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I have been reading the paper entitled ‘Giving and Taking: The foetal-maternal placental junction as a prototype and precursor of object relations’ in the Spring 1991 issue of the Journal. The case vignette is perfectly acceptable and interesting but I want to take issue with some of the argument leading up to it.
The author says: ‘Although Stern has shown that perceptual memories of sounds heard in the womb exist in young babies, the idea of any mental functioning complex enough to be called psychological life occurring before birth seems very doubtful to me’. To start with, Stern is not a researcher into prenatal life (he has done some research on mother-baby interactions) and to quote him as if he were is misleading. In any case he says hardly anything about the matter. The author does not mention the people who do write about this, such as Verny (1982) and Ridgway .
He says ‘Laing (1983) joins with Freud in considering that Rank's theory of birth trauma has no place in the scientific scheme of things’. This seems an odd misreading: the truth is that in that book Laing embraces not only the theory of birth trauma (see also Janov 1983, Grof 1985), but also the theory of foetal trauma, implantation trauma and conception trauma, and quotes people like Mott (1959), Peerbolte (1975), Swartley (1978) and Lake (1980) in support of such ideas. He also quotes Winnicott as being in favour of the idea of birth trauma (p. 94). Perhaps the author of this article is not familiar with the work of Laing, because he says many of the same things in his earlier book The Facts of Life.
None of the medical textbooks known to me mention a distinction between a foetal placenta and a maternal placenta. It seems that different authorities have somewhat different views as to the precise nomenclature here. The whole of the placenta, as I understand it, is foetal material, and comes from the original fertilised gamete. It all belongs to the foetus, in that sense, and merely pushes out villi i