Conference PaperPDF Available

The Consequences of Denials of Pregnancy

Authors:
  • Independent Researcher

Abstract

Excessive enjoyment and anxiety are at the source of pregnancy denials. When the desire and orgasm of fertilizing sexual intercourse are too intense, they trigger pain and fears of death so strong that they are violently rejected from the perception-consciousness system. When the fusional bond of attachment, which I call the Primitive Placental Bond is excessive, it awakens the original maternal fantasies, according to which women cannot detach themselves from this bond without dying. The sudden hormonal variations linked to fertilization and pregnancy stimulate behaviors which refer to reflexes of self-preservation and reproduction, which are linked to endogenous Post Traumatic Stress (PTS) of phylogenetic origin. These anxieties must be represented psychically, especially in dreams, in order to be perceived unconsciously and become liveable. Otherwise they can cause a “total denial” of all psychic and perceptual representations from fertilization or a succession of “partial denials” of perceptions and emotions felt during gestation. Denials of pregnancy could be the cause of malformations from the start of embryogenesis.They could be at the origin of addictions and disorders of perception and self-recognition (agnosia, synaesthesia, spatial neglect). These agnosias could be followed by neurological disorders (epilepsy, narcolepsy), somatic pathologies (skin diseases, Cushing’s, diabetes,cancer) and more or less serious psychological pathologies (autism, schizophrenia, psychosis, perversion and neuroses).
Denied Pregnancies
Tamara Landau
It is a great honour for me to be here with you, and I would like to thank Mr. Eric Fiat and
the scientic committee of the Bioethics Research Department of the Collège des Bernardins1
for inviting me, as a psychoanalyst, to speak on the subject of “denied pregnancies” to a medical
audience interested in reecting on the bioethical issues arising from the development of new
biotechnologies applied to medically assisted procreation.
My contribution today will be an attempt to address these issues by illustrating my
hypotheses, according to which pregnancy denial is a process that has always been present
during natural pregnancies and is caused by an excessive death anxiety experienced by couples
before giving birth and throughout the gestation period. Pregnancy denials have become more
and more frequent as a result of the stress linked to the profound changes we are experiencing
in our social and economic relations, in the world of work and in family life, all of which are
driving couples, and women in particular, to procreate later and later in life.
We could argue that the new virtual means of communication, including teleworking, are
contributing to a sharp rise in denied pregnancies, as they disrupt temporal and circadian rhythms
and often lead to addictions to screens and smartphones among both adults and children. The
result is a reduction in exchanges of words and views, and in the ability of parents to listen to
themselves, to each other and to their children, even when they are already at home—let alone
when they’re still in the womb!
Depending on the stage of pregnancy and the duration of these moments of inattentiveness,
it is conceivable that these lapses in listening and observation may give rise to a total or
partial denial of pregnancy and, I believe, the psychological cause behind the lack of symbolic
inscription of gender and the order of liation. These failed inscriptions may subsequently
result in various more or less serious pathologies: mental (autism, schizophrenia, neuroses and
perversions), neurological (epilepsy, narcolepsy) or somatic (skin diseases, asthma, diabetes,
breast and genital cancers). In recent years, autism in the general population has been estimated
at a rate of 1 case per 160 individuals. (World Health Organization, 2023).
1. Website of the Department for Bioethical Research of the Collège des Bernardins:
https://www.collegedesbernardins.fr/seminaires/engendrer-ou-creer-vers-lhomme-fabrique
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I would like to share with you today the means to comprehend these unconscious processes
of denial at play during pregnancy, as well as how caregivers can prevent or mitigate these issues
through just a few consultation sessions. These sessions, involving both the future mother and
father, can be conducted before undergoing assisted reproductive procedures or during any
type of pregnancy. Their aim is to interpret the intensity of the anxiety about giving birth, based
on unconscious fantasies of death and disappearance that have been passed on by women since
the dawn of time during gestation; what I refer to as the original maternal fantasies.
To this end, I have developed a protocol to prepare for medically assisted reproduction
(MAR), which has so far been tested on thirty couples with excellent results. Additionally, group
sessions for primiparous women at the onset of each trimester in a birthing centre, followed,
if necessary, by consultations with the couple, have proven effective in avoiding the risk of
premature delivery and in resolving somatic problems associated with gestation (pre-eclampsia,
gestational diabetes, etc.)
Before I begin, I would like to share a few words about my background as a psychoanalyst
and independent researcher: I was able to forge my hypotheses on pregnancy denial through
clinical research on addictions with adult hysteric women suffering from eating disorders and, as
Freud would have said, I realised that they were suffering from ‘foetal memories’. In examining
their eating and drinking behaviour during the day, I was therefore able to detect analogies
with the behaviour of the embryo and foetus in the quality, quantity, rhythm and succession
of tastes, colours and temperature of the amniotic uid (AF) produced and ingested during
the three trimesters of foetal life. During the rst trimester, the embryo continuously produces
drops of AF through epidermal transudation and swallows nothing; in the second trimester,
the foetus begins to produce, swallow, spit and expel more and more AF with its urine; in the
third trimester, it produces and swallows more and more AF secreted by the pulmonary alveoli,
which it expels with urine; it grows enormously and begins to produce meconium, which it
retains in its intestines. I found that anorexics tend to be psychically xated in the rst trimester,
anorexic-bulimics in the second, and bulimics in the third.
I later realised that they could not feel alive when they were alone at home unless they heard
their parents’ voices over the phone every day, particularly those of their mothers, but also of
their partners or husbands, their grandmothers, brothers and sisters or children—and if they
failed to see them regularly enough to taste the skin of their faces, foreheads, hair, mouths, their
saliva, lips, necks, shoulders and underarm and perineal perspiration... or the taste and smell of
their favourite foods and drinks, which they would consume continuously throughout the day!
Paradoxically, then, as a psychoanalyst I have come to develop a theory on the permanence
of the placental olfactory imprint, which I have called the Primal Placental Bond (PPB)
in human beings. By this term, I refer to a neurobiological and biophysical bond of fusional
hormonal attachment, which could be the source of an indestructible “life and death” passion
between parents and children from the very beginning of pregnancy. Indeed, my clinical
observations have led me to the hypothesis on the one hand that this PPB lasts a lifetime
and can be transmitted over at least three generations, and, on the other, that it is specic to
humans, as it is already structured as a language during foetal life.
The importance for newborns of smelling the breasts, the areolas of the nipples and the
mother’s skin, from birth and particularly during the rst hour, a scent that triggers the instinct
to suckle and aids their adjustment to life outside the womb, has been well-established for
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many years. But I believe that the intensity of this PPB is the key issue. If it is too intense, it
unconsciously makes any separation impossible, because it would be perceived as deadly for
the parents, and therefore for the child.
You will likely understand the difculty I myself have encountered in accepting this
discovery, which is contrary to all psychoanalytical theories from Freud to Lacan and beyond.
These theories consider us human beings as speaking beings (parlêtres, Lacan, 1987) who,
given our evolutionary position, do not truly experience the signicance of olfactory perceptions
specic to animals.
How do we then navigate and represent to ourselves the stages of separation between mother
and foetus?
