With this new knowledge at their disposal, mothers and fathers have an unparalleled opportunity to help shape the personality of their unborn child. They can actively contribute to his happiness and well-being, and not just in utero, nor in the years immediately following birth, but for the rest of his life. ...

page 18
Providing the newborn with a warm, reassuring, humane environment does make a difference because the child is very aware of how he is born. He senses gentleness, softness and a caring touch, and he responds in a quite different way to the bright lights, electrical beeps, and cold impersonal atmosphere that are so often associated with a medical birth. ...

... he is conscious or aware though his consciousness is not as deep or complex as an adult's.
He is incapable of understanding the shades of meaning an adult can put into a simple word or gesture; but, ... he is sensitive to remarkably subtle emotional nuances. He can sense and react not only to large, undifferentiated emotions such as love and hate, but also to more shaded complex feeling states like ambivalence and ambiguity. ... something like consciousness exists from the very first moments of conception ....

... the child from the sixth month in utero onward ... can already remember, hear, even learn.
The unborn child is, in fact, a very quick study, as a group of investigators demonstrated in what has come to be regarded as a classic report.

They taught sixteen unborn babies to respond to a vibrating sensation by kicking (creating) ... a conditioned or learned response in their subjects by first exposing them several times to something that would make them kick naturally -- a loud noise (it was made a few feet from each mother ...) The vibration became their cue and their kicking in response to it a learned behavior.

... Our likes and dislikes, fears and phobias ... are in part, also the product of conditioned learning. ... the sensation of anxiety ... his mother's smoking ... an unborn child grows emotionally agitated (as measured by the quickening of his heartbeat) each time his mother thinks of having a cigarette. She doesn't even have to put it to her lips or light a match; just her idea of having a cigarette is enough to upset him. ... drop in oxygen supply (in the maternal blood passing the placenta) ... psychological effects ... thrusts him into a chronic state of uncertainty and fear.

... A four- or five-month-old fetus definitely responds to sound and melody (and voice) ... Soft, soothing talk makes him feel loved and wanted [suggesting that angry, nervous talk makes him feel unloved and unwanted].

page 25
Life is not static.
What happens at twenty, at forty, even at sixty certainly influences and alters us.
But it is important to point out that events affect us quite differently in the first stages of life. An adult, and to a lesser degree a child, has had time to develop defences and responses. He can soften or deflect the impact of the experience. An unborn child cannot. What affects him does so directly. That's why maternal emotions etch themselves so deeply on his psyche and why their tug remains so powerful later in life. ...

The babies who moved around the most in utero grew into the most anxious children.
They were not simply a bit more fretful than normal. They were bursting, bubbling over with anxiety. These two- and three-year-olds felt an almost heartbreaking discomfort in even the most common social situations. ...

... most of those frightened youngsters will still be scurrying into corners to avoid encounters at thirty [unless they release their energy blocks]. The difference is that they will be trying to avoid husbands, wives and their own children instead of teachers and playmates. The cycle will repeat itself. ...

What is forming are broader, more deeply rooted tendencies -- such as a sense of security or self-esteem. From these, specific character traits develop later in childhood -- as in those youngsters I mentioned earlier. They were not born shy. They were born anxious. Painful shyness may grow out of that anxiety. ...

... a woman is her baby's conduit to the world.
Everything that affects her, affects him. And nothing affects her as deeply or hits with such lacerating impact as worries about her husband (or partner). Because of that, few things are more dangerous to a child, emotionally and physically, than a father who abuses or neglects his pregnant wife. ...

An equally vital factor in the child's emotional well-being is his father's commitment to the marriage. Any number of things can influence a man's ability to relate to his partner, from the way he feels about his wife or his own father to his job pressures or his own insecurities. (Ideally, of course, the time to work out these problems is before conceiving, not during a pregnancy.)

... A child hears his father's voice in utero, and there is solid evidence that hearing that voice makes a big emotional difference. In cases where a man talked to his child in utero using short soothing words, the newborn was able to pick out his father's voice in a room even in the first hour or two of life. More than pick out, he responds to it emotionally. If he is crying, for instance, he'll stop. That familiar, soothing sound tells him he is safe.

page 34
... In the eighteenth century man began his long, torturous love affair with the machine and the effects were felt everywhere, including medicine. Doctors looked at the human body pretty much the way children look at Erector sets. Illness was simply a matter of finding out what went where and figuring out why what was supposed to go there didn't. What mattered was what could be immediately seen, touched and verified. ... Feelings and emotions were too shadowy, too elusive and quite irrelevant to this rational view of the world of precision medicine. ...

