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INTRODUCTION The phenomenon of birth has held man's interest from earliest times. Poets and philosophers, from the beginning of history, have mused about the arcane nature of the event. More recently, the birth experience has been considered from the perspective of psychoanalytic psychiatry. Rank8 has stressed the "trauma of birth" as the primal experience of anxiety. Greenacre2 has similarly theorized that the birth process provides the prototype of the individual's later experiences of anxiety by organizing diffuse, somatic, preanxiety reactions into a definite pattern. Since uterine separation occurs by definition in all births, its effects cannot be isolated for study. However, operational, testable hypotheses can be formulated regarding the different effects of various modes of bringing about the uterine separation. A comparison af vaginally and cesarean delivered individuals would seem to offer the opportunity to determine the postpartum consequences chiefly attributable to passage through |
