Perinatal Roots of Violence
There is no doubt that traumatic experiences and frustration of basic needs in childhood and infancy represent an important source of ‘malignant aggression’. However, in the last several decades, psychedelic research and deep experiential psychotherapies have revealed additional significant roots of violence in deep recesses of the psyche that lie beyond postnatal biography. Thus feelings of vital threat, pain, and suffocation experienced for many hours during the passage through the birth canal generate enormous amounts of murderous aggression that remains repressed and stored in the organism. As Sigmund Freud pointed out in his book Mourning and Melancholia, repressed aggression turns into depression and self-destructive impulses. Perinatal energies and emotions thus by their very nature represent a mixture of murderous and suicidal drives.
The reliving of birth in various forms of experiential psychotherapy is not limited to the replay of the emotional feelings and physical sensations experienced during the passage through the birth canal; it is typically accompanied by a variety of experiences from the collective unconscious portraying scenes of unimaginable violence. Among these are often powerful sequences depicting wars, revolutions, racial riots, concentration camps, totalitarianism, and genocide. Spontaneous emergence of this imagery associated with the reliving of birth suggests that the perinatal level might actually be an important source of extreme forms of human violence. Naturally, wars and revolutions are extremely complex phenomena that have historical, economic, political, religious, and other dimensions. My intention here is not to offer a reductionistic explanation replacing all the other causes, but to add some new insights concerning the psychological and spiritual dimensions of these forms of social psychopathology that have been neglected or received only cursory attention in earlier theories.
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Efforts to change humanity would have to start with psychological prevention at a very early age. The data from prenatal and perinatal psychology indicate that much could be achieved by changing the conditions of pregnancy, delivery, and early postnatal care. This would include improving the emotional preparation of the mother during pregnancy, practicing natural childbirth, creating a psychospiritually informed birth environment, and cultivating emotionally nourishing contact between the mother and the child in the postpartum period.
The circumstances of birth play an important role in creating a disposition to violence and self-destructive tendencies or, conversely, to loving behaviour and healthy interpersonal relationships.