Schopenhauer observed that the question of the state after death is fundamentally the same as the question of the state before birth (Schopenhauer, 1818, §54). Death and birth are not opposites but two faces of the same transition. If you take this seriously, the consequences reach far beyond philosophical speculation: if every crisis has the structure of a birth, then what appears to you as breakdown is a passage — one that wants to be accompanied, not repaired.
The Three Stages
The bodily process of birth follows a three-part movement that Stanislav Grof (*1931) described in his perinatal research as the deep structure of all living things (Grof, 1975). At the beginning stands the oceanic unity: a tender feeling, sheltered by a dense covering. Then the expulsion begins — a vital thrust that creates constriction and meets resistance. Then the passage into a wider space where the new can unfold.
What Grof demonstrated in Realms of the Human Unconscious and The Adventure of Self-Discovery (Grof, 1975; 1988) goes beyond metaphor: people relive these three stages in altered states of consciousness. The basic perinatal matrices operate as deep structures that shape later experiences of constriction, struggle, and breakthrough. Consciously living through these stages, Grof found, has a healing effect because it brings people into contact with what has been at work beneath the surface since their own birth. The birth process is not a symbol but an ontological pattern that repeats itself: in personal maturation, in relationship crises, in collective upheavals.
Birth, Not Repair
The prevailing interpretation of crises follows a repair ideal: something is damaged and must be restored. An original condition counts as the norm, and any deviation from it as the problem. The birth process reverses the direction of the gaze. What appears as loss is often the vital thrust that inaugurates a new phase of life. Life is a series of births, not a series of deaths.
From this follows a reinterpretation of the death drive that turns Freud’s concept on its head (cf. Freud, 1920). What appears as a destructive fundamental impulse is, in this perspective, the unconscious search for rebirth. Behind the various forms of self-destruction lies the wish to begin anew. Lived through unconsciously, this drive leads to destruction; lived through consciously, it becomes the passage into an expanded self. The death drive is the search for the womb, and this search can succeed when it is recognised for what it is.
Vulnerability plays a sustaining role here. Egon Friedell put it in a formula: not that every Achilles has a heel, but rather that every heel has an Achilles (Friedell, 1927). From the vulnerable spot, the awareness of vulnerability, and the struggle against it — the hero is born. Armour does not protect; it prevents the passage.
Wisdom of Life, Not of Death
Spinoza wrote that the free man thinks of nothing less than of death; his wisdom is a meditation on life (Spinoza, 1677, Ethics IV, Proposition 67). Yet this shift does not reach deep enough. The wisdom of the free human being is a meditation on birth. This is not a semantic game. The change of perspective transforms your entire orientation toward life and opens a third way beyond the alternative of repression and fixation. Neither the repression of death — the modern variant — nor the circling around death — the existentialist variant — but the turning toward birth as the actual fundamental event.
Plato wrote in the Symposium that love reveals itself as procreation in the beautiful (tokos en kalo) (Plato, Symposium, 206b–207a), and in the Phaedo he described death as a transition of the soul into another state, not as an end (Plato, Phaedo, 64a–67b). Both motifs converge in the birth process: what looks like dying is the other side of being born. Goethe condensed the same thought in his Maxims and Reflections into the formula of “die and become” (Goethe, 1833), in which every transformation presupposes a dying-off of the old so that the new can take shape.
Jochen Kirchhoff (1944–2025) deepened the concept of birth in an anthropological direction (J. Kirchhoff, 2009). The child’s primary life-movement is a movement toward the mother as the first representative of life. An interruption of this movement in the first three years shapes all subsequent movements toward connection. Those who become aware of this imprint can take up the interrupted movement again — and that too is a birth process: the belated maturation of a transition that could not succeed the first time. Birth does not end when the child leaves the birth canal. It continues in every movement toward life that a person dares to make.
In Work with People
When you are caught in a crisis, you experience constriction, pressure, the feeling that nothing works any more. The repair ideal interprets this condition as a symptom of a defect and searches for what went wrong. The birth understanding interprets the same condition as the second basic matrix: the constriction before the passage. The difference lies in the question that is asked. What is broken? asks one model. What wants to be born? asks the other.
In philosophical work, the process follows not a diagnosis (G. Kirchhoff, 2024) but the question of what presses toward life, what needs space, and what constriction precedes the passage. The repair ideal becomes problematic where it does not know its own limits — where it presupposes that a person must first be healed before being allowed to live.
Collective crises follow this pattern too. Epochal upheavals, the collapse of orders that long seemed stable — all of this can be read as a birth process. A culture that accompanies these passages rather than blocking them acts as a birthing space. Where this is absent, crises become chronic because the vital thrust finds no room. The ability to recognise birth processes as such and to give them space is a measure of cultural maturity — and a personal one: the next time you feel something collapsing within you, you can ask what wants to be born.
Pre-Birth describes the condition in which the passage fails to occur and a person remains in permanent preparation. The Organic asks after the principle that distinguishes the birth process from mechanical planning: the living unfolds from within itself — directed but not manufactured. Order Work works where interrupted movements toward life become visible in family systems and the conditions are created to take them up again.
Sources
- Plato, Symposium (c. 380 BC). Procreation in the beautiful (tokos en kalo) as the essence of Eros, particularly 206b–207a.
- Plato, Phaedo (c. 385 BC). Death as a transition of the soul, not as an end, particularly 64a–67b.
- Schopenhauer, A. (1818). The World as Will and Representation. Leipzig: Brockhaus. Particularly §54 on the identity of the question of the state before birth and after death.
- Spinoza, B. (1677). Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order. Posthumous. Proposition 67, Part IV: The free man thinks of nothing less than of death.
- Goethe, J. W. (1833). Maxims and Reflections. Posthumous, in: Goethes Werke, Weimar Edition. The formula of “die and become.”
- Friedell, E. (1927). A Cultural History of the Modern Age. Munich: C. H. Beck. On vulnerability as the origin of heroic strength.
- Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Leipzig: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag. Introduction of the death drive concept.
- Grof, S. (1975). Realms of the Human Unconscious. New York: Viking Press. The basic perinatal matrices as deep structures of experience.
- Grof, S. (1988). The Adventure of Self-Discovery. Albany: SUNY Press. Deepening of perinatal research and therapeutic implications.
- Kirchhoff, J. (2009). Was die Erde will. Bergisch Gladbach: Gustav Lübbe Verlag. On the child’s life-movement and the movement toward the mother.
- Kirchhoff, G. (2024). Philosophical practice. On the birth process as an interpretive framework in philosophical accompaniment.