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Intrauterine life and the experience of birth leave discrete psychological traces that are both difficult to determine and yet pervasive in their imprint. For example, the fetus's transition from living in a floating state to beginning to feel the boundaries of the womb against its own body appear to be prerequisites for the infant's feeling of a sense of skin. For the mother, the movements of the fetus kicking and stretching are powerful indicators that the life she carries inside is different from her own. So, too, in the experience of the birth – through the contractions, the confinement of the birth canal and the delivery process – there is an imprinting for both mother and baby that their life together is being transformed and that psychological work is necessary to expand into this new space. In the best of circumstances, the experience of a live birth provides for both mother and father the needed impetus to care for and love this new creature. The infant, in turn, will send powerful social cues concerning its ongoing needs and will demonstrate through seeing, molding, and voicing an awareness of others around him.
However, what about the experience of the infant who is ‘not ready to be born’? We can only imagine the magnitude of psychological trauma to an infant born prematurely, who is most often deprived not only of a normal birth experience but of a most essential time, sometimes as long as two to three months of development – both physical and psychological. The infant is completely unprepared to meet the assault of the outside world, made unbearable not only by the loss of the ‘mother-body’ – the mother that harbors me and is me at times – but also by the lack of ordinary sensual contact that a full-term infant might enjoy as recompense for loss of life in the womb. What was destined to be a sensually rich and complex experience of smelling, touching, seeing, and hearing is now a ‘stimulus scramble’. ‘Sensuous objects’ that are the entitlemen