Book Description

The author believes the period of our lives that has the greatest impact on disease and personality formation is our gestation and birth. Recent studies provide evidence that fetal imprinting, an evolutionary strategy to prepare children to cope with life, establishes a permanent set-point in a child's physiology. Mothers highly anxious during pregnancy may give birth to babies prone to mental illness and disease in later life. Low oxygen at birth, drugs taken during pregnancy, and a lack of parental affection in the first years of life may have similar adverse affects. The author puts a case for a reorientation of our approaches to pregnancy and the use of drugs, and above all, to the modes of psychotherapy we implement to treat everything from phobias and compulsions to anxiety and depression.--From book jacket.