The Future of Homo?

Dr Michel Odent celebrates his 90th birthday this year and in this wide-ranging new book asks a series of questions surrounding what he calls primal health (www.primalhealthresearch.com)) which he has been researching over many decades. The style of these articles is academic with many references, but nevertheless accessible to the general reader. One of his most important overall contentions is that we have over-socialised the birth process in terms of medical intervention and even interference in ways that are inimical to our own evolutionary history. He shows how many indigenous women give birth alone and undisturbed or with only a few supportive companions. This ensures what he calls neocortical inhibition, a mental and emotional state conducive to a smooth birthing process. Women need to be protected against all possible stimulations of the neocortex since the 'birth process is an involuntary process under the control of primitive brain structures we share with the other mammals' (p. 14). In this sense, he recommends a birth environment with candles rather than bright lights overhead since this kind of light inhibits melatonin release.

In a chapter on pre-labour Caesareans, he notes that we underestimate the multiple effects on babies of stress and microbial deprivation in such cases, recommending that Caesareans should be delayed until the onset of labour. This is part of Michel's emphasis on our 'cultural lack of interest in the possible long-term consequences of the way babies are born' (p. 76) resulting from what he calls the scientification of love associated with a dominating attitude towards nature and cultural control not only of genital sexuality, childbirth and lactation, but also of access to transcendence 'and the association of orgasmic states with concepts of shame, culpability and fear' (p. 111). Hence his recommendation that childbirth needs to be de-socialised and the need for privacy recognised since the very socialisation of childbirth involves inhibitory factors and a language of management and control where the woman is treated as a patient in a largely passive role. Besides the essays on childbirth, there are also interesting papers on the future evolutionary thinking and psychotherapy, abbreviations and a reflection on the epigenetic clock. A very stimulating volume, especially for those in the field.