The Perinatal Matrix is not the natural course of an emotional process, but the form in which an emotional process runs when it is not processed. Whoever passes through a shock without letting it come to an end does not wander at random but along a shaped track. Four phases with an almost geometric recurrence: an initial attunement that tears apart like an illusion; an entrapment in which the world turns against you; a movement of pride that comes with taking up responsibility; a breakthrough into a new form of experience among people. Only after the breakthrough do you fully perceive others again.
#Four Phases, One Movement
The first phase is the amniotic sense of attunement. Something carries you, something holds, the world seems to be right. This phase does not feel like the beginning of a process but like a state that will last. Its peculiarity lies exactly in this security: it has to be broken like an illusion before the process can even begin.
The second phase breaks in with great disillusionment. A great entrapment sets in, a more open “the world is against me, this is going wrong.” You find yourself in a container with no way out, and the container is your own process. This phase is the most stubborn one; it is also the phase where most attempted solutions take hold that keep the movement precisely from reaching its end: soothing, distraction, negotiating with the outside world.
The third phase is a movement of pride that does not tip into narcissistic self-inflation, because it comes with taking up responsibility. You take the matter as it stands, and yourself within it as the person who has to carry it. When things go well, a vision can form out of this movement. It is the phase in which entrapment is not dissolved but answered.
The fourth phase is the breakthrough into a new form of experience among people. What breaks through here is not a better story about yourself but a changed perception of others. Only here do you fully perceive others again — among them, with them, alongside them. Before this breakthrough you are caught in your emotional process inside yourself, isolated and individualised; that is not a weakness but the structural condition of the breakthrough.
#Why the Egoic Distortion Is Necessary
The point that is hardest to access is that the self-relation between stage 2 and stage 4 is not a moral defect but the carrying force of the movement. A certain egoic pull within this self-relation is exactly what is necessary for the breakthrough to succeed (Kirchhoff, Lecture on Ethics, 30 April 2026). Whoever stops relating to themselves in the entrapment calms the process but does not end it.
This is where the diagnostic sharpness against two common misreadings sits. The first mistakes the egoic phase for egoism, pushes early for empathy and “letting go,” and thereby interrupts exactly the phase that carries the breakthrough. The second mistakes entrapment for a symptom that could be soothed with cognitive self-soothing — a placating story about one’s own situation. Soothing is possible, but it is not the breakthrough; it replaces stage 3 with an appeasement that stays in the inner room and structurally can no longer reach stage 4.
#Structural Borrowing from Grof, Generalisation by Kirchhoff
The term perinatal matrix comes from the consciousness research of Stanislav Grof (born 1931). In Realms of the Human Unconscious (1975), Grof describes, out of years of LSD therapy research, four Basic Perinatal Matrices oriented to the stages of biological birth: BPM I for intrauterine unity, BPM II for the onset of labour without escape, BPM III for the struggle of birth, BPM IV for the passage through (cf. Grof, 1975).
Gwendolin Kirchhoff takes the form from Grof but not its tie to biological birth. Her reading is more general: the four-stage movement is not the repetition of the original birth event but the shape that unprocessed emotional processes tend to run through. Birth supplies the model because it is the paradigmatic form of a passage: unity, constriction, struggle, breakthrough. The matrix operates wherever an emotional process draws the same track, whether in the ending of a relationship, a professional crisis, or a becoming-aware of one’s own involvement. This generalisation is Kirchhoff’s own move, a structural borrowing that Grof himself did not make.
The Lecture on Ethics of 30 April 2026 also makes clear that several Pre-Births can run at once, one fundamental and several smaller ones. Each of these pre-births is, on the inside, a perinatal matrix seeking its four phases. Whatever remains unprocessed presses into the next container and begins the game again from the start.
#What Does Comfort Have to Do with the First Stage of Birth?
In Gwendolin Kirchhoff’s view, “the real comfort that everyone talks about” is a move back into the first stage of the birth process, amniotic unity, when you feel the second stage, instead of going into the third stage (Kirchhoff, 2026, Wie frei sind wir wirklich?, 16:41–17:21; transl.). She says this in her conversation with Elisa Gratias, which TransitionTV published in October 2026. Gratias had drawn her own conclusion: we should perhaps orient ourselves more towards hero figures again and not towards the word security, which, she believes, carries an extremely great weight in Germany in particular and actually keeps us from setting out on our own hero’s journey (cf. ibid., 13:32–13:53). Kirchhoff replies with a question of her own, what a hero and a hero’s journey actually are, and then answers with the processes of birth: our processes of emotional development, she says, have the same shape as processes of birth (cf. ibid., 13:53–14:12).
The perinatal matrices are Grof’s concept. Grof himself, in Realms of the Human Unconscious, relates four typical experiential patterns from LSD sessions “to consecutive stages of the biological birth process” and stresses of this model of his own that it “should be considered at the present stage of knowledge only as a very useful model, not necessarily implying a causal nexus” (Grof, 1975, ch. “Perinatal Experiences in LSD Sessions”).
Kirchhoff describes the stages of the birth processes she speaks of starting from Stanislav Grof and the perinatal birth matrix (cf. Kirchhoff, 2026, Wie frei sind wir wirklich?, 14:36–14:45). At the beginning, she says, there is a state of amniotic unity: merged with the mother, with wonderful oceanic feelings. With the onset of the birth process, it moves into the second phase, with feelings of victimhood and captivity, a very great narrowness; connectedness turns into a narrow, unpleasant self-relatedness, and the surroundings that were beautiful a moment ago are suddenly a prison. In the third stage comes a still very self-related, titanically powerful impulse to seize one’s own power. In the fourth stage the human being is outside the mother and meets her, and with her another human being for the first time; with that, this self-relatedness ends (cf. ibid., 14:42–15:50).
