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Born Too Soon: The Enduring Effects of a Premature Birth on the Psyche. A Hermeneutic Literature Review

Date

2022

Authors

Supervisor

Collens, Paula

Item type

Dissertation

Degree name

Master of Psychotherapy

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Auckland University of Technology

Abstract

Premature babies suffer intrusive and painful medical procedures. They often teeter on the precipice of life and death and are subjected to lengthy separations from their mothers in life-saving, but contact-limiting, incubators. It is unbearable to imagine their experiences of helplessness, terror and dread, as they struggle with physical and emotional pain. This study uses a hermeneutic literature review process to explore psychoanalytic literature that has clinically and/or conceptually made a connection between premature birth experiences and ongoing implications for the psyche. This study found that adults who had experienced a premature birth as an infant often appear to have a persistence of unhealed, nonsymbolised, nonverbalised trauma and a self that has creatively adapted to its early environment of deprivation. The psyche appears to be haunted by feelings of overwhelming helplessness, hopelessness, terror and dread. The structure of the psyche can be affected and rendered vulnerable to future traumas. In the face of this difficult early life start, the developing self struggles to depend on others, instead finding alternative ways to gain comfort. Ongoing development of the inner self suffers from the need to over-adapt to the environment, which then impedes the adult capacity to reflect, think and make meaning. These creative adaptations distort the developing psyche and affect the capacity to feel truly alive. Throughout the study, I reflect on my subjectivity and progressive understandings. I use these, alongside my embodied responses, to form my interpretive lens: that premature birth could be understood as an experience of torture. In our current socio-cultural context, these enduring effects on the psyche appear to go widely unacknowledged as the prevailing narrative appears to be that babies do not have the capacity to remember. I argue that this narrative is able to evolve, and that the provision of a framework to think about the premature baby’s experience is needed. This study contributes to an emerging body of literature on the lasting impacts of birth experiences. The implications of these findings are useful to psychotherapy practitioners and other professionals working with children, adults and families who have been through the experience of a premature birth. It may provide nurses, doctors and medical staff in hospital environments with a different way of understanding their infant patients and help to strengthen the bridge between psychotherapy and the medical world.

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Permanent link

https://hdl.handle.net/10292/15615

Collections

Masters Dissertations