Response to John Rowan

Thank you for your letter and for your interest in my paper, ‘Giving and Taking: The Foetal-Maternal Placental Junction as a Prototype and Precursor of Object Relations’.

You take issue with a number of points in the theoretical part. Firstly, I should like to admit freely to using, at times, a dogmatic style in what is speculative writing. Your letter, it seems to me, at times demonstrates a similar style.

Regarding the quotation from Laing, I have assumed that Freud's ‘version of the objective scientific scheme of things’ is the only version, and this is obviously not the case.

You say that Stern is not a researcher. In the bibliography of his book, there are twelve papers of which he is either the sole or joint author, which strongly suggests that he is a researcher. The perceptual memories of sounds heard in the womb, although quoted by Stern, were indeed not his own research but that of Lipsitt, personally communicated to Stern in 1984.

You say that none of the medical textbooks known to you mention a distinction between a foetal placenta and a maternal placenta, and also say that I do not quote evidence and so you are sceptical. However, I have given the reference to my source, i.e. Baird, D. Combined Textbook of Obstetrics and Gynaecology (E S Livingstone Ltd). On p. 74, it reads: ‘It is of great importance to remember that, although colloquially the afterbirth is called the placenta, yet this in reality only represents the foetal part. Biologically, the placenta is an organ developed by mother and child in symbiosis and can be defined anatomically as the chorion frondosum, the decidua basalis and the chorio-decidual space or blood lake between’.

Since receiving your letter, I have obtained and read your chapter ‘Primal Integration’ in Innovative Therapy in Britain. I was not previously aware of your work. I see that it covers some areas on which I have commented although your view of antenatal events is very different from mine. I could not comment just now on t