Monday 9 November 2009

Michel Odent's testimonial

I feel honoured and excited to have had Michel Odent read my book and send me the following endorsement:-


"The book by Maggie Howell is much more than a practical guide for birth preparation. It is a book about human nature. It includes several dominant themes. One of them is the negative effect, in certain situations, of the knowledge adults have acquired the human way, compared in particular with the knowledge transmitted from generation to generation among non human animals. It is significant that the book starts with a chapter entitled ‘mammalising birth’. Several of the selected quotations, presented as foot notes, are opportunities to reintroduce this dominant theme: ‘Aerodynamically the bumblebee shouldn’t be able to fly, but the bumblebee does not know that, so it goes on flying anyway’ and, some pages later, ‘a child should not be denied a balloon because an adult knows that sooner or later it will burst’.

Obviously, Maggie has digested the contents of the first pages of the bestseller written several thousand years ago. She has been able to interpret ‘the sin of consuming the fruit of the tree of knowledge’, and she has noticed the significant association, in the first pages of this famous ancient book, between knowing too much and being condemned to have difficult birth. In modern scientific language we can explain this association by introducing the concept of neocortical inhibition, and by claiming that the huge development of the neocortex – the brain of the intellect – is the main reason for difficult births in our species. The solution to cope with this human handicap is to put the neocortex at rest. This is why ‘natal hypnotherapy’ can be presented as a set of tools to overcome powerful neocortical inhibitions and the effects of thousands of years of cultural conditioning."


Warm regards

Michel

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