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It seems that as humans we have always thought of our existence as set within its confines. So we think of death and what this means for our existence, but also of birth. And this leads us to imagine what our prebirth existence is like and what birth means for us. Philippe Ployé's book The Prenatal Theme in Psychotherapy is full of thoughts about our perinatal and prenatal life. He raises questions about the possibility of object-directed prenatal forms of relatedness and of prenatal forms of aggression. Then we wonder what this aggression could be directed towards, and he suggests the prenatal mother herself and the placenta.
I found Ployé's writing stimulating in terms of making me think more imaginatively about prenatal life and, more specifically, about the placenta. I came to feel that I had badly overlooked the importance of this vital organ, although I had been aware of Meltzer talking of it as the baby's first companion. Ployé makes the placenta vivid with his list of placental symbols, but much more through his keen awareness of the service that the placenta provides for the baby. He makes one want to know more about the mechanism of the placental membrane. He cites E.W. Page as describing this membrane as ‘highly dynamic’ and both separating and linking the foetus and the mother. Page says that it receives input from both and is believed to play an active role in ‘determining the nature of these exchanges as well as the rate at which they occur’ (Ployé, p. 123; Page 1963, p. 147). Ployé places great importance on this ‘dual-touch’ interchange and sees it as the physical forerunner of Bion's container/contained and of Kleinian ideas of projective identification and projection. He points out that, in describing these, we often talk about ‘metabolizing’, and that when we talk about the physical processes by which the placenta receives the wastes of the baby and provides him with oxygen and nutrients, we use the word ‘metabolizing’ unmetaphorically.
This raises