Gurevich, P. S. Life and Death Confrontation in the Newborn’s Mind

Abstract: The article is devoted to the description of the child’s mental processes after birth. It is well known that such intensive attention towards a child’s emotional experience is typical for the English school of psychoanalysis. Many researchers who studied the psychic dynamics of a newborn empathized the importance of emotional states experienced by the newborn right after he or she had been born. Such emotional states are neither sentimental nor optimistic. Today everyone knows that a child takes his or her birth as death. Otto Rank used to write about it and modern transpersonalists conduct many detailed studies on the matter. The death threat does not leave a child when he or she is finally born. It is caused by the baby leaving the mother’s body and unconsciously wanting to return to where he or she had the almost absolute comfort. It is impossible for a child to return to the mother’s womb and the parent care cannot substitute for the previous comfortable existence. The author of the present article describes the three scenarios that can define the further development of the child. The author of the article uses the methods of phenomenological interpretation of mythology as well as particular techniques allowing to describe the mental world of the child from the point of view of later mental formations. Therefore, the author traces possible disclosures of the child’s mind and interprets their goals and meanings. The novelty of the present research is that the mental development of the child is being viewed in terms of life and death. The author analyzes the difficult dialectics of the confrontation of life and death instincts in the newborn’s mind and stresses out the contribution of the English psychoanalytical school.

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