ABSTRACT
William Emerson learnt to recognize typical movement of various stages of development in the womb or during birth. Any severe maternal distress, whatever its cause, imprints itself on the fetus. The noxious stimulus could be a drug, such as alcohol, as well as the mother's distress. In addition to the deep-sea fantasy, Frank Lake used Reichian deep breathing— W. Reich had been a student of S. Freud. "Most people's subjective experiences of birth are highly consistent with reality", says W. Emerson, "but where reality and subjectivism differ, it is the subjective experience which forms the basis of psychotherapy." The psychotherapist Emerson points out that mothers who are giving birth may re-experience aspects of their own birth. He gives an example of a mother who, while giving birth, was taken back to her own birth. He describes how the subjective experience can interpret wrongly what happened at birth.
