No matter how the defense manifests itself, there seems to come a point where death first is felt as a terrifying prospect and then is accepted as if it's inevitable which then releases the person from the death-like state and the birth process is actively resumed often with more freedom and success than before. It seems as if the first experience after the awareness, biologically, of life is the biological awareness of death. When this conflict is resolved and the person finally experi-ences the birth itself, a feeling of total relaxation, quiet pleasure, awareness of self in the cosmos on a large scale very often occurs. Whether this condition is a transcendental one or not isn't up for a discussion at this point. To return to our dynamically-oriented description of the structures involved and created by the process of birth, it is clear that at first, survival was a condition of pure pleasure with security, and when the preborn infant is thrust into the birth process the pleasure is withdrawn when conditions are altered to their opposites.
Survival is equated with pleasure initially and forms a survival-pleasure bond.
Survival becomes threatened when birth begins, at which point pleasurable responses are no longer appropriate and the survival-pleasure bond becomes split off and separated into two separate functions. To cope with the threat to survival, the Drive to Function demands more aggressive, self-initiated maneuvers specific to the changing demands of the situation. The preborn must develop or create survival-defense behaviors out of the genetic and physiologic capacities and givens with which he is biologically endowed. Physiological patterns are then cathected in the unmylenated sheath of the nervous system that will now help support the organism's life and these first patterns of biological defense are taken part of the Drive to Function with energy sources that remain patterned on the birth process right into later life with no awareness of the sources until evoked by the somato-psychic forms of therapy. If, unfortunately, the post-natal mothering care is inadequate or hostile, the traumatic experiences of birth will become reinforced and possibly even amplified, setting the base for severe behavior problems and a later psychosis.