After training in psychosomatic music therapy, a number of women in our therapy group made the decision to bear their children at home. The music therapy team at AMO (Associazione Maeutica Ontico Existenziale) in Bari, Italy, helped this process.
At AMO, we believe the moment of conception to be a very important initial point preceding psychosomatic malaise, because in the moment in which the two cells meet, a positive, healthy intentional element already has to exist. Otherwise, we have in our children the same conditioning, structures, and distortions as the system produced in us. The women whose experience are described here had begun training in music therapy prior to conception.
The idea that the uterus is a sphere of earthly action provokes emotion, but if we don’t realize that this is the case, the child can be exposed to an unfriendly world surrounding the mother, and alienated from the true psychosomatic way to hear, to see, to live. The ecosystem is based on the complete harmony between the environment and life. The natural law of harmony creates in each being a self-organization and a tendency toward evolution of the organism itself and its balance with the ecosystem. Today, unfortunately, much of humanity is going against the stream with respect to this natural harmony. The psychosomatic wisdom (psychosomatic ontosophy) of the organism can feel when the individual is outside of this natural stream, and it is the vehicle for bringing the mother and gestating child back into harmony.
One of the women who was followed during gestation and psychosomatic music therapy training told me that through it a process of harmonization had occurred within her, with her natural intelligence taking her to live within her interior consciousness throughout the birth event. She decided to bear her child at her country home because this new awareness permitted her to consider the birth not as pathological but as a natural event.
With this new awareness, she had to fight with the medical team (midwife, gynecologist), who wanted to adopt hospital-style rules and timing which were not biological, and which we think denaturalize the birth event. During labor, the contractions stopped and the midwife began to instill fear in the woman (for whom this was a first birth). She warned about the extended timing, the slow dilation of the cervix, and the possible resulting danger to the child.
Doctors wanted to induce the birth with oxytocin, a common technique. The woman maintained her presence and didn’t permit this. The gynecologist and midwife acceded to the music therapy team, which freed the woman to proceed naturally.
The woman went into another room to relax in a way that she had learned during the psychosomatic and imagogic music therapy training. She came in direct contact with the psyche-soma of the child, creating a communicative flow of positive energy. This intentionality led in a short time to dilation of the cervix from 2.5 cm to 7 cm. In one hour, the child came into the new world with a simple plunge. Her eyes opened and after the first intonation she smiled in an indefinable way while near the mother’s body to which she was still linked.
During the expulsive stage, the woman had been in a state of deep imagery (aware state) in which she listened to music very sweetly in a field full of flowers (symbol of womanliness), and fresh and limpid water flowed from her vagina. In contrast to this experience, it is evident that the medical-reductionist structure creates negative effects on the birth event and afterward.
We have found in our studies that the first sounds heard imprint on the virgin memory and implant in the body structures of somatic activity. These structures include kinesispraxis and holographic images and create resonant psychosomatic entelechia (an ancient Greek word meaning Mind/Body).
For this reason, we propose that during the birth event, gestation, and labor, original music be created and played for these events. First of all, it includes the natural intentional quality of healthy, intelligent musicians and of all present. This intentional music has the purpose of welcoming that one unique individual into the world, and of recognizing that they have one note, or soul sound, which is theirs. The musicians are thinking, "I am playing your music, as you are." This is an act of connection with the God of creation, Eros, within the wholeness of reality. The world can no longer exist without this new note, this creature who is coming into being with their added note.
This natural intentional quality of those surrounding the gestating baby lays the foundation for the biological soundness of that individual and their personal maturity. Family members take part in the training in psychosomatic and imagogic music therapy.
Psychosomatic music therapy eliminates psychic and psychosomatic malaises, and imagogic music therapy introduces a psychic reality in the parents and other members of the nuclear family of the newborn.
One mother describes: While lying on a bed in a maternity home, I had a harder and more intense experience of imagogic music therapy. I had a cardiograph on my stomach to record the heartbeat of my baby during the birth. Near me there were many nurses speaking, and cries, screams, laments. I decided to close my eyes and to go out completely from that environment and to go into myself. I came back to a music therapy session on a night illuminated by the moon. I heard my baby’s heartbeat in that moment as the music therapist beat on a conga, which was impulsive, then caressing, accelerating, then softening, …then a gallop of inner sensations. All of my body relaxed in that wave, I heard myself in syntony and in harmony with myself and my baby, ready to birth. This was the birth of my first son, which I faced with serenity using the sensations of natural being that I had realized, but not understood in my rational consciousness.
When my second son was born, I felt joy and indescribable emotion because I was in more harmonic congruence with my body thanks to greater experience with the training, which helped me to understand the possibility of giving birth at home in a more natural way. And so it happened again for my third son, who was not born in the hospital. The most beautiful moment was when, during the expulsive phase, the music therapist began to play the piano and it was coincident with my oneiric spirit and intimate emotions. I remember the tenderness and emotion of the first meeting between me and my baby.
