I have been often wondering why the mother’s state of mind during pregnancy is important when prescribing a homeopathic remedy to a child. I have thought and noticed that if the mother had specific traumatic events during pregnancy it must have affected the child and not only in a straightforward manner but also in a more chronic way. This, I have explained, was due to the fact that the mother had a certain predisposition, which corresponded to the trauma or her state of mind during pregnancy and she ought to display it throughout her mothering, not only during pregnancy, thus affecting the child in his or her very essence. This usually brought under my scrutiny clues to whether or not the child reacted to the mother’s state in any observable manner. I often found it did, so I explored the mother’s disposition during pregnancy, tried to see if it had any elements that were unusual for the mother outside of her pregnancy, and included that in the remedy picture for the child.
While this is still relevant and stands true in my homeopathic thinking, I have noted a connection between the underlying logic of including the mother’s state during pregnancy and the child’s constitutional make up. This came through psychoanalytic explorations of the infant’s psychic development.
According to some psychoanalytic theories, the infant is born into the world without a self-concept. The infant does not know about her limitations, physical boundaries and does not have the concept of predicting or expecting future events, like feeding times, hunger, thirst, pain, digestion, urination. All these events and sensations happen to the infant and together with the environment’s response to these events and sensations, the infant slowly but surely starts to develop its own being and understanding of the world.
The mother (or primary care taker) is a crucial being in the infant’s developing self-concept. This is the person, who responds to the infant’s needs, urges, cries, smiles, and tries to read the infant’s bodily signals, most often in an attending fashion. This care taking, thus plays an essential role in the infant’s development, not only in psychosocial and physical development, but also in the very creation of the infant’s self –image. Taking it one step beyond this actual physical care taking during the initial stages of the infant’s life, the mother, as a container and care taker was there for the infant during the pregnancy as well. The mother was the containing environment the infant (the fetus) was surrounded by, received vital signals of life and well being from, and essentially everything that got absorbed into the infant’s being.
This conceptualization of the origins of the developing self, gave me the missing piece I needed to understand the fundamental reason for inquiring about the mother’s state during the pregnancy. With this frame of reference, I can navigate my way easier in the maze of critical and non-critical information a mother can provide the homeopath during the interview for her child. The mother, as the environment, or container plays a crucial role in the creation of the very matrix of the developing self of the fetus and infant, thus providing clues to the personality and remedy picture of the child through her own inner experience and world of vital sensations.
