Stanislov Grof has talked about how he feels, based on very long term experience dealing with people in altered states of consciousness, that the birth experience is very important in influencing later life. It remains with people until they process it. Difficult births lead to certain personality impairments that can only be healed with what I tend to term ecstatic states, states in which the inner healer is enabled to function properly, in terms of qualitative reorganization of the personality gestalt.
This led me to wonder: in cultures where ecstatic states are rare or absent, do people unconsciously blame the mothers? Is the inability to process these states a source of misogyny?
I think of Islam, where virtually everything is banned. They don’t like singing, dancing, painting people, drinking. They prize sobriety over all else. Given a percentage of the population that will have undergone traumatic births, how can they ever process them? They can’t.
Conversely, it would seem to me that cultures which value femininity would tend to have many more ways of processing feelings, deep experiences, of releasing deep down pent up tensions in some way OTHER than violence.