all anxieties experienced later in life.

   British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion suggests a theory of trauma that seems remarkably similar to Rank’s proposal, yet is significantly more complex and credible. Bion, too, believes that the infant is "born into trauma". Bion wrote that children are born into an inner state of chaos and confusion because their earliest ‘feelings' are not feelings at all, but rather undifferentiated feeling ‘states'. Bion called these feeling states "sense impressions" that are formed in the mind before actual thinking comes into being. These "feeling states" or early sensations ‘hit' the infant's mind in lightning bursts of sheer, inescapable experience - unmitigated events experienced in the fullness of their strength and reality. As such, these sensations are unbearable to the infant.

   Bion believed that the infant is born into an experience that either remains traumatic or becomes sensible depending on the quality of the infant's attachment to the mother. Bion says Nature has mandated that the infant needs the mother to "contain" its earliest emotional states. The infant requires the mother to protect it not just physically, but also emotionally, and to make the infant's inner emotional states "safe". The infant's trauma becomes a survivable experience through a process in which the infant's feelings are "named" and thus are provided limits and solutions. This process of "safe containment" of the infant's "problems" ends with the emergence of thought and the formation of knowledge.

   Attachment leading to a sense of security and safety is a specific process; the mother takes unarticulated and traumatizing bursts of emotional states into herself and defines them. Taken into the mother and now within the mother, the baby's thoughts now have a historical context or basis. They are given to them by the mother's ability to calmly contain, think about and "digest" them within herself before giving them back to the infant, pre-digested, understood, named and, therefore, safe. In this form, the infant can have his own experiences while still believing that loving help and satisfaction in the face of pain will ease its earliest and most unbearable feeling states. The more the parent satisfies the panic of sensations that hit the newborn child, the less the "birth trauma" will haunt the infant in later life.

   Bion believed that the infant is born into trauma - experience that is too big for the infant's mind to process, and as such, is completely overpowering to the mind. This trauma carries with it the sense of impending death unless some relief from early, unbearable experience can be found. Without relief, the infant grows to hate the emotional states that are within him; he will learn to rid himself of emotional states instead of welcoming such states into his sense of identity, and he will learn to make a goal of his life to rid himself of such states and avoid feelings altogether. 

 

Frederick Woolverton, Ph.D.,

Psychology Today