Memories Before Birth?

Up to now, most psychiatrists practicing analysis have been content to stop their dredging of the past at early childhood. They have left to Dianetician L. Ron Hubbard the primordial darkness extending back from birth to conception and still further back to such matters as "memory" of life on other planets (TIME, Dec. 22). Now a serious British psychiatrist, who conducts much analysis under hypnosis, seriously claims to have dredged his patients' memories back to the womb. And though Dr. Denys E. R. Kelsey's report and conclusions seem fantastic to the layman, London's reputable Journal of Mental Science prints them with a straight face. His three case histories:

P: A single woman of 44 "regressed" under hypnosis to age 13, then to five, then six months and to three weeks. At this point, she said: "I used to be part of a 'oneness,', and now I am separated." Dr. Kelsey told her that as he counted ten she would find herself back at the "oneness . . ." As he reached ten, she said ("quite calmly and positively"): "This is the womb. There is something beating in me and through me--my mother's heart. I can't see--and it feels as if I've got no mouth." He asked her in what position she found herself. She answered, "Curled up," and she "immediately assumed the fetal position." When Dr. Kelsey tried to get this patient to describe her existence before the "oneness," she babbled some seemingly incompatible impressions: "It was dark, yet filled with colors of indescribable beauty; there was complete silence, yet the place was filled with heavenly music; it was still, yet everything was quivering." At one time, the patient described what seemed to be the agonies of her birth. Dr. Kelsey grants that she had had a chance to acquire "obstetrical knowledge."

P: A married woman of 28 was more remarkable because she insisted that although she had borne two children, she knew nothing of the "facts of life." Dr. Kelsey admits the scientific possibility that she may have been suffering from hysterical amnesia. However, he says: "I am quite sure she had no knowledge of [the biological details of] conception." Under hypnosis: "She soon regressed to a scene in which she felt she had just been born. She was choking from something wound tightly around her neck. She had no idea what this could be. I asked her to trace it. Her hand went up to her neck and then . . . down to the region of her navel--'It comes from my tummy.' " This patient also had an idea that she had been an unwanted child, and described two burning sensations when she believed that her mother had been trying to cause an abortion. Despite her conscious ignorance of biology, she told in detail of having been "just a tiny spot," then beginning to grow bigger. From the patient's mother, Dr. Kelsey learned that she had indeed been unwanted, and had been almost strangled at birth by the umbilical cord. "Not surprisingly, [the mother denied] any attempt at procuring a miscarriage."

P: A bachelor of 25 suffered from two obsessions: he could not don a garment which had to be pulled on over his head, and could not work successfully with his hands. He, too, recalled unpleasant experiences in the womb. His mother told Dr. Kelsey about his birth: the head had been delivered with only a midwife present, and then his shoulders caused an obstruction. "Hence the infant remained, with just his head born, for an hour or so until the doctor arrived." Though the mother insisted that she had never told the patient about this, he re-enacted his birth difficulties in pantomime. Enlightened, this patient has begun to use his hands in occupational therapy and promises to make a good recovery.

Concludes Dr. Kelsey: "It is my belief that these so-called fantasies are in fact the reliving of events which were experienced and appreciated and promptly repressed." And he accepts the prophecy of Psychiatrist Nandor Fodor: "Prenatal psychology may shatter the last fetters with which scientific materialism has bound our minds."

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