I believe that the loving relationship with our children is not innate, but is progressively
acquired during gestation and after birth, when the mother, and father if present, can unconsciously
anticipate and accept strong decreases in the intensity of this PPB during its development,
without any fear of death. In this way, women can unconsciously experience and represent to
themselves the various stages of separation during pregnancy. If death anxiety is not excessive,
and therefore not denied, parents can transition from a “life and death” passion to a loving
relationship with their child. In the research conducted by Michèle Benhaïm (Benhaïm, 1992),
only biolgical mothers, and no adoptive mothers, were found to have committed infanticide.
One of these mothers, who had killed her six-year-old daughter, told the Court of Assizes: “My
daughter had lost her baby smell, how can you expect a child to live without her mother?” On
this topic, see the lm by Alice Diop Saint Omer, which perfectly describes the total denial of
pregnancy by an infanticidal mother.
Today I would like, therefore, to present my ideas on the origin and formation of this Primal
Placental Bond starting from my clinical research on addictions through what my anorexic and/
or bulimic patients have taught me. I will begin by describing the function of anxiety and its role
in pregnancy denial. I will then describe the formation of original maternal fantasies of death
and falling aroused by the presence of endogenous traumas forged by the implicit memory of a
sequence of Post-Traumatic Stress (PTS) experiences of a phylogenetic origin. The stress, fear
and death anxiety associated with PTS are said to be reactivated during certain critical periods
of bodily metamorphosis and abrupt hormonal transformations during gestation, and are at the
root of various pregnancy denials.
MY GENERAL HYPOTHESES
My idea is that death anxiety and the desire to survive eternally drive men and women to
procreate and create incessantly, much like artists and poets, so as to feel alive and maintain a
continuous sense of existing.
The underlying fantasy is self-fertilisation by biological ssion, in other words that of
engendering and creating a clone-child every moment of every day, an original double as Freud
called it, in order to be reborn and rediscover with it the fusional bond of passionate attachment
and the continuous feeling of existing outside time already experienced with the mother during
foetal life.
However, in Sodom and Gomorrah Proust warned us of the risks of self-fertilisation.
He wrote: “if the visit of an insect, that is to say the transportation of the seed from another
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ower, is generally necessary for the fertilisation of a ower, this is because self-fertilization,
the fertilization of the ower by itself, would lead, like a succession of intermarriages in the
same family, to degeneracy and sterility, whereas the crossing effected by insects gives in the
subsequent generations a vigour unknown to their forebears. This invigoration may, however,
prove excessive, the species develop out of all proportion; then, as an anti-toxin” (Proust, 1922).
The intensity of death anxiety drives human beings to procreate in order to nd the same
intensity of PPB once created with their own parents. But when death anxiety is excessive,
sexual attraction and desire become too intense during fertilizing intercourse, and they could
cause an orgasm so strong that it produces an exquisite pain that is totally unconscious, and a
very sudden drop in muscle tone followed by feelings of absence and amnesia comparable to
those experienced during an epileptic seizure.
An intensity of death anxiety, excitement, pleasure and pain, that is reactivated during
childbirth, in the expulsion phase, like at the beginning and end of a work for an artist or writer.
In this case, the intensity of orgasm and pain is accompanied by a rejection and hatred of the
child, the source of the violence felt in the act of giving birth. This violence and impulse of
destruction are necessary for childbirth and for the mother to separate herself from a child with
whom she has completely identied and who has been a source of intense, often unconscious,
pleasure and orgasms throughout pregnancy. Which can lead to varying degrees of postpartum
depression, all the stronger if the pregnancy and childbirth have endangered the mother’s life.
The destructive violence and hatred felt for the child will therefore leave an indelible mark
on the memory of the mother, father and child. This hatred that can translate into suicide after
childbirth. In France every four days a woman dies during pregnancy, at delivery, and 13% of
deaths occur by suicide after childbirth. (Saint-Maurice: Santé publique France, 2021).
Normally, when the intensity of the anxiety, pleasure and orgasm experienced during
fertilising sexual intercourse are not excessive, they are overshadowed during childbirth by
pain, which is now at the conscious level. The hatred and rejection felt towards the child, along
with the pain, are quickly forgotten and repressed by women, and a baby blues, which may go
unnoticed, will mark for them the rst loss of the fusional child-clone after birth, marking the
rst abrupt drop in PPB on the third day after giving birth.
However, when pleasure, jouissance, death anxiety and pain are excessively intense,
also because of the prohibition of incest (a point on which we will return), they can lead to a
negation (Verwerfung), as Freud described it (Freud, 1894), or a symbolic foreclosure, in the
words of Lacan (Lacan, 1956), which I translate as a “total denial” of all the violent psychic
and perceptual representations of fertilisation, or/and a succession of “partial denials” of the
conicting perceptions and emotions experienced throughout pregnancy.
THE FUNCTION OF ANXIETY AND TYPES OF PREGNANCY DENIAL
The idea I want to set forth is that an excessive unconscious death anxiety experienced by
both women and men prior to giving birth can result in a total or partial denial of perceptions
specic to pregnancy as early as fertilisation. This can also lead to a succession of partial
denials during the critical phases associated to the most abrupt hormonal transformations at the
end of the three trimesters and at the time of delivery.
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I have translated as “total denial” what Freud called the process of negation (Verwerfung),
namely that “the Ego rejects [Verwift] the incompatible idea together with its affect and behaves
as if the idea had never occurred to the ego at all” (Freud, 1894), and as “partial denial” his
later denition of denial (Freud, 1925), namely a subject’s refusal to acknowledge and see what
they are looking at or, more precisely, the refusal to recognise the perception and vision of a
traumatic reality, such as the difference between the sexes.
Freud revealed early on the biological and phylogenetic anchoring of anxiety, sexuality,
excitation, and libidinal energy. Thanks to him, we know that any bodily modication and
transformation of libidinal energy, when it is too intense and not psychically representable, can
be traumatic and produce symptoms. He initially dened automatic” anxiety as a sudden,
unexpected inux of endogenous or exogenous sexual arousal that the subject is unable to
control. Subsequently, he distinguished this automatic anxiety from signal” anxiety. Indeed,
any anxiety, when felt physically, is a necessary alarm signal that allows anticipation of a
very intense bodily transformation and sexual excitation that is about to take place. Anxiety,
according to Freud, “has with expectation an unmistakable relation: it is anxiety in the face of
something” (Freud, 1926). For Freud, these two anxieties coexist in humans from birth alongside
original distress (Hilosigkeit, ‘helplessness’) (Freud, 1895), of biological, phylogenetic, and
ontogenetic origins, which unconsciously persists throughout life at least as a mnemonic trace.