Another mother in the training said: I remember that night, during music therapy, when I was able to move using all the space around me, and I understood what complete harmony means, because I felt each part of my body moving well. This happened while I was waiting for my second son, and in this same music therapy I felt pleasure flowing in all my body and in my uterus. The music therapy helped to "fluify" the energy within me, and the result was a decision during the birth that reduced the labor time, because I wanted the contact with my baby. After the birth, it seemed that the baby looked for the pleasurable sound, when the beating on the congas was intense.
The first time that I heard him, another woman said, happened during a music therapy session. He was an embryo (and I know that doctors think it is not possible to hear the movements of the fetus so early). I lived a unique experience in total agreement with my cells, pressed by the notes played by the music therapist. I felt those notes come into me and run and play along my body. In a word, I felt total comfort, a refueling of my being in a deep meeting.
We create a center—a sphere of action— for each soul that is gestating. We contact the consciousness of the child before the hologrammatic matrix is fixed. The child will then remember in his dreams his earlier quiet psychic state. These children are above average in intelligence and psychomotor activity, if we would even consider testing those who have a total experience of being human.
Of course music acts through vibrations, and wave frequency can be more or less "intentional." If we impute the opportunity for intentionality through change, color, timbre, length, intensity, frequency, along with that incommensurable psychic variable of the human behind those changes, then what we have found in clinical reports from many different cultural groups implies the creation of vibrations in cellular tissues with new openings where before there were instead programmed events. The physicist Franco Selleri said: "The fluid entity which F. Palmirotta calls the Principle of Psichosomatic Ontosophy, and considered by him somehow real, might find a physical basis."
In other words, in the genetic program of a psychosomatic intelligence, certain kinds of maieutic (birthing in harmony) music can open up the space of the micro-world of the human being. This has been part of the art of midwifery. In our hypothesis, "focus-of-action spheres" were created where the hologrammatic nuclei reside.
Bohr’s atomic theory says that a point of substance is not a geometric space-time, a finished phenomenon, but rather an indeterminable "quantity" of energy. We intervene on the hologram nucleus through action on the phonic receptors of the embryo’s skin. These phonic receptors are able to receive sound waves and to transmit them to the mind without using specific nerve centers in Corti’s organ. There is a direct correspondence between this body intelligence and brain intelligence.
These embryonic phonic receptors do not disappear completely in the adult. They can function to give the cortex extra information about the state of harmony of the being. Music therapy acts on these organs, which are part of the visceral mind.
This is why it is so important to begin the work during the gestation period. It prevents hologrammatic fixation in the mnemonic cerebral predisposition of the personality. The mind follows from the total psyche and makes for the identity of the whole human organism, and a well-defined hologram ensures a healthier organism.
We have seen that in a pathological environment (with many electronics) there is a negative cardiology in the babies. After looking at this phenomena for fifteen years, we believe that there are genetic changes during gestation and that many diseases such as cancer incubate at this time.
The fetus feels the movement of the walls of the mother’s abdomen as waves. In fact, waves crashing on rocks have a frequency very similar to the respiratory frequency of the mother. Therefore, when mother is calm and relaxed and breathing abdominally, there is a decrease in the movement and cardiac activity of the fetus and a balanced exchange of blood and gases. Violent sounds to the fetus produce violent movements and faster cardiac rhythm.
From our own experience and that of others we met at the VII World Conference of Music Therapy, we recommend that a coordinated team of psychotherapist, music therapist, pediatrician, midwife, gynecologist, and parents can work together to bring about harmonious gestation and birth. Music therapy Maieutics (being born in harmony) can bring together different sciences and deter trauma for newborn children. This will result in more positive imprinting and greater psychic and somatic health.
For the baby, being born into the pleasure of life will mean less trauma and psychosomatic disorder later. A child born this way has a stronger ego, less life distortion and alienation, fewer defenses and schizophrenic reactions. He remains an open book to himself and others, living in transcendental subjectivity in direct relation to the ecosystem.

FRANCESCO PALMIROTTA, psychologist, philosopher, musictherapist, and author of books and articles, manages a residential Center of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatic Music Therapy in Bari and in Borgo Solinio, Italy, and is president of the Ontic-existential Maieutic Association and of the Psychosomatic Ontosophy Association. He has dedicated himself to the psycho-music-therapeutic training of psychologists, doctors, teachers, artists, and managers, etc. He first pointed out the relationship between dreams and Freud’s tumor as a psychosomatic event. He founded a school for children (supported by UNESCO). You may contact him at http://www.ontosophy.org/
Contact: Francesco Palmirotta (ONTOPALM@GMAIL.COM)
The embryonic phonic skin
receptors continue to function in adulthood
as part of the visceral mind.