The infant unlocks the true nature of the woman and gives to her the greatest stature as a woman, being a mother, just as a mother unlocks the hidden potentials of that infant. It’s a dynamic. Each is bringing the other to their fulfillment and that’s the beauty of it. It’s always there. You can’t destroy it.

You’ll find that within the same time frame of the breakup of the nuclear family, when the extended family begins to simply be made almost impossible to maintain or we elect for these small compartmentalized, everything in its neat little tidy segment of society. Along about the same time that began to take total hold of us and change the whole nature and structure of family as it is, at the very same time was the separation of infant and mother becoming the common practice and finally hitting that water shed at World War II, moving from 30% of the mothers to 97% of the mothers and suddenly becoming nationwide. And at the same time you’ve broken up your extended family and so everything is isolated. Then to expect an isolated young mother who has no access to other mothers, who has no access to grandmothers and so on, on a daily basis, for consultation, assistance, and so on and so forth. You have a very difficult situation and the mother is at risk herself in that situation.

You cannot overnight, within a short period of time like that, eliminate that intelligence informing the brain system. I think of a very close association of mine, close kin, who was certainly born under the most disastrous situations in the hospital and had a very, very bad beginning and whose mother was one of the most anxiety ridden persons in the world and followed immediately by siblings which created a great situation of tension and rivalry, a lack of nurturing, and brought up in that kind of a situation. Everything really negative and with a lot of anxieties and negativities and so on. A lot of problems. And you would think that this individual would have difficulties in mothering. But nevertheless this particular individual, just by a good prenatal indoctrination and educational process, and a good solid birth education before it happened, and by the time the birth took place this particular woman was enormously confident and entered into the whole birth process with a feeling that she didn’t need anybody there. I must say that it was not just a natural birth but the separation simply never took place and there was this enormous, what we think of as bonding. This woman was 35 when she had this child, her first child, and she breastfed this child for three years and nurtured it in every way. There was this enormous unbreakable, separation never took place. 

She displayed every mammalian instinct known to man or beast in a perfectly beautiful magnificent form simply because it was all activated within her and she did it spontaneously. She didn’t read a single book on mothering. She read books on the prenatal care of herself. She did prenatal exercises. She’d watch her diet. She talked to her infant in-utero. She did all of these things and absolutely controlled the birth situation. She was in charge from beginning to end. It was a very quick birth of course because she was so relaxed and totally confident. Her confidence was enormous.

And then of course once that little baby came out and she took it, nothing was ever going to separate her from it. And it was a most successful affair. So there it always is. The brain has that enfolded within it. And what I found here, we had an extremely neurotic and timid and uncertain, hesitant, unsure, woman who was transformed completely in her personality and her behaviour patterns and everything else by the birth experience. Precisely as Kennel and Klaus and even MacLean implies, that the infant unlocks the true nature of the woman and gives her her greatest stature as a woman, as a mother, just as a mother unlocks the hidden potentials of that infant. It’s a dynamic. Each are bringing the other to their fulfillment and that’s the beauty of it. It’s always there. You can’t destroy it.