According to my hypothesis, the intensity of phylogenetically-induced automatic anxiety in
humans depends on the rate of increase in the intensity of the PPB and on the fusional attachment
bond between the couple. A bond that leads to an extremely strong attraction and heightened
sexual desire, reactivating the fear of predators experienced prior to the ovulatory phase, with
an implicit memory of the most archaic reexes of self-preservation and reproduction in the
phylogeny experienced by females both before and during copulation, depending on the intensity
of sexual arousal, conservation and reproduction in phylogenesis experienced by females before
and during copulation and on the intensity of sexual arousal, psychomotor energy, orgasm
and pain experienced during fertilization. At the phylogenetic level, orgasm and pain were
necessary in some mammals to induce ovulation (Pavlicev & Wagner, 2016), while for the male
overcoming female aversion during estrus increased motor functions and sexual arousal. The
PPB would then be composed of attachment hormones (especially oxytocin, vasopressin and
prolactin, very closely related to the growth hormone GH), sex hormones, steroid hormones and
stress hormones—in particular cortisol, which, in interaction with melatonin causes ontogenetic
and epigenetic fear and death anxiety. And this in a succession of Post-Traumatic Stress (PTS)
events giving rise, as immediate responses, to behaviours corresponding to reexes of self-
preservation and reproduction, which are very archaic in the phylogenetic tree.
In this way, the intensity of the death anxiety reactivated by these endogenous Post-
Traumatic Stress events, specic to the state of gestation, need to be psychically represented by
women to acquire the status of unconsciously perceived and bearable endogenous traumas.
This is a very important point, because the denial of anxiety, when excessive, can result in
miscarriages, malformations and somatic and mental pathologies, from the beginning of
gestation and throughout or after birth, for the mothers and/or “their foetus”. This denial occurs
during the critical phases of metamorphosis and hormonal transformation during the circadian,
menstrual and gestational hormonal cycle at the beginning and end of the three trimesters of
pregnancy.
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According to my hypothesis, excessive death anxiety in pregnant women causes denial
during the three trimesters of gestation, which are the source of perceptual defects and
desynchronizations of the ultradian, circadian and infradian rhythms in the foetus. These
desynchronizations are reactivated after birth according to the circadian and nycthemeral sleep-
wake cycle of the melatonin biological clock at the beginning and end of the third, sixth and
ninth month, and then at the ages of three, six, nine, twelve/thirteen, seventeen/eighteen, at the
age of twenty and then every ten years, with an acrophase at 40 for women and 50 for men, and
they are passed on over three generations.
Freud already suggested that hormonal transformations associated with menstruation and
the sight of blood during puberty, when they are unexpected and have not been adequately
anticipated, described, or discussed by someone, can lead to an excess of death anxiety and a
very intense trauma that relates back to the trauma of birth (Freud, 1905).
A trauma of birth we can associate today, after the discovery of the very important function of
kisspeptin on the GnRH (gonadotropin-releasing hormone) system for reproduction in animals
and humans, to this series of PTS events. This system is already operating during ovulation and
stimulates and organises gonadotropins in the same way in both boys and girls during foetal
life. It is reactivated at birth for a week before falling into dormancy and is suddenly reawakens
at the age of nine, at puberty, by stimulating the gonads (testicles and ovaries) to produce sperm
or ova. Some of my patients were so shocked, unconsciously, by the sight and smell of blood
when their period arrived that they would become “immediately amenorrhoeic”, as they put it,
without any awareness of their bodily transformation. In addition, upon the onset of their own
child’s puberty, some patients, both male and female, developed somatic symptoms (allergies,
eczema, urinary haemorrhage, broids or cancers of the breast or uterus, ovarian or testicular
teratomas, etc.).
Freud distinguishes between the dread of death and death anxiety to mark the difference
with a real danger that arises at an unforeseen moment (Freud, 1920). I think that certain
recurring nightmares women experience when they become pregnant and during pregnancy
involve fear, a post-traumatic stress of phylogenetic origin and an anxiety about death and
collapse experienced during the unexpected hormonal, neurophysiological, biophysical
and somatosensory transformations that took place during gestation in interaction with the
development of the foetus and placental involution.
Freud emphasizes the anticipatory nature of anxiety because in humans, the ‘touch’ of the
gaze and of the word is necessary in order to expect and subsequently to become conscious
of ongoing transformations; because in the unconscious, space and time coincide. Freud
introduces the concept of libidinal energy (Freud, 1895) which connects, through psychic links,
the psychomotor and quantitative dimension of sexual excitation of the neuronal system to the
affects and to the sensations of pleasure, displeasure, anxiety and pain. And he suggests that
when sexual arousal and enjoyment are too sudden and too intense, the psychic links necessary
to maintain psychosomatic homeostasis disintegrate, causing an excess of anxiety that becomes
the cause of symptoms. Therefore, when desire, sexual excitement and orgasm are excessive,
they unleash pain and death anxieties that are violently rejected by the perception-consciousness
system, along with the perception of the bodily transformations underway.
The mechanism of total denial would then lead to a decit in olfactory, gustatory, auditory,
visual (retinal and proprioceptive), kinaesthetic, pallaesthetic, nociceptive, sensory, emotional,
psychosexual and psychomotor perceptions which, in the foetus, could be the cause of
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malformations and more or less serious disorders in the perception of the body, self-recognition
and the recognition of one’s face. My hypothesis on the predominance of olfactory images
(Landau, 2010) for newborns in the perception and recognition of faces, and in particular that
of the mother at birth, has been validated by research (Rekow et al., 2021).
HOW TO RECOGNISE PREGNANCY DENIALS
Right from the beginning of pregnancy, the expectant mother needs to be able to consciously
imagine the presence of the child through the sympathetic (a term which means “to suffer
together”) signs that she needs to learn how to feel, perceive from the inside and, at the same
time, she needs to be able to see in external space and time the bodily metamorphoses and feel
the pains and all the specic symptoms of each trimester according to the development of the
foetus: changes in taste and appetite, sleep disorders, migraines, fatigue, muscle pains, intestinal
pain, breathing difculties, blood circulation issues, constipation or diarrhoea, haemorrhoids
and the need to urinate often; as well as all the problems linked to weight and to the position of
the foetus. I have sometimes received very attractive women, who resembled fashion models,
who came to see me for various issues (fear of the metro, marital problems, etc.) and, towards
the end of the session, would casually mention that they were six or seven months pregnant!
All I had to do was tell them that at their stage of pregnancy it is normal to have a very
prominent belly, to nd it slightly difcult to climb the stairs, etc., and the following week they
were already quite visibly pregnant!
Conscious perception of foetal movements only begins in the fourth month with the hiccups,
which many mothers imagine to be leg movements. Throughout the day, the mother needs to
be mindful of all bodily changes and gradually become aware of the active movements of the
foetus as well as its pauses, especially during the last trimester, when, as space becomes more
limited and as its lungs develop, it can remain motionless for more than an hour. This is a very
important point to emphasise: if a mother fails to regularly pay attention to the occurrences
within her womb because she is too focused elsewhere, or if she becomes overly identied with
the child, assuming that it feels everything she feels (“it wants to eat chocolate right now!”, she
may exclaim), both scenarios can be a source of partial denial. Indeed, the anxiety of losing the
child and searching for traces of blood in her underwear or in the toilet, especially in the rst
trimester, allows the mother to represent its presence – a recognized presence that will enable
the child to feel its existence later on.
Then it is essential to imagine the child, to project onto him or her, as early as possible, a
happy future. However, here too we encounter the phenomenon of “too much” or “not enough”;
because I have had patients who were students of the École Polytechnique, and they had bibs
embroidered with the word “Polytechnique” at birth, which they felt to be a fateful destiny.