... This concern with comfort may explain why some newborn children are so active at night.
In utero, night was the busiest time of the day. Lying in bed, his mother was anything but relaxed and restful. With her heartburn, upset stomach and leg cramps, she was forever moving this way, then that way, and invariably there were at least two or three trips to the bathroom. So I do not think it is too surprising that some infants come into the world with an inverted sleep rhythm. ...

Recent studies also show that from the twenty-fourth week on, the unborn child listens all the time.

page 43
How ... can a child decode maternal messages that say "love" and "comfort" when he has absolutely no way of knowing what these feeling states mean? ... in 1925, when American biologist and psychologist W.B. Cannon demonstrated that fear and anxiety can be biochemically induced by the injection of a group of chemicals called catecholamines (epinephrine, norepinephrine, dopamine), which appear naturally in the blood of fearful animals and humans. ... extracted from already frightened animals were injected into a second group of relaxed animals. Within seconds and without provocation, all the calm animals also began acting terrified. ...

... in the fetus's case (the mother) is the source of these substances ... when she is upset.
As soon as they pass the placental barrier, they upset him as well. ... each wave of maternal hormones jots him out of the blankness that is his normal state in the womb, and into a kind of receptivity. Something unusual -- perhaps unsettling -- has happened and (he) begins trying to make sense out of that event. ...

(The mother's) thoughts and feelings are the material out of which the unborn child fashions himself. When they are positive and nurturing, the child can ... withstand shocks from almost any quarter. But the fetus cannot be misled either. If he is good at sensing what is on his mother's mind generally, he is even better at sensing her attitude towards him, ....

Dr. Gerhard Rottmann ... placed (mothers) in four emotional categories based on their attitudes towards pregnancy. ..

... Ideal Mothers ... wanted their unborn children ... had the easiest pregnancies, the most trouble-free births, and the healthiest offspring --- physically and emotionally.

... Catastrophic Mothers ... with the negative attitudes ... had the most devastating medical problems during pregnancy, and bore the highest rate of premature, low-weight, and emotionally disturbed infants.

... Ambivalent Mothers were outwardly quite happy ... their unborn children ... picked up the same unconscious ambivalence Dr. Rottmann's psychological tests had. At birth, an unusually large number of them had both behavioral and gastrointestinal problems.

... The unborn children of Cool Mothers also appeared to be deeply confused about the mixed messages they were picking up. ...many reasons for not wanting children (yet) .... At birth, an unusually large number of them were apathetic and lethargic.

page 49
(Dr. Dennis Stott) rates a bad marriage or relationship as among the greatest causes of emotional and physical damage in the womb. ... He found unhappy marriages produced children who as babies were five times more fearful and jumpy than the offspring of happy relationships ... found them to be undersized, timid and emotionally dependent on their mothers to an inordinate degree.

... low reactors (fetuses) ... were upset very little by the noise ... Fifteen years later ... rarely upset by the unexpected ... remained in control of their emotions and behavior. ...

(When) high-reacting adolescents was shown a picture by the investigators, he was much more likely to provide an emotional, creative interpretation of it, describing not just what was in the picture, but how he thought [projection] the people in it felt -- whether they were sad or happy, concerned or carefree. The low reactors, on the other hand, tended to offer very concrete descriptions. What they described was what they saw immediately in front of them. There was little or no imagination or flair in their interpretations.

page53
... Dr. Lester W. Sontag .. found that war had transformed what in peacetime were occasional fears of danger into a daily reality for hundreds of thousands of pregnant women with soldier husbands, ... (served to) heighten a child's biological susceptibility to emotional distress. ... Dr. Sontag named this phenomenon somatopsychics and defined it as the way "basic physiological processes affect the personality structure, perception and performance of an individual," ... the person's body machinery predisposes him toward such psychological disorders as anxiety or depression . ... neurohormonal loops that link the mother to unborn child ....

The rates of psychiatric disorders, particularly schizophrenia, were markedly higher among those whose fathers had died before the children were born. ...

"Because the child's irritability involves the control of his gastrointestinal tract he empties his bowels at unusually frequent intervals, spits up his feedings, and generally makes a nuisance of himself."

