Birth trauma and social dynamics

'Every institution is a womb, every boundary is a potential cervix and every change is a little birth,' says David Wasdell, founder director of the Unit for Research into Changing Institutions (URCHIN), a Docklands-based charity. 'Groups react to threat with psychotic levels of anxiety. It is these underlying, primal fantasies at the international level which help explain the arms race. The group's boundaries carry the terror of the cervix. Out-groups threaten these boundaries.'

'Every institution is a womb, every boundary is a potential cervix and every change is a little birth'

Our memories reach back before birth, Wasdell claims, and our stress at birth, with cranial pressure and oxygen deprivation, is a shattering and traumatic event for most of us. At a social level, whenever the circumstances unconsciously remind us of birth, for instance as at present, with high stress, low resources and rapid change, this primal trauma is reactivated: 'behaviour regresses, and is characterised by inter-group oppression, scapegoating, paranoid boundary controls and outbursts of anarchic system-destructive activity.'

David Wasdell dealt with his own early traumas through a process of regression and integration. Releasing these has led, he says, to a 'phenomenal increase in my creativity' - and to the publishing of a wide variety of URCHIN research papers. He works internationally as a 'process consultant' and lecturer with business organisations,churches, universities and other institutions, investigating the psychodynamics of large social systems under stress.

David Wasdell, URCHIN, Meridian House, 115 Poplar High Street, London E14 OAE (tel 071 987 3600; fax 071 515 8627).

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