For the mother, the most difcult time to perceive the presence of the child is during the rst
trimester, as it is not perceived by her perception-consciousness system. The only sympathetic
signals will be a reduced appetite, nausea, fatigue, changes in sleep patterns, gastric reux,
an aversion for certain foods she normally enjoyed and a preference for other foods. I would
add to this list some signs that are often unreported, namely all the changes related to the
hormonal variations of gestation in interaction with the melanotropic hormone known as MSH
or melanocyte-stimulating hormone (Heffner & Schust, 2010) which, by synthesising melanin,
transforms the taste, smell and colour of the skin. Hyperpigmentation is often observed on the
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face, forehead, around the eyes, cheeks (melisma, or pregnancy mask), around the breasts, nipples
and genitals and, on the abdomen, a brown line (linea nigra) running from the navel to the pubis
(Estève et al., 1994), which becomes more pronounced in the second and third trimesters. There
are also changes in the colour, odour and consistency of vaginal discharge, in the hair sebum,
axillary hair and pubic hair, and a marked increase in the musky odour of the vagina and skin.
But the onset of sneezing and allergic rhinitis in 20% of pregnant women (Murer et al., 2020),
and sometimes of ptyalism gravidarum from the rst trimester, prevent all these changes from
being perceived and felt! Hormonal changes also cause breathing difculties, yawning, snoring
and sleep apnoea in around 40% of women (Paulovic, 2016). These sympathetic signs usually
occur during the second trimester, but they can also occur during the rst. In addition, women
may experience back and abdominal pain, develop ‘honeymoon cystitis’, feel very heavy and
breathless at the beginning of pregnancy with sympathetic signs specic to the last trimester, or
even childbirth, like some women during a hysterical pregnancy or a typical hysterical crisis of
the last century. Or, on the contrary, she may feel t and vibrant right up until giving birth, as
if she weren’t pregnant at all. We can see here all the extremely contradictory forms that partial
denials of pregnancy can take!
From Hippocrates, who coined the term ‘hysterical’ from the Greek word hustera meaning
womb or matrix, and attributed women’s illnesses to the wandering movements of the uterus,
to Charcot, who later associated the convulsive seizures of hysterics with the model of epilepsy,
there has been signicant attention given to the topic of uterine movements. In 1895, Freud
introduced the concept of libidinal and psychic energy to emphasize the psychomotor and
quantitative aspects of pleasure, sexual arousal, anxiety and pain, all of which need to be
integrated through psychic links. And he suggests that a sudden and excessive release of sexual
arousal can disrupt the functioning of the psychological connections within the ego that are
necessary for maintaining homeostasis between mind and body. This disruption is believed to
be the cause of the symptoms, as I already mentioned.
Therefore, what needs to be emphasized is the profound challenge that all pregnant women
face in becoming aware of the unconscious processes at play from the moment of conception.
Representing the presence of the child during pregnancy is therefore extremely complex, because
the child is unconsciously perceived as ‘belonging’ entirely to the mother’s body throughout
pregnancy, like a phantom limb in neurology. But this is just another way of denying the child’s
presence.
The Sanhedrin Tractate, which derives its laws for the Jews from the Talmud, decrees that
the foetus is like one leg of the mother and that it is not a living being before the emergence
of its forehead during childbirth. If it endangers the life of the mother, the foetus should be
“cut up and removed limb by limb” because “her life comes before the life of the child.” This
corresponds to a recurring and very bloody nightmare for certain women before childbirth,
which in some maternity wards leads doctors to perform a caesarean.
Here we nd a very clear expression of extreme violence and the presence of incestuous
representations that remain deeply suppressed by everyone, namely the reality of an extreme
pleasure the mother and her foetus share throughout the pregnancy on the one hand, and the
anxiety and totally unconscious destructive drive both parents feel towards the foetus, which
can endanger the mother’s life throughout the pregnancy and especially during childbirth.
Two representations that are still totally repressed today; indeed, denied outright. Only Sabina
Spielrein and Margarete Hilferding, who were among the rst female psychoanalysts in Freud’s
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circle and were both deported during the war, evoked these two issues. Sabina Spielrein in
her 1911 article Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being”, introduced the hypothesis,
now conrmed by biology, that cellular destruction is necessary to create living things. In this
instance, she developed the concept of the “destruction drive”, later taken up by Freud. But
the most original aspect of her theory is the link she makes between the destructive drive and
phylogenetic reproduction. To illustrate this idea, she evokes the fate of mayies, insects that die
and disappear after mating. In her lecture “On the Foundations of Maternal Love” of 11 January
1911, Margarete Hilferding suggested that the child’s movements arouse certain sensations of
pleasure reminiscent of the beginnings of relationships of the sexual order. According to her
theory, the child provokes maternal love as a function of the sexual sensations experienced
by the mother during pregnancy and in the period following childbirth, particularly during
breastfeeding.
Françoise Dolto was the rst psychoanalyst in the 1940s to have intuitively identied the
PPB, which led her to suggest giving a scarf impregnated with the mother’s scent to a newborn
who refused to drink milk from a baby bottle. Above all, she had the intuition that anxiety
carries a smell to which the subject can become addicted. She said “I wonder whether children
who have an anxious mother are not much more in love with the smell of anxiety, without
knowing that it is anxiety, because it is the scent of anxiety that is necessary to them. In the
unconscious, the scent of anxiety is linked to the security of existing.” (Dolto, 1976), but she also
immediately reminds us that being too attached to the scent of the mother is incest. But like all
psychoanalysts, she approached this addiction and incestuous desire only from the perspective
of the infant and its Oedipus complex, and not from that of the parents. However, she was
the rst psychoanalyst to dene the unconscious body image and the unconscious fantasy as
an “olfactory, gustative, auditory, visual, tactile, baresthetic and coenesthetic memorisation of
subtle, weak or intense perceptions, felt as the language of desire of the subject in relation to an
other” (Dolto, 1984).
It is important to emphasise the interactive aspect of this organisation, as the mother’s
attention, thoughts and movements modify the movements of the foetus and vice versa, giving
rise to pleasure and pain, emotions, erotic fantasies and affects that reshape and strengthen their
bond of fusional attachment at every moment. This is why it is so important to choose a name
as soon as possible after the ultrasound scan, because it allows you to direct your attention,
thoughts and words to the infant as another person, and to listen to its every movement. Above
all, it is important not to change the given name later on, as it symbolises the child’s gender and
time. “Angèle will be a dancer” or “Serge will be an athlete”. Dolto wrote that “the enormous
signicance of the most archaic phonemes, of which a given name is the typical example, shows
that the body image is the structural trace of a human being’s emotional history” (Dolto, 1984).
Marie-Claire Busnel was one of the rst researchers in the ‘80s to believe in a sense of
hearing in the foetus (Busnel & Granier-Deferre, 1983), and the rst to show experimentally
how a mother could transmit all her emotions to her foetus at a very early stage through
her words, whether thought or spoken aloud, whether addressed to it or not (Busnel, 1998).
