Anxiety and Birth

One of Freud's statements that has met with the geatest incredulity, and even ridicule, is his suggestion that the distressing experiences passed through by the infant during the act of birth serve as a prototype for all subsequent experiences of fear, so that in a sense it may be said that every attack of fear involves a partial repetition of that great initial experience.

It is therefore interesting to observe that this suggestion of Freud's was, to some extent, anticipated in the eighteenth century by Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin. In his Zoonomia, published in 1794, Vol. I, p. 148, he expresses himself as follows:1 'As soon as the young animal is born, the first important sensations that occur to him are occasioned by the oppression about his precordia for want of respiration, and by his sudden transition from ninety-eight degrees of heat into so cold a climate. He trembles, that is he exerts alternately all the muscles of his body, to enfranchise himself from the oppression about his bosom, and begins to breathe with frequent and short respirations; at the same time the cold contracts his red skin, gradually turning it pale; the contents of the bladder and of the bowels are evacuated; and from the experience of these first disagreeable sensations the passion of fear is excited, which is no other than the expectations of disagreeable sensations. This early association of motions and sensations persists throughout life; the passion of fear produces a cold and pale skin, with tremblings, quick respiration, and an evacuation of the bladder and bowels, and thus constitutes the natural or universal language of this passion.'2