Apocalypse,
or New Age?
The Emerging Perinatal Unconscious
Book
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by Michael Derzak Adzema,
M.A.
PART ONE: SOMETHING'S HAPPENING
Chapter Two: The Perinatal Unconscious
Surrounding Birth
Elements of Birth Experience
For Dreaming Out Loud!
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Chapter Two: The Perinatal
Unconscious
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SURROUNDING BIRTH
How are we to characterize these strangest of days and the current unprecedented
global condition? As I have said, they are driven by what I call
an emerging perinatal unconscious.
Why perinatal? First, let us remind ourselves that perinatal
means, literally, "surrounding birth." As a one-time college
instructor of pre- and perinatal psychology and as an editor of a professional
journal concerned with perinatal psychology1
— as well as a psychohistorian, let me explain what might be considered
elements of a perinatal unconscious. The elements I will describe
are near universally accepted among perinatal psychologists as unconscious
forces, factors, matrices that exist in us all as a result of a human birth
that is unique, by comparison to all other species, in its degree
of trauma and hence of its impact or imprint on what we might call — dare
I say the word — our "human nature."
These perinatal elements have come to our understanding through the
efforts of both the inner explorations of experiential pioneers into the
perinatal, as well as the hard empirical work of pre- and perinatal researchers.
I might also point out that I, myself, have over twenty-five-years of experiential
exploration into these perinatal elements. My experiences confirm,
in my own mind, their absolute validity, as well as validating for myself
the theoretical constructs put forth by others to describe and explain
them. Be that as it may, these perinatal elements in the unconscious
have been described most thoroughly be three figures in particular: Stanislav
Grof, Arthur Janov, and Lloyd deMause. It might help, also, to keep
in mind that entire new fields of pre- and perinatal psychology, primal
psychology, and to some extent, transpersonal psychology have grown up
around the existence of these perinatal factors and these unconscious perinatal
elements have, at this point, been confirmed by thousands of researchers
and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of experiential voyagers into
the perinatal unconscious.
ELEMENTS OF BIRTH EXPERIENCE
Based upon all this, then, let us look at some of the elements, in general,
that characterize this perinatal unconscious. Stanislav
Grof2 describes basic perinatal matrices
(BPMs) — in other words, typical experiential constellations
related to our births, which happen to be very much akin to deMause’s perinatal
schema, with some slight differences in emphasis, and more elaboration
on the part of Grof. So let us use Grof’s schema as a basis.
All Needs Met . . . with luck
Grof’s Basic Perinatal Matrix I, or BPM I, involves the
experiences and feelings related to the sometimes, or at least relatively,
undisturbed prenatal period — that time in the womb sometimes characterized
by feelings of peace, complete relaxation, a feeling of all needs met,
or "oceanic bliss." It corresponds to deMause’s societal periods
of "prosperity and progress," which he claims are accompanied by feelings
and fears of being "soft" and "feminine" — understandably here, for in
BPM I, that is, prenatally, the fetus is largely identified with his or
her mother and is very much "soft," i.e., undefended. Since the time
in the womb may also be disturbed by toxic substances that the mother ingests
— drugs, chemical additives, and so on — as well as by disturbing emotions
that the mother experiences, which release stress hormones into the mother’s
bloodstream, which then cross the placental barrier and affect the fetus,
BPM I is also sometimes characterized as feelings of being surrounded by
a polluted environment and being forced to ingest noxious substances, toxins,
and poisons, which sickens the fetus.
No-Exit Despair
In Grof’s schema, BPM I is followed by BPM II (i.e., Basic
Perinatal Matrix II), which are experiences and feelings related to
the time of "no exit" in the womb and claustrophobic-like feelings occurring
to nearly all humans in the late stages of pregnancy and especially with
the onset of labor, when the cervix is not yet dilated. Since there
does not seem to be any "light at the end of the tunnel" — metaphorically
speaking — it is characterized by feelings of depression, guilt, despair,
and blame, and a characterization of oneself as being in the position of
"the victim." It is very much like deMause’s period of collective
feelings of entrapment, strangulation, suffocation, and poisonous placenta,
which he has found to precede the actual outbreak of war or other violence.3
Birth Wars
This of course is followed by BPM III, which involves feelings
and experiences of all-encompassing struggle and is related to the time
of one’s actual birth. Characterized also by intense feelings of
aggression and sexual excess — in the position, now, of "the aggressor"
— it is related directly, in deMause’s schema, to a time of actual war.
Hallelujah! . . (I think. . . . )
BPM IV follows this; it corresponds to the time of emergence
from the womb during the birth process and is characterized by feelings
of victory, release, exultation, but also sometimes, after that initial
relief, of depression — when the struggle does not bring the expected rewards,
as when, during modern obstetrical births, the neonate is harshly treated
and then taken away from the mother, disallowing the bonding which should
occur, naturally, immediately after birth.
In my own experience, the exultation and relief of release was replaced
suddenly by feelings of being assaulted by the attendants at my birth (which
of course they thought of as "attending" to me) as they went about roughly
removing mucous from my mouth; prematurely cutting my umbilical cord to
leave me struggling for breath; scrubbing, weighing, measuring, and otherwise
probing me; and wrapping me like a tamale and taking me away from all I
had previously known (i.e., my mother). This felt like ritual abuse
to me, and I have often likened it, after the intense period of compression
and crushing before birth, to a situation of "going from the frying pan
into the fire."
At any rate, this experience of actual emergence or birth coincides,
societally, with deMause’s period of the ending of a war.
Heaven and Hell
In summary, we have euphoric, oceanic, blissful feelings, sometimes
feelings of being poisoned or being in a toxic or polluted environment;
followed by crushing, no-exit, depression, claustrophobia, compression,
strangulation, suffocation, and being force-fed by a poisonous placenta;
followed by struggle, violence, war scenarios, birth/death fantasies, sexual
excess; and finally release, triumph, feeling of renewal or rebirth and
a new golden age, but also possibly of being abandoned, tortured, ritually
sacrificed, probed medically, and assaulted by sensations. These
are some of the elements that characterize the experience of the perinatal
unconscious.
FOR DREAMING OUT LOUD!
In the next chapter we will take a look at how these elements have erupted
into our collective dreams in recent history. By this I mean, we
will see how our artists and creative people have projected them into the
media, movies, and TV -- in which we all participate -- and how our fascination
with them, because these artists are reflecting things that exist deep
inside of ourselves as well, has caused them to grow, creating the dominant
underlying mythos of our time.
CHAPTER TWO NOTES
1. Primal Renaissance: The Journal of Primal
Psychology, formerly published by the International Primal Association,
currently published by SSILLY God Press, P.O. Box 1348, Guerneville, CA
95446-1348. [return to text]
2. Stanislav Grof, Realms of the Human
Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research. New York: Viking Press,
1975; LSD Psychotherapy. Pomona, CA: Hunter House, 1980; Beyond
the Brain: Birth, Death, and Transcendence in Psychotherapy. Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press, 1985; The Adventure of Self-Discovery:
Dimensions of Consciousness and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Inner
Exploration. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988;
The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How
They Shape Our Lives. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993.
[return to text]
3. Lloyd deMause, "Restaging Early Traumas
in War and Social Violence." The Journal of Psychohistory 23 (1995):
344-391. (Reprinted, with permission, on this website as "Restaging
Prenatal and Birth Traumas in War and Social Violence") [return
to text]
Copyright © 1999 by Michael Derzak Adzema
Comments? E-mail me by clicking on: mickel@primalspirit.com
Mickel Adzema
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