During high-risk pregnancies requiring surgery at birth, she measured the heartbeats of the
mother and the foetus while discussing the upcoming postnatal surgical intervention with
the medical technician. She observed that the foetus, up to six months, reacts to the strong
emotions and anxiety the mother experiences by exhibiting a corresponding variation in heart
rate. However, after the 24th week of gestation, when the mother has become accustomed to the
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idea of a surgical intervention at birth and no longer experiences uctuations in heartbeat, the
foetus increases its own heart rate Mothers therefore transmit all their emotions (anxiety, hatred,
love, enthusiasm, sadness, fear, etc.) and states of being (peace of mind, fatigue, drowsiness,
agitation), food and sexual pleasures and dislikes (excitement, repulsion, pleasure, orgasm and
pain) to their foetuses through their voices (Abitbol, 2019). Some studies are beginning to prove
what I surmised during a conversation with Marie-Claire Busnel, namely that a mother’s words
of love to her six-month-old foetus can reactivate an increase in the sucking and swallowing
movements of amniotic uid, like when the mother swallows her favourite foods (Ustun et
al., 2022), and also induce an anaesthesia of the pain felt (Flours, A., 2022). Researchers have
already found this to be the case when the mother ingests sugar (Steiner & Weiffenbach, 1977),
which produces both an anaesthetic and hedonic effect in the foetus or six-month-old premature
child (Smith & Blass, 1996).
HOW ANOREXIC AND/OR BULIMIC PATIENTS HELPED ME UNDERSTAND
THE ORIGINS OF EXCESSIVE ANXIETY AND ENDOGENOUS TRAUMAS SPECIFIC
TO PREGNANCY WHICH FORM THE BASIS OF PRIMAL MATERNAL FANTASIES.
In the course of the psychoanalytic treatment of these women, I noticed the same
succession of compulsive gestures recurring, of a mirroring body language and a mimicry of
the environment”, the same slips of the tongue mixing up three generations, such as “when I
was pregnant with my mother” or “I will be born in three months” in the case of the pregnant
ones, and the repetition of the same poetic statements describing a melancholy experience, such
as “I was born without a body”, “I feel like I’m wandering through the air like a bird”, etc. All
these women express the pain and extreme anxiety they feel as a result of the sensation of
being “bodiless”, “invisible” and “impalpable”, of having been forgotten, dead or dyingin
the wombs of their mothers and of their pregnant grandmothers. They have the impression of
having been forgotten and having disappeared into the “black hole of the cosmic void” before
being born.
Anxieties and sensations forged on the impression of belonging to the fused body of their
mother and their pregnant grandmothers and being “their” foetus, which form the sequence
of the three primal maternal fantasies: “one life for two, if one lives the other dies” in the rst
trimester, “a body for two” in the second trimester, “to give birth and to be born is to die, to kill
the mother and the grandmother” in the third. In all cases, any sort of separation is imagined
as impossible, and their slips of the tongue indicate that they are transmitted to the foetuses over
three generations.
Asking these anorexic-bulimic patients questions, I realised that the feelings of being
invisible, of oating in mid-air, of “not having a body of their own” or of “having lost forever
the body that belonged to them” are often accompanied for them by a difculty in recognising
their own voices on an answering machine, for example, or their own face in the mirror. They
need to touch themselves, arrange their hair, pull it out, taste it, eat their nails or the skin
around them, and to often look at themselves in the mirror when they’re alone; They need
to be in the presence of someone to feel that they exist and possess a body and a face. They
feel their ngers do not belong to them, especially their thumb and index nger, nor their
left hand and arm, and the lower part of their body from the waist downwards, as they lack
any perception of their weight, the muscular effort involved in walking and dancing, and the
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elasticity of the skin enveloping their stomach, all the while feeling ‘very fat’. Sensations that
bulimic patients express quite clearly by saying that “their voice, their face, their belly and their
legs, along with the fat on their belly or, jokingly, ‘their lifebuoy’, and around their thighs, as
well as the right hand that force-feeds them are not their own but belong to their mothers”. The
symptom of not recognising that your limbs belong to you has been studied by Alain Berthoz in
somatoparaphrenic patients (Berthoz, 1997).
I came to realize that these patients suffered from many types of agnosia: nger agnosia,
prosopamnesia, asomatognosia, allotopoagnosia or heterotopoagnosia (Bachoud-Levi &
Degos, 2022) as well as certain synaesthesias (featuring graphemes, chromesthesia, numerical,
lexical-gustatory) of which they were unconscious. All forms of asomatognosia which describe
the ‘fusional body’ I am dealing with, namely the impossibility of identifying one’s own body
compared to that of others; something similar to the ‘spatial neglects’ that Berthoz described in
astronauts who lost perception of the lower part of their bodies (Berthoz, 1997).
I therefore came to realize that they still perceived themselves as stuck, as trapped like
weightless foetuses in the bodies and wombs of their pregnant mothers and grandmothers
according to several archaic sensory-motor and functional patterns; they were held in the
representation of the fusional body schema in the weightlessness of their pregnant mothers and
grandmothers like astronauts in a space shuttle. We can then assume that the memory of what
the foetus experienced and the perception of ‘its’ own body are constructed using the reverse
spatio-temporal patterns and the inverted internal models (Berthoz) of the mother and maternal
grandmother. This process is thought to be reactivated by a functional feedback mechanism
of perception (feed-forward) following the ‘Big Bang’ caused by the signicant hormonal
surge during the primitive fusion. But any sudden increase or decrease in the psychomotor,
psychosensory, mechanical and kinetic speed of muscular movements causes a reversal of
perception and a sensation of falling, Berthoz says. And at the level of quantum physics, any
great bodily metamorphosis, such as the ‘Big Bang’, causes an explosion, a silence and a void
before the collapse of the protostar “into the black hole of the cosmic void”. As a result, at
every sudden hormonal transformation during the critical phases of pregnancy and depending
on the intensity of her death anxiety, the future mother can transmit to the foetus terrifying
hypnagogic sensations of falling into the void. Sensations and “abnormal movements” that
often occur at the time of falling asleep (hypnic myocloni) and sometimes during transitions
between two sleep cycles or during deep sleep and paradoxical (REM) sleep (parasomnias)
(José Haba Rubio et al., 2018).
During analysis, some childless women express the same melancholic experience undergone
by pregnant women at the start of gestation and at the end of the three trimesters through
their recurring nightmares: they describe archaic terrors that refer to endogenous traumas
experienced during foetal life. We can also nd them in certain future fathers, in many patients
born prematurely, in small children at specic stages of their development, as we have seen, but
above all in artists, composers and writers at the beginning and at the end of a work.
A SEQUENCE OF THE MOST FREQUENTLY RECURRING NIGHTMARES
1. At the beginning of gestation, women often dream that they or “a child” are being devoured
by a crocodile. Some dream of being nibbled on from within by a little mouse that suddenly
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becomes a gigantic rat, or a toad, a huge lizard or a snake that devours them, and some of their
mothers have also confessed to having had these nightmares during pregnancy.
Freud also perceived in Emmy von N., the rst patient mentioned in his Studies on Hysteria
(1895), who was anorexic, the emergence of these fears and anxieties or primary terrors of
animals in the form of hallucinations, misperceptions, delusions or dreams of wild beasts.
