Consciousness from the beginning of life? Exploring womb-life and birth stories as part of psychotherapeutic journeys

Join us for this fascinating talk from Dr Keith Evans.

In this presentation, Dr Keith Evans introduces pre- and perinatal psychology as a field that has a long history, stretching back to Freud, Jung and Otto Rank whose seminal work “The Trauma of Birth” was published 100 years ago, providing a century of research and practice that has provided learning opportunities for clients undertaking psychotherapeutic journeys including through personal regression events of womb-life and birth.

The presentation briefly covers the historical development of pre- and perinatal psychology, from Freud through Stanislav Grof and Frank Lake to modern practitioners such as Matthew Appleton and Cherionna Menzam-Sills. It reviews various conceptions of memory and how pre- and perinatal psychology as a field draws on the continuing development of cellular consciousness as an access point into womb-life and birth experiences. It explains how participants in regressions access what, after Bollas (2018), can be regarded as unthought knowns with aetiological explanatory power, a means by which to make better sense of their Self-in-relationship modalities through a ritualised, psychosomatically experienced enactment of returning to the womb.

Case examples, drawn from personal experience and Dr Evans’ PhD research, show how storying of womb-life and birth explorations demonstrates these stories provide meaning-making of Self, relationships and embodied ways-of-being as part of the participants’ self-developmental therapeutic journeys. The presentation therefore offers up a wider perspective of counselling and psychotherapy psychodynamics, extending understanding of psycho-somatic-socio-therapeutic endeavours to the pre-birth influences on our ways-of-being, and underlines the potential for the important contribution that inquiry reaching into the very beginning of life can make to this professional field.