For My Scientologist Freudian Pro-Choice Nazi Readers
Apparently both [OE 4/13: Scientologists and pro-choice people] believe that life begins at birth. In the course of an article about TomKat, the following appeared (emphasis mine):
Infants deserve to be born into a reverent place, agreed Mindy Goorchenko, a certified doula and birth educator whose own unassisted delivery of twins was featured on the Discovery Channel. The transition from the womb to the world should be peaceful, she said.
But moms, dads and doctors probably need to talk during delivery, Goorchenko noted.
"Communication is key in birth for all people involved," she said.
Sound can also be an effective means of working through labor, she added. Besides, the womb isn't as quiet as one might think; babies can hear voices, music and their mother's heartbeat, Goorchenko said.
"Infants respond in the womb to what's going on around them," she said. "Why at the moment of birth you'd suddenly need silence doesn't make sense physiologically."
Still, said Goorchenko, a mother of four, she wanted privacy during her deliveries and preferred silence following the births.
"You don't need loud, blasting noises while mother and child are bonding."
Even Hubbard believed that babies could receive negative vibes BEFORE birth:
Hubbard's view was that, when a pregnant woman was struck in the abdomen or engaged in intercourse, the child she was carrying suffered pain, and aberratively heard words which accompanied such incidents, and so received an engram.
The earliest engram (or "basic") is the foundation of a "chain" of engrams, and through re-experiencing it, the "chain" will dissipate. To make an earlier engram available it is necessary to "destimulate" more recent engrams by re-experiencing them....Hubbard claimed it was possible to relieve all such engrams, thus "erasing" the Reactive (unconscious) Mind. A person without a Reactive Mind would be "Clear." To make a Clear, it would be necessary to erase the earliest engram by re-experiencing it. Hubbard asserted that the engram of birth was very important, and claimed it was possible, and necessary, to find the earliest engram, long before birth, perhaps as far back as conception, the "sperm dream."
There is one possible source for Hubbard's ideas on childbirth:
A year before Hermitage House published Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health...it published an extensive psychoanalytic study by Dr. Nandor Fodor, called The Search for the Beloved, subtitled "A clinical investigation into the trauma of birth and prenatal conditioning." Fodor credited Otto Rank, another Freudian, with original work on the trauma of birth....
Arthur Ceppos was both the head of Hermitage House and a director of the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation. It is highly unlikely that Hubbard did not know about Fodor, even though his book was certainly not as popular as Dianetics. Fodor did publish first, and had been expressing his ideas on the trauma of birth in psychiatric journals for some years. The first edition of Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health even carried an advertisement for Fodor's book on the dust-jacket, subtitle and all.
Fodor and Hubbard each argued that birth and the pre-natal period could be abreacted, or re-experienced, and were fundamental to later behavior. Scientologists mistakenly credit Hubbard with the discovery of the trauma of birth and the pre-natal period. Hubbard did nothing to disabuse them of this notion. Although Fodor's patients supposedly relived their birth, his method differed from Hubbard's. Dianetics was closer to Freud's original approach. Fodor believed that very few people were able to reexperience their birth, whereas Hubbard claimed nearly everyone could.
A biography of Otto Rank (nee Otto Rosenfeld) can be found here. Here's a little about him:
Publication of Das Trauma der Geburt und seine Bedeutung für die Psychoanalyse (1924; The Trauma of Birth) caused Rank's break with Freud and other members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, which expelled him from its membership.
The book, which argued that the transition from the womb to the outside world causes tremendous anxiety in the infant that may persist as anxiety neurosis into adulthood, was seen by many members of the Viennese society as conflicting with the concepts of psychoanalysis.
Following the break, which became complete in the mid-1920s, Rank taught and practiced in the United States and Europe (chiefly Paris) for about 10 years, settling in New York City in 1936.
But let's go back to Freud:
The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.
I'm not sure when Freud wrote this quote, or exactly what the religious war was between Rank and Freud. But as long as we're talking about Austria and birth trauma, here's a factoid of interest:
At 6:30 p.m. on the evening of April 20, 1889, [Adolf Hitler] was born in the small Austrian village of Braunau Am Inn just across the border from German Bavaria.