Emmy was persecuted by the terror of nding mice or rats in her bed, or lying dead in a box,
or by visions, hallucinations or delusions that they were going to grow huge and attack her,
possibly turning into gigantic toads, lizards or other wild animals.
At the end of the rst trimester, the dreamer’s most frequent nightmares are of either her or
a child being devoured by a shark or of her losing all her teeth.
2. During the second trimester, the dreamer hears a loud gunshot and witnesses from a
distance the murder of a child, whose body disappears, along with the murderer, without leaving
any footprints. Towards the end of the trimester, the dreamer ies up into the sky and “suddenly
plunges into a black hole and into the cosmic void”. Women often have this nightmare at the
start of their period.
At the end of the trimester, some dream that their childhood bedroom in the house where
they were born catches re at night. Often their mothers wake them up the next morning telling
them about the same nightmare! In this way, any trace of the child’s space in the family house
has disappeared. This dream is similar to that of another of Freud’s patients, the Dora described
in Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905). But in Dora’s dream there is a re
in the house and the mother wants to look for her jewel case before escaping; and it is Dora’s
father who wakes her and saves her, saying to his wife “I refuse to let myself and my two
children be burnt for the sake of your jewel case!” Once again, we see the mother’s destructive
impulse at work: everyone needs to burn to death! In fact, at the end of the second trimester
a metamorphosis and a very signicant reduction in the PPB occurs, and placental involution
begins, with the foetus becoming more autonomous in its voluntary movements.
3. At the beginning of the third trimester, the dreamer wakes up to nd a dead or dying
mouse, hamster, rat or toad forgotten in the cellar. Later in the trimester, the dreamer starts
happily ying when suddenly an extremely strong gust of wind knocks her off the mast of the
ship to which she had been clinging and she drowns in a ‘freak ocean wave’. At the end of the
trimester, the dreamer and/or her child are swept away by a tsunami. And often the nightmare
of being swallowed by a crocodile at the beginning of pregnancy reappears before giving birth.
Three days before giving birth, according to the intensity of the uterine contractions, to
the pleasure, anxiety, orgasmic sensations and pain the mother feels, a terrifying feeling of
plummeting and sinking ensues, which translates into nightmares where the child and/or the
dreamer fall from their bed, or from a window, a tower, a high cliff, either onto rock or into the
bottomless black hole of a stormy sea. All sensations of falling and collapsing that the mother
experiences during the baby blues, three days after delivery.
We can see how these endogenous traumas and metamorphoses appear in Federico Fellini’s
drawings of his crocodile dreams.
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First Dream with a Crocodile
Federico Fellini, The Book of my Dreams
Fellini had the rst nightmare when he began work on lming ‘Juliet of the Spirits’, and in
his commentary, he wrote that he wanted to portray Giulietta as quite vicious, wanting to kill a
tiny dog by plunging it into the mouth of a sleeping crocodile. Then he added that the devoured
dog disappears and turns into a toad, which in turn dies and disappears. But a new toad appears
and devours the one that disappeared, before nally devouring itself. The gaping mouth of the
second toad also eventually disappears.
We see the violence of the rst, original maternal fantasy of self-fertilisation based on the
oral-cannibalistic drive for self-preservation, as Freud dened it, which I believe is forged
at fertilisation and in the wake of the most archaic metamorphoses in phylogenesis. Some
researchers (Thévenet et al., 2023) have recently proved that Nile crocodiles can detect the
distress and needs of baby humans through their cries better than their parents!
Second Dream with a Crocodile
Federico Fellini, The Book of my Dreams
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Fellini had the second nightmare, in which he is devoured by the crocodile just before
falling into the black hole, when he nished lming ‘City of Women’. There is no commentary
on this dream. The dreamer disappears in silence. Fellini plunged into a long depression after
completing the lm, which in his book he compared to postpartum depression.
THE APPEARANCE OF CROCODILES IN SCULPTURE AND PAINTING.
The rst photo is of a sculpture by the Art Brut artist Auguste Forestier entitled “La
Bête du Gévaudan”. It portrays a prehistoric crocodile-alligator with the memory of several
metamorphoses. He produced the work during the war while interned at Saint-Alban psychiatric
hospital. This hospital hid many members of the Resistance, intellectuals, artists and poets, and
was the rst to apply the so-called Institutional Psychotherapy, becoming a humane place for
listening to psychiatric patients who had until then been abandoned in squalid asylums.
Auguste Forestier, The Beast of Gévaudan, 1935-45
Wood, tyre rubber, leather, metal, animal tooth, glass bead and woven bre
The second photo is of a 2020 painting by Yassine Balbzioui entitled “Adjugé”, a work
completed during connement. It shows an auction of a painting depicting a crocodile drowning
in a wave of oceanic pleasure before birth. The judges are sitting behind a table with their heads
completely covered by a red mask, but revealing their shapeless faces like stuck together, with
eyes everywhere. The crocodile that was the model for the painting is hiding under the table,
reluctant to show itself in the esh and well alive, fearing it will die, killed at birth. The anxiety
felt when leaving the house during connement.
Adjugé, 2020, Yassine Balbzioui
Acrylic on canvas, 180 / 200 cm
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The third photo shows a 2020 sculpture by Yassine Balbzioui, Untitled, produced at the
end of his connement. We see a newly born crocodile, green after the foetal suffering during
childbirth, standing happily but exhausted after birth, ready to launch into life with its automatic
stepping reex.
Untitled, 2020, Yassine Balbzioui
Resin sculpture
The fourth photo is the ‘Self-portrait’ by Léa with the head of a crocodile. Léa was an
opera singer analysand who spontaneously brought me this drawing in the early days of her
analytical therapy. She described it as a crocodile metamorphosing into a bird: “Above, in
purple, I’ve drawn what are feathers or scales, I’ve never been able to decide! And on the
right, a tear is running down her tightly, too tightly closed, mouth... It is beginning to fall and
underneath there is another mouth, a normal one, that’s growing... or perhaps a beak! It’s a sort
of prehistoric monster, rather sad-looking”.
Drawing by Léa: Self-Portrait as a Crocodile
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The crocodile-bird also leads us to the hypothesis put forward by the psychoanalyst and
novelist Lou Andreas-Salomé (the rst female psychoanalyst in Freud’s circle to reect on
female eroticism) that women unconsciously experience their genitalia as something borrowed
from the cloaca of female birds (Andréas-Salomé, 1915).
Freud calls primal fantasies (Urphantasien) the typical fantasies found in all humans
(Freud, 1915). They appear in the form of scenarios that remain unconscious and that the
therapist reconstructs on the basis of the patient’s dreams and symptoms. The nightmares I
have described conrm his hypotheses that they stem from a primeval heritage, that they are
therefore linked to a phylogenetic memory. However, they are underpinned by a personal and
psychobiological foundation rooted in a historical, specically ontogenetic, constitution. He
adds (Freud, 1920) that the time spent in the mother’s womb and the events experienced there
can constitute the family narrative in the primal fantasies.
Freud was inuenced by the insights of anatomist Ernst Haeckel (Haeckel, 1874) into the
short recapitulation of species during embryogenesis.
