A story: Importance of Infancy for Mental Health


It is a common belief that babies cannot feel or understand any events, speeches or anything they receive during their first months. Unfortunately this opinion causes incurable personality disorder and psychological problems.

Gisele Antoine tells a trajik story in her book called “Le courage de se seuvenir”

The heroes of the story are married couple. The problem surfaces when the husband wanted help from his psychologist friend about his wife who doesn’t want to have a baby. He causes his wife become pregnant by juggling. Even though she doesn’t want to have a baby, at first she feels positive about the baby with the infuence of a dream she had. Even during the birth she doesn’t want to cooperate with the doctors.

At the end they have a healty baby, but she feels so unhappy. Nobody, including herself, can’t figure out the reason of her unhappiness. As time goes on life becomes beyond bearing. At last she commits suicide.

Psychogist Gisele Antoine unravel the problem by doing some researches on basis of psychoanalysis. The event that causes trauma in her emotional memory happens after the first days of her birth. She was born one of the siamese twins. The doctors have to kill one of the twins to make the other continue her life. So she was preferred as the lucky one. Her parents never tells the truth, and she has never known about her dead sister. Because it has never surfaced, this event becomes a deep trauma and ends up as with the suicide.

How did she understand her parents decision while she was only a few days old? How did the decision that is taken on behalf of her effected her psychology?

All psychologists claim that it doesn’t matter how old your baby is, they are not as foible as we think. Especially their emotional memory is equipped with a record mechanism that goes before birth.

1 comment:

Elizabeth said...

Hi. I read on your blog that you like to make posts about developmental games and advice about babies, so I thought you might want to know about this. A BYU professor has created a study that can plot babies' learning curves. The study can show what a 4-month-old baby comprehends. To read more: http://byunews.byu.edu/archive07-Jun-BabyResearch.aspx

Best,
Elizabeth Cramer
University Communications Intern
Brigham Young University