Childbirth and Being Born 2025, May

“Hello Baby”

To contemplate the landscape of birth is a privilege. Having the chance to work in a maternity ward helps us to be in contact with life, hospitality, complexity and mystery. It is often very passionate and can be difficult and conflictual. The maternity is also an observatory of society’s changes. We would like to share in our platform some minutes of a newborn’s discovery of arriving outside of the womb. Observing the beginning of interactions gives us a hint of baby’s active contribution of this beginning. Ferenczi’s intuitions on the primal environment inspired us to explore with a special angle the perinatal care we wish to be provided.

“Hello Baby” is a short video, it was created for Arte Cultural Television (France/Germany) by Valerie Wincler photographer, filmmaker with a commentary by Julianna Vamos (Wincler, 2014). The film shows the initial meeting, the very first moments between the newborn and her mother, father, parents. Baby’s participation from birth on are shown in the intimacy of different sensual communications.

The film was made in the maternity ward “Les Bluets”. Les Bluets is an Avant-Garde Parisian maternity hospital, well-known in France and internationally since the 1950s by founder Fernand Lamaze, who first introduced the idea of the mother’s active role in labor. We are remaining faithful to this innovative spirit and continue to face contemporary challenges (medically-assisted reproduction, same-sex parents, single parents, couples of varying ethnic backgrounds, trans-parentality etc.) with our postnatal program, to raise awareness about this primal time in mother-infant relations.

Protecting the first mother-newborn contact is important for many reasons… This message is continuously misunderstood in our society, for example, the use of the term “caregiver” interchangeably with the term “mother” in the psychoanalytic or psychological field is problematic. The experience of continuity from conception to pregnancy, to childbirth, to postpartum is guaranteed exclusively by the same body, the body of the mother. This topic is really urgent today. 

The idea of being with the mother seems to be so obvious, so simple, even mundane… but still we have to reflect on that, as being not at all easy – this is what we all are working for, day by day. Also it is important to keep in mind that mothers are rarely independent from their social circle, and fathers -among other loving persons- can provide the love (holding and containing) for the mother which supports mothering, as we say „mothering the mother”.

We’ll be happy to be in touch with colleagues’ clinical experiences or lectures in the effort of finding the bridge between perinatalists and Sandor Ferenczi’s intuitions for primal preoccupations and for the infants in us.