Birth Anxieties

This chapter looks at some forms and sources of birth anxiety. Our beginnings are mysterious to us, and because of infantile amnesia we can remember neither being born nor our formative years, which leaves much of our own personalities and motivations opaque to us. The chapter incorporates psychoanalytic insights into birth anxiety provided by Rank and Freud, and interprets separation anxiety as an anxiety that we suffer because of our natality. It also shows that Sartre’s and Kierkegaard’s existentialist views of anxiety leave room for certain kinds of birth anxiety. One is anxiety that we cannot honour all the obligations that come from the attachments we have inherited from birth; another is anxiety to be caught up in the wrongs of the society around us where, having been born, we are deeply shaped by these wrongs and cannot readily extricate ourselves from them.