The Myth of Normal 115

growing body of knowledge now available to us. I aim only to shed light on dynamics our entire culture needs to understand. This and the next chapter begin at our very beginnings, tracing our culture’s failure to follow the developmental templates of gestation and birth as laid down by evolution. The child’s “ambivalent or painful memories” that Rae foresaw in her pregnancy journal are no poetic invention. Intrauterine experiences may not be accessible to conscious recall, but they can live on as a different kind of memory: emotional and neurological imprints embedded in the cells and nervous system of the human organism. The psychiatrist Thomas Verny calls this process “bodywide memory.” A pioneer in recognizing the long-term influence of the intrauterine period on emotional health, Verny published his groundbreaking The Secret Life of the Unborn Child in 1982. In his sequel to that book, he wrote, “Before the event of birth, before we have even had a glimmer of sight or sound in the womb, we record the experience and history of our lives in our cells.”[1] In recent decades, a deluge of fresh information has underscored the crucial importance of women’s physical environment, health, and emotional balance during pregnancy to the optimal development of the infant. Meanwhile, our era has also brought substantial increases in the number of children, adolescents, and young people facing depression and anxiety and other mental health challenges. Genetics on their own cannot begin to account for such abrupt shifts. If we are serious about reversing trends like these, it is critical that we connect the dots by looking to the environment. “Environment does not begin at birth; environment begins as soon as you have an environment,” the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky has said. “As soon as you’re a fetus, you are subject to whatever information is coming through Mom’s circulation, hormone levels, and nutrients.”[2] A very early factor is the stresses pregnant women are under—emotional, economic, personal, professional, and social. As the physician and psychoanalyst Ursula Volz-Boers points out, “Intrauterine life is not a paradise as some people try to make us believe. We are the receiver of all the happiness and of all the anxieties and difficulties of our parents.”[3] But of course, even the earliest factor has its own earlier factors: namely, the