In fact, with regard to the phylogenetic origin of the image of the crocodile in nightmares,
Julie Baker (Knox & Baker, 2008) conrmed this hypothesis when she found that the genes
active in placental cells until about halfway through gestation and foetal development were
genes that reptiles and birds of the Archosaur family have in common with humans.
With regard to dreams with mice and rats at the very beginning of embryogenesis, some
researchers (Dupressoir et al., 2016) have found that certain genes (syncytins) involved in the
creation of the placenta are almost identical to those of mice and rats. Similarly, as regards the
nightmare of the shark devouring the child, which is common at the end of the rst trimester,
according to the geneticist Jacques-Michel Robert (Jacques-Michel Robert, 1994), the foetus’s
brain corresponds to that of a sh, with no convolutions or folds, but with a jaw full of teeth, like
that of a pike. And the shark’s self-preservation system is one of the oldest and most efcient
in the world, with its teeth that regenerate continuously. The child devoured at the beginning of
pregnancy and at the end of embryogenesis indicates that there is a very distressing traumatic
passage experienced by mothers following sudden hormonal transformations that lead to the
loss of the unconscious image of the fusional body and the sudden reduction in the PPB created
with the child. This loss is perceived as a silent destruction and dissolution, followed by an
amnesia of the more archaic images of reproduction and self-preservation of phylogenesis.
The nightmares of the second trimester indicate that the unconscious representation of the
trauma and of the loss and reduction of the PPB is already being perceived in the mother’s
perception-consciousness system by the end of the trimester, and is manifested by hypnagogic
and somatosensory hallucinations represented by “an explosion and a fall into the black hole
of the cosmic void”, similar to those experienced during the passage of the last sleep cycle
between light slow wave sleep and REM sleep.
We can imagine the anguish and terror the foetus, or the premature baby of the same age,
feels, its vestibular system not yet complete as it rst moves into a calm sleep cycle at the end of
the sixth month and then into the restless sleep cycle during the seventh. Terrifying sensations
detected by paediatricians when they move premature infants a little too abruptly.
At the end of the second trimester, the interaction between the mother’s movements and
those of the foetus is at its peak, the intensity of pleasure, pain and anxiety are extreme and the
fall and decrease in the PPB is experienced very strongly.
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In fact, nightmares appearing three or four days before the end of the rst two trimesters
are sometimes preceded by dreams depicting an incestuous sexual relationship between the two
parents with a faceless child. At the end of the rst trimester, the dreamer participates in the
sexual intercourse of her own conception, which corresponds to the original fantasy described
by Freud, of participating in the “primal scene” (Freud, 1918) imagined as a very aggressive
act by the father towards the mother. And some three or four days before the end of the second
trimester, the dreamer has sexual intercourse with her mother, her father, her daughter or with a
brother and/or sister, an uncle or aunt, staging the incestuous fusional bond felt in the mother-
foetus interaction and the intensity of the PPB transmitted over three generations.
Therefore, the psychic representation of the murder of the overly fusional child in the
nightmares of the end of the sixth month, the beginning of placental involution, is extremely
important because it makes it possible to psychically integrate the loss of the intensity of the
highly fusional and incestuous placental bond between mother and child and to operate the
more important phase of original repression. The pathognomonic sign that this passage is not
denied is represented by the fact that when the woman wakes up in the morning, she forgets for
a few minutes that she is pregnant and then, suddenly not feeling the movements of the child as
before, she believes that she has killed it during the night, so she searches for it, trying to listen
to any movement it may make. However, for over-anxious women, the fantasy of “I’ve killed
my baby” may persist unconsciously and manifest itself after delivery in the form of a puerperal
delusion while the newborn is alive and well. This delusion is a way of expressing the denial of
the existence of the living child after the sharp decrease in the PPB and the incestuous fusional
bond that occurs at the end of the second trimester, marking in this way the failure of a very
important stage of primary repression.
During the third trimester, the woman can quite clearly perceive the active movements of
the foetus and its pauses, particularly in the late evening, between nine and midnight (Challamel
and Thirion, 1988). The whole choreography of the mother-foetus dance is perfectly organised,
but at the expense of the foetus. Indeed, if the mother is too anxious, the foetus will move faster
and faster and may end up wrapping the umbilical cord around its neck! It is very important to
reduce the mother’s anxiety by stating the original maternal fantasy of the third trimester: “To
give birth and be born is to die, to kill the mother and the grandmother” (Landau, 2019).
The nightmares at the end of the third trimester indicate the extreme oceanic pleasure and
anxiety felt before the waters break and during childbirth. These nightmares are essential for
unconsciously integrating the various critical passages of selective epigenesis and completing
all the stages of original repression. But if the anxiety is too great, they will be rejected and
denied. And after childbirth, if the PPB, pleasure and pain have been too intense, the woman
may trigger a delusion of denial or Cotard’s syndrome. This delusion is present in autistic or
schizophrenic patients, but also in women after a difcult delivery. In this delusion, patients do
not have a body that ‘belongs’ to them, they no longer recognise familiar others, they claim that
they “do not to exist” and are “already dead”, they feel haunted by a double who has stolen their
image and identity and is constantly trying to rape or murder them, to steal everything from
them during the night, especially jewellery, with regard to female patients, as we’ve seen in the
dream Dora, Freud’s patient, had. We can see how the original maternal fantasies, nightmares
and statements that arise during episodes of puerperal psychosis and delusions of negation
are based on olfactory, visual and auditory perceptions and emotions, hallucinations and
hypnagogic images actually experienced during gestation and foetal life, which are reactivated
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during and after childbirth and at birth in both child and mother. Since the Covid epidemic,
cases of delusions of negation have been reported as a consequence of anosmia and ageusia.
(Yesilkaya, et al., 2022).
REPRESENTATIONS OF THE OVERTURNED TREE
Some of my patients with anorexia and/or bulimia expressed these original maternal fantasies
and sensations by spontaneously bringing a drawing of an overturned tree (Landau, 2004),
either with the branches laden with leaves beneath the ground, like roots, while the actual roots
are bare, stretched out towards the sky like hands, as in the case of Christelle.
Or with the branches brimming with leaves pointing underground in a “mirror image”, as
in the case of Maeva.
The third drawing, Corinnes overturned tree without the roots pointing to the sky, is set in
an innite space and time. Inside the tree, there are two Stuck Twins attached on the ventral side,
having legs but no arms or hands, their faces lacking a mouth, nose, or ears, but with a third eye
connecting their right and left eyes. The drawing was accompanied by the caption “the longer
I live, the more I bury myself.” This third eye corresponds to the pineal gland, or epiphysis,
a small endocrine gland in the hypothalamus that secretes melatonin, a hormone that plays a
central role in regulating biological rhythms (sleep/wake and seasonal).
