“I don’t want to give birth. I want a child, I like (like) being pregnant, but I DON’T WANT TO GIVE BIRTH.” “I know that during childbirth I will experience unbearable suffering, pain, I will be torn into pieces, no one will care about me, no one will come to me, they will not even give me water, I will die and writhe for days on end, and they’ll only pay attention once so they can yell and quit again...” This fantasy was voiced to me by a modern, healthy, wealthy woman living in Europe (!). And I listened to the description of the birth that took place in the Soviet maternity hospital 30 years ago, and thought what this former baby sitting in front of me experienced then. Not only the mother, the young woman rejoicing in pregnancy and spring, was suddenly twisted, as if coming from outside, by the unbearable pain of the first birth and left to writhe in the “birthing room.” There was also a baby there, who just a few hours ago had been enjoying the serenity of the mother's womb. Monique Bidlowski: The internal object is not always equally good. Some infants may experience chaos during insufficient, irregular, or inadequate care. If in the past the maternal care given to the psychic being in the making was intrusive, the internal object can never be trusted and will even be threatening. Thus, the postpartum traumatic neurosis that befell the mother also befalls the baby. But in a baby it is buried for the time being in the depths of the psyche, far delayed. He will come to life in the first manifestation of the Oedipus complex, when the beginning of separation from the mother becomes a representation of birth trauma. Here it will become overgrown with incestuous representations, and during puberty, when penis envy must be overcome by the desire to have a child of one’s own, it will become an insurmountable barrier to growing up - fear of childbirth. Thus, therapy for fear of childbirth should begin with the treatment of postpartum traumatic neurosis, the target of which is there will be the patient's internal mother object. Here, standard therapy for psychotrauma can be applied according to the scheme “calming” (clarification, normalization, validation of the event) - “response”, as a delayed discharge of accumulated affect through the emotional and motor spheres in combination with repetition phenomena. Since the goal of therapy in this case is not the patient herself, but her internal representation of the mother, it is advisable to use art therapeutic methods in the work to create a transitional object (for example, a mother doll). However, we must not forget about the transgenerational nature of birth trauma. After all, even at the beginning of the twentieth century, the birth of a child represented a real danger to a woman’s life. And a great-great-grandmother who died in childbirth can significantly aggravate the trauma of her mother’s birth in a woman’s psyche. And here therapy should proceed through the restoration of family history, reproducing the life situation of the ancestor - the “ancestor” of the injury and differentiating the patient’s transgenerational experiences from his own.