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The Effect of Maternal Psychological Stress on the Foetus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

William H. James
William H. James*
Affiliation:
Department of Biometry, Gallon Laboratory, University College, London W.C.1
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Extract

Folklore has had more to say than science about the relation between the outcome of a pregnancy and the psychological history of the parturient: our culture interprets a legitimate stillbirth as the sign of a sick marriage. And sceptics may think that accretions of folklore are with us yet in the form of facile psychoanalytic explanations. Helene Deutsch (1945) ably expounds the case: spontaneous abortion differs from induced abortion, she tells us, in that “the inducing agent is the psyche, and the pregnant woman who resorts to the help of this agent does not act from conscious will or in accordance with conscious wishes”.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 115 , Issue 524 , July 1969 , pp. 811 - 825
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1969 

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