Open Seminar- Consciousness from the beginning of life?

In this presentation, Dr Keith Evans introduces pre- and perinatal psychology as a field that has a long history, stretching back to Freud, Jung and Otto Rank whose seminal work “The Trauma of Birth” was published 100 years ago, providing a century of research and practice that has provided learning opportunities for clients undertaking psychotherapeutic journeys including through personal regression events of womb-life and birth.

The presentation briefly covers the historical development of pre- and perinatal psychology, from Freud through Stanislav Grof and Frank Lake to modern practitioners such as Matthew Appleton and Cherionna Menzam-Sills. It reviews various conceptions of memory and how pre- and perinatal psychology as a field draws on the continuing development of cellular consciousness as an access point into womb-life and birth experiences. It explains how participants in regressions access what, after Bollas (2018), can be regarded as unthought knowns with aetiological explanatory power, a means by which to make better sense of their Self-in-relationship modalities through a ritualised, psychosomatically experienced enactment of returning to the womb.

Case examples, drawn from personal experience and Dr Evans’ PhD research, show how storying of womb-life and birth explorations demonstrates these stories provide meaning-making of Self, relationships and embodied ways-of-being as part of the participants’ self-developmental therapeutic journeys. The presentation therefore offers up a wider perspective of counselling and psychotherapy psychodynamics, extending understanding of psycho-somatic-socio-therapeutic endeavours to the pre-birth influences on our ways-of-being, and underlines the potential for the important contribution that inquiry reaching into the very beginning of life can make to this professional field.

Bollas, Christopher. 2018. The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. 30th Anniversary Edition. Abingdon: Routledge.

Rank, Otto. 2010. The Trauma of Birth. Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Publishing.

Entry is free and open to all but please register your place.

Host or Publisher Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies