Maternal impression

The conception of a maternal impression rests on the belief that a powerful mental influence working on the mother’s mind may produce an impression, either general or definite, on the child she is carrying.^[1]

Medicine

Maternal impression, according to a long-discredited medical theory, was a phenomenon that explained the existence of birth defects and congenital disorders. The theory stated that an emotional stimulus experienced by a pregnant woman could influence the development of the fetus. For example, it was sometimes supposed that the mother of the Elephant Man was frightened by an elephant during her pregnancy, thus "imprinting" the memory of the elephant onto the gestating fetus. Mental problems, such as schizophrenia and depression, were believed to be a manifestation of similar disordered feelings in the mother. For instance, a pregnant woman who experienced great sadness might imprint depressive tendencies onto the fetus in her uterus.

The theory of maternal impression was largely abandoned by the 20th century, with the development of modern genetic theory.

Folklore

In folklore, Maternal Imprinting, or Versehen^{[citation needed]} (a German noun meaning accident or as a verb to provide) as it is usually called, is the belief that a sudden fear of some object or animal in a pregnant woman can cause her child to bear the mark of it. Perhaps the first and most famous instance of this is that of Jacob in the Book of Genesis:

Jacob, however, took fresh-cut branches from poplar, almond and plane trees and made white stripes on them by peeling the bark and exposing the white inner wood of the branches. Then he placed the peeled branches in all the watering troughs, so that they would be directly in front of the flocks when they came to drink. When the flocks were in heat and came to drink, they mated in front of the branches. And they bore young that were streaked or speckled or spotted.^[2]

(In the following chapter, Genesis 31:8-12, it is implied that the patterns of coloration did not really change the outcome, but that Jacob merely thought they did.)

Oswald Spengler understood Maternal Imprinting to be a folkloric understanding of what he called “blood feeling” or the formation of a group aesthetic of a bodily ideal:

What is called the “Versehen” of a pregnant woman is only a particular and not very important instance of the workings of a very deep and powerful formative principle inherent in all that is of the race side. It is a matter of common observation that elderly married people become strangely like one another, although probably Science with its measuring instruments would “prove” the exact opposite. It is impossible to exaggerate the formative power of this living pulse, this strong inward feeling for the perfection of one’s own type. The feeling for race-beauty—so opposite to the conscious taste of ripe urbans for intellectual-individual traits of beauty—is immensely strong in primitive men, and for that very reason never emerges into their consciousness. But such a feeling is race-forming. It undoubtedly molded the warrior- and hero-type of a nomad tribe more and definitely on one bodily ideal, so that it would have been quite unambiguous to speak of the race-figure of Romans or Ostrogoths.^[3]

Pliny the Elder also comments at length about the phenomenon of postpartum maternal impression in bears.^[4]

See also

• Epigenetics
• Fetal origins of adult disease
• Lamarckism
• Mary Toft
• Mooncalf
• Pseudoscience

Bibliography

• Wendy Doniger and Gregory Spinner. “Misconceptions: Parental Imprinting” in “Science in Culture” edited by Peter Louis Galison, Stephen Richards Graubard, Everett Mendelsohn, Transaction Publishers, 2001
• Lily Weiser-Aall. “Svangerskap og Fodsel i Nyere Norsk Tradisjon” in Folklore, Vol. 82, No. 4 (Winter, 1971), pp. 339–40
• Patricia R. Stokes. “Pathology, Danger, and Power: Women's and Physicians' Views of Pregnancy and Childbirth in Weimar Germany” in Social History of Medicine 2000 Vol 13(#3)

References