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Birth is the prototype for all discontinuities in the relation between a mind and its objects. Otto Rank's The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1909) introduced this theme into psychoanalytic literature.

In the same year Freud took an interest in dreams of birth in an addendum to The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a). Birth, as a passage from intra-uterine life to extra-uterine life became for him "the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety" (SE, 5: 525, note 2). He returns to this theme in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1916-17a [1915-17]), in which he speaks of the "separation"(SE, 15: 397) of birth.

This is the theme that Wilfred Bion developed in Caesura (1975) when he made birth the paradigm for all psychic discontinuity, which means that experiences lived through before the caesura must be capable of being retranscribed in a psychically assimilable form after the caesura. Taking a more genetic point of view, other authors have applied the term "psychic birth" to the moment when children become conscious of their individuation and the separation between them and their libidinal objects (Mahler, Margaret, 1975; Tustin, Frances, 1981).

DIDIER HOUZEL

See also: Constitution; Dream symbolism; Infant development; Infant observation; Infant observation (therapeutic); Infantile psychosis; Intergenerational; Maternal; Memoirs of the future; Myth of the Birth of the Hero, The; Narcissistic elation; Parenthood; Postnatal/postpartum depression; Premature-Prematurity; Primary love; Reversal into the opposite; Seduction; Sexual theories of children; Social feeling (individual psychology); Trauma of Birth, The.