Content area
Full Text
Abstract: One of the important differences between Homo sapiens and the other primates is the condition of pregnancy and birth. Because of the upright walk and the larger brain size of Homo sapiens, the birth channel became too narrow to accommodate birth after a long pregnancy. The evolutionary solution was the shortening of human pregnancy from about 21 months to only nine months. The consequence of this was the so-called "physiological prematurity" of human newborns. The far-reaching psychological implications of this bio-psychological situation of la condition humaine will be outlined in this contribution. Because of this "physiological prematurity," human babies live simultaneously in the real, outside world and but also still experience the fetal emotional state as a dreamy "other world." This other world is often projected onto the real world. And on the level of the collective psychology, humans in early tribal cultures lived in a similar way; simultaneously existing in the real world while also experiencing a magical world of projected fetal feelings. The process of individual human development is the slow growing out of this primal confusion between real world and the dreamy consciousness and an increasing differentiation between inside and outside. This same evolutionary process is found in the collective experience of humanity's mental development.
Keywords: pregnancy, birth, physiological prematurity, cultural evolution
We have a tradition of separating the fields of science on the basis of methodology. The more restricted the field of observation is, the more exact the methodology developed specifically for this field of observation can be. This is especially true for the natural sciences. With philology and hermeneutics, the humanities have also developed their own methodologies. The field of psychology has an idiosyncratic middle position here, and in the past, psychology was assigned alternately to the humanities or the natural sciences. In the past, there was an ongoing discussion of methodology in psychology, which remained essentially unresolved. It was an important advance when psychoanalysis was able to demonstrate that some psychological phenomena can be understood only in the light of their history (Janus, 2013b).
Independently of this, research in biology achieved great scientific progress when the history of organisms was combined with observation of them, by which means their nature became understandable. That was the paradigm...