Right after that, she herself draws the line between what comes from Grof and what comes from her. Into the sentence about this sequence of processes she inserts that this part, by the way, is hers: “I did not get that from Grof” (ibid., 15:49–15:59; transl.). This sequence of birth processes, she says, is the cycle of the rebirths that take place again and again, which people go through during their lifetime (cf. ibid., 15:59–16:10).
A little later in the same answer, she turns to comfort. When you are, as it were, in the first stage, amniotic unity, where you feel that it is peaceful in the uterus, then “one doesn’t want to leave there, of course” (Kirchhoff, 2026, Wie frei sind wir wirklich?, 16:41–16:52; transl.). A great deal of what she sees in processes of addiction, she says, is an attempt to return to this place (cf. ibid., 16:51–16:58). That is not the contact surface and real contact, the look outwards into the world, but, so to speak, a feeling of oneself, a cosy feeling of oneself, which people try to seek out again (cf. ibid., 16:57–17:12). She does not describe a diagnosis or treatment of addiction at this point.
What the step into the third stage means, she says right afterwards: first of all, properly asserting your ego impulse outwards. Every entrepreneur has to do this as a matter of necessity, she says, there is no other way; this going out of oneself, literally towards the other, is essential to entrepreneurial action (cf. ibid., 17:20–17:39). How people experience this differs a great deal: for some it is quite easy, for others harder or not quite so natural (cf. ibid., 17:38–17:49). These people, she says, tend rather towards withdrawal, a tendency that, incidentally, is also justified; she wants to point this out “because that is perhaps often seen differently” (ibid., 17:48–17:55; transl.). It is not merely avoiding contact or social life: she assumes that some people carry a particular memory, a connection in thought with the origin, which they have to protect against a particular kind of harsh influence coming at them from outside; here it is about preserving, in the good sense (cf. ibid., 17:54–18:19). Only, the withdrawal can have both qualities: is it “a preserving of an original connection” or “an avoidance of the necessary confrontation with life” (ibid., 18:19–18:31; transl.)? Part of that confrontation, she says, is expressing one’s autonomy, for instance also standing up for oneself in conflicts and expressing oneself towards the other in an appropriate way (cf. ibid., 18:30–18:42).
#What the Matrix Is Not
The Perinatal Matrix is not a linear course of healing. Models thought of as linear promise that a wound, once worked through, produces someone healed who can be certain of their healing. The matrix says something different: that a given movement has its own geometry, one that must be run through, and that several such movements happen in parallel and repeatedly. The breakthrough in stage 4 is real, but it is not the end of all emotional processes — only the end of this one.
Nor is it an all-purpose therapy metaphor into which any difficult phase can be read after the fact. The four phases carry diagnostic weight only where a sense of attunement was broken, where an entrapment followed that could not be resolved by changing the outer world, where a movement of pride with taking up responsibility set in, and where, at the end, a changed perception of others became reachable. Where one of these moments is missing, the matrix does not describe what is happening.
Finally, it is not Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages-of-grief scheme (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance). The two look related from the outside, but the stages model ends in acceptance, an inner assent to one’s situation. The Perinatal Matrix ends in a breakthrough to others. Acceptance and breakthrough are not the same thing; one is an inner reconciliation, the other a changed form of presence in the world.
#In Accompaniment
In philosophical work, the matrix serves less as a diagnostic label than as orientation about which phase a person is currently in and what temptation belongs to that phase. In stage 2, the most common temptation is the premature outburst, in which the outside world is blamed and the process is undercut. In stage 3, the most common temptation is mistaking pride for self-inflation; taking up responsibility fails to happen, and the pride goes hollow. Stage 4 cannot be produced — it arrives; what can be done is not to redirect the earlier phases into a quick soothing.
This connects the matrix directly to the ethics of closed loops. What an open loop is has, on the inside, the shape of a perinatal matrix that does not reach its end; it gets stuck between stage 2 and stage 3, or it gets ended through appeasement. The birth process is the matrix in its paradigmatic form; pre-birth is the more general condition in which several matrices run at the same time.
#Sources
- Grof, S. (1975). Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research. New York: Viking Press. The original working-out of the four Basic Perinatal Matrices. German edition: Topographie des Unbewussten, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1978.
- Grof, S. (1988). The Adventure of Self-Discovery: Dimensions of Consciousness and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Inner Exploration. Albany: State University of New York Press. German edition: Das Abenteuer der Selbstentdeckung, Munich: Kösel, 1987. Deepening of the perinatal research, especially on the fourth matrix.
- Kirchhoff, G. (2026). Lecture on Ethics (Part 1 + Part 2), 30 April 2026. Generalisation of the four phases to any unprocessed emotional process.
- Kirchhoff, G. (2026). “«Wie frei sind wir wirklich?» Gwendolin Kirchhoff über Fremdbestimmung, Wut & die Macht der Gedanken” (“How free are we really?”) [Video]. Conversation with Elisa Gratias, TransitionTV, YouTube, 10 October 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTW7B162RPs (in German; timestamps 13:32–18:42).
