In this powerful and ground-breaking book, Benig Mauger challenges one of the most pervasive myths of our time, namely that birth is a physical event to be managed by doctors.
Based on her experience as a birth teacher, therapist and mother, and backed by recent research in pre- and perinatal psychology, the author places birth and life in the womb as a formative experience creating patterns we carry with us into later life.
Anchoring her insights in Jungian psychology, Benig Mauger highlights the “loss of soul” many feel as a result of our modern medicalised way of birth where technology has replaced nature.
Drawing on her work, she explores the darker unexplored territories of childbirth; the fears and fantasies of pregnancy; the despair and anguish of women after traumatic birth experiences; the raw pain of babies torn from their mothers at birth and the joys of coming into life. Through real life/ birth stories she evokes the realities of life in the womb and intelligent, sensitive, feeling prenates who carry with them the memories of their experience.
This book looks at the inside story of childbirth and in so doing gives voice not only to women and their babies, but to anyone interested in the nature of the human soul. This book makes it impossible to continue to view birth as simply a physical event with no lasting consequences.