Birth process describes an understanding of human development that grasps crises not as disturbances but as passages. Not repair but passage stands at the centre: something alive presses into a wider space, and what reveals itself in the process is not a defect to be fixed but a becoming that wants to be accompanied.
What birth process means
The concept takes the structure of physical birth and recognises it as the fundamental pattern of all living things. At the beginning stands a tender feeling, sheltered by a dense covering. Then comes a vital thrust that sets the expulsion in motion. Then a wider space in which the new can show itself. This three-stage pattern repeats: in personal maturation, in relationship crises, in collective upheavals.
What sets this thought apart from the prevailing interpretation of crises is its direction. The usual understanding sees in crises a loss, a damage, something that needs to be restored. The birth process reverses the direction of the gaze: what appears as breakdown is often the vital thrust that inaugurates a new phase of life. Life is not a series of deaths, but a series of births.
From this follows a radical reinterpretation of the death drive. What Freud described as a destructive fundamental impulse appears, in this perspective, as an unconscious search for rebirth. Behind the various forms of self-destruction lies the wish to begin anew. Unconsciously, this drive leads to destruction; consciously lived through, 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 central role in this understanding. It is not armour that protects; rather, the willingness to make oneself vulnerable opens the space for higher development. Egon Friedell put it in a formula: not that every Achilles has a heel, but that every heel has an Achilles. From the vulnerable spot, the awareness of vulnerability, and the tenacious struggle against it, the hero is born.
Where the concept comes from
The systematic connection between birth experience and psychological development goes back to Stanislav Grof (born 1931). In his research on perinatal psychology, set out in Realms of the Human Unconscious (1975) and The Adventure of Self-Discovery (1988), Grof described four basic perinatal matrices: the oceanic unity in the womb, the sense of no exit at the onset of contractions, the struggle through the birth canal, and the liberation after birth. These matrices operate as deep structures that shape later experiences of constriction, struggle, and breakthrough. Grof showed that people in altered states of consciousness relive these stages, and that conscious re-experiencing has a healing effect.
The philosophical depth of the idea reaches further back. Schopenhauer stated that the question of the state after death is the same as the question of the state before birth. Death and birth are not opposites but two faces of the same transition. Spinoza wrote that the free man thinks of nothing less than of death; his wisdom is a meditation on life. Gwendolin Kirchhoff shifts this sentence by a decisive nuance: the wisdom of the free human being is not a meditation on death, but on birth. This is not a semantic game but a shift of perspective that transforms the entire orientation toward life.
What emerges here is 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 fundamental event of life.
Birth process in practice
In philosophical work, the birth understanding operates as a framework for interpretation, not as a technique. When you are stuck 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 disorder and searches for what went wrong. The birth understanding interprets the same condition as the second basic matrix: the constriction before the passage. Nothing is broken — something wants to be born.
This does not mean that therapy is devalued. What therapeutic methods achieve also happens here, when psychological burdens are taken seriously and attachment patterns are examined. The path is different: not diagnosis but the question of what presses toward life guides the process. The repair ideal becomes problematic only when it does not know its own limits — when it presupposes that a person must first be healed before being allowed to live.
Collective crises, too, can be read in this way. Pandemics, epochal upheavals, the collapse of orders that long seemed stable — all of this follows the pattern of the birth process. A culture that holds this understanding and does not block birth processes but accompanies them acts as a birthing space. Where this is absent, crises become chronic, because the vital thrust finds no room.
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. This, too, is a birth process: not the first appearance, but the belated maturation of a transition that could not succeed the first time round.
Related concepts
The birth process stands in immediate proximity to Order Work, where it becomes apparent that children take on their parents’ fate out of love, and that the resolution lies in giving the burden back so that one’s own life-movement becomes free again. In Philosophical Accompaniment, the birth understanding forms the existential background: accompaniment does not ask what needs to be repaired, but what wants to be understood and brought into life.