ABSTRACT
Rank considered that certain transferences could be regarded as reproducing, at least at one level, the “physiological connection” that had existed between the mother and her unborn child. He also drew attention to the fact that legends, myths, patients’ associations, and so on often contained what appeared to be symbolic references to the act and experience of birth. Balint does not, however, appear to have considered for very long the possibility of equating the search for “primary object-love” with the search for prenatal or uterine “love”; he seems, in fact, to have decided against it. Greenacre is well known for her pioneering work on the mother–foetus relationship and for raising the question of whether the foetus’s reactivity to certain—presumably unpleasant—stimuli could be regarded as what she called a “pre-anxiety” kind of response. It seems reasonable to suppose that by “unpleasant experiences” Klein was referring to the kind of events she described as giving rise to what she called “persecutory anxiety”.
