Term used by Otto rank (1884–1939) to relate his theories of anxiety and neurosis to what he believed to be the inevitable psychic shock of being born.
An injury caused to a a baby delivery.
Any injury occurring to a baby during the act of birth. In psychiatry it refers to mental trauma alleged to occur during birth and which may subsequently be the starting point of a neurosis. Although this may seem a little far-fetched, experimental work, in which groups of babies were subjected to various sounds while they slept, revealed that those who were most relaxed in sleep were those subjected to a sound simulating the pumping of the mother’s heart and circulation, to which, presumably, the baby had been attuned while within the womb. Some psychiatrists also claim that there is less neurosis in breast-fed babies than in those brought up on the bottle, and deprived of the natural instinct to suckle at the breast. The whole question is open to conjecture, and it is probable that the nervous temperament that dries up the mother’s milk also provides the nervous background in which the child is reared, and that it is this environment that leads to neurosis, not the lack of the act of suckling.