While this set of conditions may or may not produce feeding problems, it frequently does produce behavioral ones. A child with an irritable, overcharged ANS (autonomic nervous system) tends to be high-strung: restless, fidgety, overactive. In the womb, the precursor of such behavior is excessive movement ....

page 64
Anxiety within limits, is beneficial to the fetus.
It disturbs his sense of oneness with his surroundings and makes him aware of his own separateness and distinctness. It also pushes him into action. Being excited, upset or confused by noisy messages is an uncomfortable experience, so he kicks, he squirms, he gradually begins devising ways of getting out of the way of anxiety -- in short, he starts erecting a set of primitive defence mechanisms. ... forces him to conjure up ways of dealing with those intentions (of his mother).

The foundations of anger ... one of the things that produces it is restraining his movements. Hold his arm or his leg and he screams furiously. Almost certainly, blocking his behavior has the same effect before birth as it does afterward. If his mother happens to sit or lie in an uncomfortable position, he becomes annoyed.

Unpleasant sounds --- such as his father's yelling --- also make him react this way. As with anxiety, however, anger in small doses actually benefits fetal development since it hastens the development of rudimentary intellectual connections. In the case of restraint, for example, the child learns something about cause and effect --- the way his mother sits or lies causes cramps and, hence, angers him -- and that is a precursor of human thought.

Some forms of depression can also originate in utero.
Usually, these are produced by a major loss. For whatever reason --- illness or a distraction --- a mother withdraws her love and support from her unborn child; that loss plunges him into a depression. ...

If loving, nurturing mothers bear more self-confident, secure children, it is because the self-aware "I" of each infant is carved out of warmth and love. Similarly, if unhappy, depressed or ambivalent mothers bear a higher rate of neurotic children, it is because their offsprings' egos were molded in moments of dread and anguish. ...

... the link between subjective womb feelings and adult sexual behavior. We found that people who recalled being terrified in utero were markedly more unsure of themselves sexually and also more prone to sexual problems, while those who remembered the womb as a good and peaceful place were sexually better adjusted.

[A parent's inability to express feelings fully and constructively, as well as a parent who experiences abuse through lack of assertiveness and self-esteem may have these tendencies mirrored in the infant through energy block induced behavioral pattern imprinting as well as shared energy block formation during pregnancy. Releasing the blocks later does not afford the individual with the communication and awareness skills denied, avoided, and frustrated by the block-induced and imprinted behaviors. The person still must make the effort to develop these skills, or, risk rebuilding blocks as a means of coping with a deficit.]

page 121
Caesarian ... The caressing and massaging the baby receives as it passes down the birth canal represent a first encounter with sensuality and, however diffuse or unfocused, the quality of that feeling leaves a permanent mark. It is, in a very real sense, a forerunner of adult sexuality; so, in a different way, is the total absence of it. That is why Caesarians often have sharply different sexual (and even physical) attitudes.

Surgical delivery deprives a child of the physical and psychological pleasures a vaginally born infant experiences. Removed from his mother's uterus in an operating room, he gets no massaging or caressing. ... has trouble with the concept of space ... prone to be clumsy. Sexually, the effects are manifested in a hunger for body contact. The Caesarean demands, indeed requires continual stroking and hugging. Given the way he was born, it is not hard to see where his cuddle-hunger comes from. ...

Sexually, these contrasts leave a mark in the form of ambivalence.
Men express this ambivalence differently than women, and some of us feel the ambivalence more acutely than others, since the ratio of pain to pleasure in the birth balance varies from one person to the next. At its root lies a subconscious desire to re-experience the joy and tranquility, the safe place we once possessed in the womb. In men this longing often expresses itself in mindless promiscuity. Endless sexual conquests are really veiled attempts to re-enter and recapture the serenity of the womb. But since by its nature this is an unrealizable goal, inevitably each compulsively repeated sexual encounter ends in disappointment.

Though superficially similar to promiscuity, in women the desire to enter the womb takes the quite different form of hugging and cuddling. Since both are usually available only as part of sex, many women -- especially single ones -- become promiscuous to get the holding they want. ...

... primal anger ... A danger arises only when that residue is large and unexpressed. ... an unusually painful birth --- sensing in utero --- that his mother is rejecting or ambivalent ... lacking an acceptable outlet, very frequently turn the anger inward against themselves ... unexpressed anger accounts for a number of emotional problems ... ulcers ... depression.

page 172
... infants learn best when what is being taught taps their natural abilities, ... Anything more complicated will not only elude him, but may harm him, particularly if it is pressed on him insistently by an overly ambitious parent. ...

A child needs instant encouragement --- meaning within five or six seconds ---or he will not associate it with his behavior --- which, in this case, means he will not feel encouraged to (take the action desired by others). ... there is an almost geometric progression between the amount of meaningful time spent with a child and that child's intellectual and emotional growth, ....