Umbilical phantoms

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Notes

1 What the newborn is and what it knows is an old philosophical riddle, often framed as empiricism versus rationalism, that remains unanswered. For a thoughtful overview of contemporary philosophical issues that turn on the self, see Zahavi (2005). The debate about whether the neonate has a rudimentary sense of self and can distinguish between self and non-self remains vigorous. The assumption that newborns had no such capacity was challenged by Meltzhoff and Moore in their paper “Imitation of Facial and Manual Gestures by Human Neonates” (1977). Ulric Neisser (1997) argued that neonates can also distinguish between self and environment. See also Rochat (2011). For an examination of fetal and neonatal brain development, see Lagerkrantz and Changeux (2009). For recent papers that cast doubt on self/other distinction immediately after birth, see Welsh (2006), a position echoed by Kennedy-Constatini, Slaughter and Nielsen (2016), who conclude that recent research on the subject has led them to believe there is no strong evidence for neonatal imitation. . Nothing is settled, however. See Nagy et al. (2019).

2 Although the cellular traffic is bidirectional, by far the most research has been on how fetal cells, which can remain in the mother for decades, affect her health over time, for better and for worse. For an overview, see Knippen (2011). See also Dawes, Tan and Xiao (2007), and Hahn et al. (2019).

3 Françoise Dolto regarded the placenta as the child’s early double and used it to understand psychotic and anorexic children in her psychoanalytic work with them. See Morgan (2009, 39–62). A Christian thinker, Dolto read the Gospels through a Freudian lens that included the uterus and placenta as part of the earthly reality Christ escapes through resurrection. See Kritzman (2006, 508).

4 In an editorial, Jan Brosens and Birgit Gellersen (2010) articulate a changing paradigm in embryology, which includes implantation: “The concept of the ‘passive’ decidua and the ‘invasive’ embryo is being challenged by recent observations … The role of the decidua in remodeling of the maternal-fetal interface is much more dynamic than heretofore recognized. Rather than being invaded, the decidual cells actually engulf the conceptus.”

5 For a lucid overview, see Rendell, Bath and Brennan (2020, 26), and Vinketova, Mourdjeva and Oreshkova (2016).

6 For a typical neo-Darwinist gene-war view of pregnancy, see Sadedin (2014).

7 Freud’s often quoted sentence from Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety ([1926] 1955c, 138): “There is more much more continuity between intra-uterine life and earliest infancy than the impressive caesura of birth would have us believe.”

8 Bion muses on Freud’s statement about intrauterine life and earliest infancy: “I don’t suppose there will ever be a way of knowing, so to speak, what a fetus thinks, but to go on with my science fiction—I suggest there is no reason to why it shouldn’t feel” (Bion and Bion 1994, 236–237).