I was reading an article about someone who claims to have remembered emotional abandonment in the womb and is receiving the same kind of counseling that someone would receive if this happened during childhood.
I have also read stuff from practitioners about healing the “inner child”, which involves not only facing remembered trauma, but also the trauma that occurs during complicated births or incidents occurring right after birth that you wouldn’t expect anyone to remember.
The idea that events occurring so early in development could impact a person psychologically sounds like woo-woo quackery to me. However, I can buy some things. Like, I know there has been some research showing a correlation between expectant mothers undergoing stress and the later health of their babies. The physiological linkage here is clear, though. Stress would cause the mother to secrete high levels of stress hormones, which could have a number of bad affects on a developing fetus (adrenaline causes vasoconstriction = reducing blood supply to fetus = hypoxic conditions in the brain = badness). However, this article I was reading mentioned stuff like amniocentesis or having an “absorbed” identical twin screwing up a person. Or not bonding with the mother during gestation. Does anyone really remember whether they bonded with their mother when they were in the womb?
Is there any fact-based evidence demonstrating a relationship between prenatal “experiences” and the later psychological make-up of a person? Or is all of this something dreamed up by creative psychoanalysts, encouraged by patients who want answers to questions that have no good answers?
No. There’s a huge market for “past regression therapy” where people will go to quack therapists and uncover “repressed memories” of birth, alien abduction, or past lives. It’s all a massive dog-and-pony show, and it really does a disservice to the mentally ill people who seek those services (but try telling them that!).
Here’s a study stating that humans are incapable of developing long-term memories before the age of 9 months-1 year.
Several episodes of Penn and Teller’s Bullshit have demonstrated multiple versions of this kind of “therapy”:
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The alien abduction episode where they showed snippets of an actual therapy session with one of these quacks. One of the experts on the show explained how the “therapist” asks leading questions like “where was the light coming from?” which leads the patient to believe the light must be coming from somewhere unusual.
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A past-life regression where a woman was the handmaiden (or something) to Napoleon’s wife(?) Josephine. It was pointed out on the show that, interestingly, everyone who does these past regressions was somebody noteworthy in history, rather than an average peasant farmer like the vast majority of the population.
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A woman who came to birth-regression therapy knowing that she almost suffocated at birth based on what she was told growing up, and during the session the therapist walked her step-by-step into reliving her “memory” of the experience. She felt it was transformative and therapeutic, and was in tears at the end of it. But nobody actually **remembers **getting strangled with their own umbilical cord in the womb. It’s a biological impossibility. This woman might have created a little fantasy and the “therapy” session enabled her to play-act it out; this may have been therapeutic for her, but was certainly not anything approaching the truth.
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A group session from the alien abduction episode, where several people told stories about the relationships, sex, and/or children they had with aliens during their abduction. One woman had even drawn a picture of her “husband.”
People can come out of these sessions believing everything that happened, but unethical “therapists” can actually, at worst, be implanting false memories in their patients. At the very least, they paint an attractive picture of victimhood that the patient clings to. As the types of people who are drawn in by these services are already predisposed to superstition, they *want *to believe. They *want *to believe so hard that, in the end, they do.
There might be a minor argument in favor of this kind of therapy, in that it provides comfort through socialization and the placebo effect, but none of it should be mistaken for science. It seems like most of the people who take advantage of such therapy are histrionic types. They’d be much better served by getting real therapy and medication, rather than an excuse to indulge their desire to be “special.”
Please forgive my over-frequent use of air quotes.