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Corinne’s drawing of the overturned tree:
The more I live, the more I bury myself
This was these patients’ way of expressing a traumatic experience similar to that
experienced by the ‘evanescent’ stuck twin suffering from Twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome
(TTTS) who has died, disappeared, been swallowed by the surviving twin or/and absorbed by
the placenta or/and forgotten in the mother’s viscera during the critical phases of the sudden
hormonal transformations that take place during pregnancy. Swallowed by the surviving twin
and/or absorbed by the placenta and/or forgotten in the mother’s viscera during the critical
phases of sudden hormonal transformations that take place during gestation, i.e. at fertilisation
and towards the end of the second trimester, without leaving any imprint in the amniotic uid
(LA) at delivery. This led me to think that it is at the end of the sixth month of pregnancy that a
metamorphosis of the primary olfactory system in humans takes place, following which there is
a 50% reduction in olfactory photoreceptors in the primitive glomeruli of the PPB, which are
transformed into visual and auditory photoreceptors.
The fact that all these pictures were drawn only by women, bulimic and/or anorexic subjects
in particular, who didn’t yet want to have a child or couldn’t have one (due to infertility), gave
me the impression that they had all remained xed on the overturned tree process.
With this type of drawing, these patients were expressing the fantasy of feeling like “living
dead” caught in the past. No male patients ever brought me similar drawings.
In this inversion of the arrow of time, they occupy the space of a ‘fusional’ family tree,
representing their own bodies, those of their mother and those of their grandmother, in a “stuck
twin” relationship. The (conscious) branches in ‘full light’ of their grandmothers become their
(unconscious) roots, which, plunged underground ‘in the darkness’, feed the lifeblood and sense
of existence of their mothers, as if their fundamental function were to care for them and keep
them alive. According to Françoise Dolto, the tree represents the visceral image of the child
(Dolto, 1984).
We can nd another analogy between these unconscious fantasies of belonging to the fusional
body of the grandmother and of the mother still as a foetus and the process of microchimerism that
takes place during gestation, whereby the pregnant woman transmits her own cells and several
of her own mother’s cells and older children’s cells to the foetus, while the latter transmits its
own cells to its mother via the placenta (Boddy et al., 2015). Moreover, one of the functions of
these ‘twin’ cells, when they function, is to increase the mother’s immune defences! Therefore,
in order to survive, my bulimic and/or anorexic patients, gripped by their death anxiety, had to
remain in the fusional space-time and time of their grandmothers, in order to avoid dying and
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killing their grandmother, their mother and their “stuck twin” at birth, tearing off the branches/
roots in one fell swoop to straighten them out towards the sky and the light. They were all xed
to their original maternal fantasies, according to which detaching themselves from the PPB
and the fusional body of their grandmothers and mothers in order to be born implies dying and
killing those mothers and grandmothers.
We nd the image of the overturned tree with its roots reaching towards the sky, the innite
and eternal space-time of the past becoming the future, in the most ancient theories of the
creation of the universe and the human being, for example in the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred
text of Hinduism, where the overturned tree, like the primordial breath and time itself, has
neither a beginning nor an end. In Chinese tradition, the overturned tree (the Jianmu) links
the nine springs (the abode of the dead) to the nine heavens. In Plato’s Timaeus, we are a tree
of heaven, not of earth, because God suspended the head and root of us from that place where
the generation of our daimon, our soul, rst began. In the Kabbalah the tree of life is depicted
overturned, because creation can only be descending, and in the Be’er Hagolah by Rabbi Loew
ben Bezalel, the Maharal of Prague, the overturned tree and the creation of the universe and
man were already conceived in physical dimensions of space.
All these women helped me formulate the hypothesis that all of us may be surviving stuck
twins who have escaped multiple times from a programmed death and disappearance through
selective epigenesis from the end of embryogenesis. Their remarks, gestures, drawings and
nightmares, lead us to think that we have retained an implicit (procedural and emotional) and
explicit (episodic and semantic) long-term perceptual memory of this, already structured like a
language, that unconsciously inscribes us in the fusional space-time and temporality of all the
actions and muscular, emotional, affective and somato-sensory movements of the functional
neurovegetative patterns of pregnant mothers and grandmothers.
This also led me to the think that during pregnancy, women may transmit their unconscious
fantasies to their foetuses over three generations through a primordial thinking akin to dreaming,
translating all the olfactory, gustatory, auditory, visual and sonic images of the Primitive
Placental Bond into actions, words and letters of all colours to the rhythm of their heartbeat and
breathing.
These images would then transmit the intensity of all the sensations, emotions and
contradictory affects of love and hate linked to the sudden increases in death anxiety and
fears reactivated by endogenous post-traumatic stress events during gestation, according to
the intensity of pleasure, desire, sexual arousal, orgasms and pain experienced in interaction
with “their foetus”. In this way, pregnant women would be able transmit endogenous and
exogenous traumatic experiences (accidents, bereavements, genocides, etc.) over at least three
generations. This, therefore, at the psychic level (through original maternal fantasies, dreams
and nightmares), and at the neurobiological, biophysical, neurophysiological and epigenetic
level, according to archaic sensory-motor patterns, of phylogenetic origin, pre-organised and
already translated into actions (Landau, 2004).
In this way, the earliest models of foetal perception would be structured by the memorized
topological relationships of the speed of all actions intertwined with the smell, taste, colour,
temperature and quantum avour of the mothers voice as she thinks or utters words addressed
to the foetus according to the rhythm, prosody, timbre and colour of the words once thought,
spoken, inhaled, ingested, digested, seen, heard and experienced with her own mother during
her own foetal life (Landau, 2014).
Tamara La ndau, Denied Pregnancies 05/10/202321
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CONCLUSION
I hope I have been able to convey the elements needed to understand how difcult it is,
because of an excessive death anxiety linked to endogenous post-traumatic stress events of
phylogenetic origin specic to gestation, for women to become aware of their child’s presence
during pregnancy. In our society, total denial and partial denial are becoming more and more
common, resulting in children suffering from more or less severe disorders of self-perception
and self-representation.
I have tried to show how important it is for women to take note of all bodily changes, changes
in taste, smell and appetite throughout the different phases of pregnancy; of paying attention to
the active movements of the foetus as well as its moments of rest; of giving it a name as soon
as possible, talking to it, even forgetting it at times, so that it may be found again more strongly.
Indeed, if they deny the onset of pregnancy, due to an excess in anxiety, or ‘forget’ for a certain
time that they are pregnant, this lack of attention, of thoughts and words spoken to the foetus
could endanger the latter’s life and result in miscarriages, premature births, low birth weight for
certain full-term newborns and, sometimes, malformations, as well as several psychological,
somatic and behavioural problems of varying degrees or gravity after birth and into adulthood.
We have also observed that neurotic women may exhibit signs of the autistic spectrum
and agnosias, which researchers usually only detect in schizophrenic and somatoparaphrenic
patients. This has led me to propose the idea that all of us are a little autistic, because our
perception system is fundamentally structured according to an autistic mode, through mirror
neurons (Rizzolati & Fogassi, 2014)!
And, to conclude, we have seen how naming and representing to oneself the succession
of the three original maternal fantasies during pregnancy—“one life for two, if one lives the
other dies” in the rst trimester, “one body for two” in the second, “to give birth and be born
is to die, to kill the mother and the grandmother” in the third—could alleviate the excess
anxiety felt by women during the critical passages they encounter at the beginning of pregnancy
and at the end of the three trimesters, and could help avoid total or partial denial.
Tamara La ndau, Denied Pregnancies 05/10/202322
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