Songs from the Womb: Healing the Wounded Mother
by Benig Mauger
Collins Press, Dublin, Ireland, 208 pages. 1998
Reviewed by Jane English, Ph.D.

With its Jungian perspective, this book is a unique contribution to the literature of pre and perinatal psychology. The inclusion of the natural world, archetypes, and the soul broadens and deepens this work that bridges between perinatal and transpersonal psychology. She challenges one of the most pervasive myths of our time, namely that birth is a physical event to be managed by doctors.

Based on her experiences as a birth teacher, therapist, and mother, and backed by recent research in pre- and perinatal psychology, the author emphasizes that prenatal life is formative, creating patterns we carry into later life. "Birth," she says "is an experience which is deeply engraved in our souls, leaving traces that permeate our lives."

Benig takes us into the darker unexplored territories of childbirth: the fears and fantasies of pregnancy, the despair and anguish of women after traumatic birth experiences, the raw pain of babies torn from their mothers at birth, and the joys of coming into life.

Songs from the Womb also continues perinatal psychology's tradition of valuing anecdotal and clinical data as well as experimental data. The many stories found in this book engage the emotions and, if the reader allows it, one's own body knowing.

As Benig is, like myself, one of the few cesarean(caesarean, cesarian)-born people active in the field of perinatal psychology, she includes valuable material on cesarean-born people and their mothers. I was delighted with this new contribution to the very sparse literature on both the child's experience of cesarean birth and the soul journey of the cesarean mother. It was personally gratifying to me to see her build on work I did around 15 years ago exploring the cesarean perinatal experience.

Embodying Jungian psychology's archetype of the Wounded-Healer, Benig enriches the book with some of her own journey.

In the latter half of the book I felt she attempted to cover too much of the history of various methods of healing birth trauma, sacrificing immediacy for scholarly completeness. However, this is a first book. I trust that in subsequent articles and books, Benig will continue to enlarge on what she has started here.

For its fresh perspective, I warmly recommend this book both to those new to perinatal psychology and to those with more extensive knowledge.