Adolf Hitler would one day lead a movement that placed supreme importance on a person's family tree even making it a matter of life and death. However, his own family tree was quite mixed up and would be a lifelong source of embarrassment and concern to him.
His father, Alois, was born in 1837. He was the illegitimate son of Maria Anna Schicklgruber and her unknown mate, which may have been someone from the neighborhood or a poor millworker named Johann Georg Hiedler. It is also remotely possible Adolf Hitler's grandfather was Jewish.
Maria Schicklgruber was said to have been employed as a cook in the household of a wealthy Jewish family named Frankenberger. There is some speculation their 19-year-old son got her pregnant and regularly sent her money after the birth of Alois.
Adolf Hitler would never know for sure just who his grandfather was.
He did know that when his father Alois was about five years old, Maria Schicklgruber married Johann Georg Hiedler. The marriage lasted five years until her death of natural causes, at which time Alois went to live on a small farm with his uncle....
[Alois] later enlisted in the Austrian civil service, becoming a junior customs official. He worked hard as a civil servant and eventually became a supervisor. By 1875 he achieved the rank of Senior Assistant Inspector....
Alois had always used the last name of his mother, Schicklgruber, and thus was always called Alois Schicklgruber....[A]fter his success in the civil service, his proud uncle from the small farm convinced him to change his last name to match his own, Hiedler, and continue the family name. However, when it came time to write the name down in the record book it was spelled as Hitler....
In 1885, after numerous affairs and two other marriages ended, the widowed Alois Hitler, 48, married the pregnant Klara Pölzl, 24, the granddaughter of uncle Hiedler. Technically, because of the name change, she was his own niece and so he had to get special permission from the Catholic Church....
Klara Pölzl eventually gave birth to two boys and a girl, all of whom died. On April 20, 1889, her fourth child, Adolf, was born healthy and was baptized a Roman Catholic. Hitler's father was now 52 years old.
I'd love to hear what Scientologists say about the engrams in THAT family.
On second thought, I wouldn't.
Comments
Several years ago I read an article which put forth that alien abduction stories stemmed from memories of birth. Maybe that was a Hubbard article; I don't remember.
Thesis: Alien abductions are archetypal fantasies involving belief or deception, in which the subject's birth memories play a central role.
The articles incorporating this view are written by Alvin H. Lawson, Ph.D. Lawson has been an active CE3 researcher since 1973. He taught a class in UFO literature at CSU, Long Beach for ten years, and worked with hypnotist W. C. McCall, M.D., on more than 100 hypnotic regressions of "abductees" and related CE3 subjects. The Imaginary Abductee study was an early Lawson-McCall collaboration (see "Hypnosis of Imaginary Abductees" below, for discussion and four Imaginary transcripts).
Lawson takes on the advocates of the ET hypothesis (the "ET-True-Believers") concerning claims of abduction by aliens, makes some telling points against these claims, and presents his counter theory, the Birth Memories Hypothesis.
From http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Vault/6521/sectn2-1.html:
Beginning with our first UFO abductee regression in 1975, Dr. W.C. McCall and I carried out a successful decade-long program of hypnotic research into CE3 reports, which led us to the following conclusions and thence to the Birth Memories Hypothesis:
A CE3 abduction is an archetypal fantasy involving belief or deception in which an individual's perinatal or birth memories play a central role. During the abduction fantasy, revivified birth events may become one or more symbolic abduction images or events. Because of an abduction's peak-experience intensity, seemingly sequential structure, and surreal qualities, the witness may interpret the CE3 fantasy literally -- that is, as an actual Close Encounter with unusual extraterrestrial creatures. But like analogous mental phenomena such as shamans' trances, near-death experiences, and hallucinations, a CE3 abduction is demonstrably a rare but not abnormal delusion.
The funny part about this is the existence of someone in 1975 with the name "W.C. McCall." Presumably one of his associates subsequently started a music group called "Heimann Steamroller."