The Role of the Placenta in Neurosis and Normality

I have been writing about gestational life for decades but I have never discussed the baby’s home, the placenta, in detail. We never seem to consider the placenta an organ but this is what it is,  secreting hormones and other chemicals just like other key organs. It is affected by trauma and reacts to it in its own peculiar way. Its home is against the wall of the uterus. It merges with the mother yet remains apart. It therefore seems foreign to the mother and yet is not rejected by her. The placenta is a kind of monitoring device mediating the all communications between fetus and mother. There is a constant “conversation” taking place between those two, mostly by chemical means. The first order of business for the placental is defense; keeping out all sorts of pathogens and harmful chemicals.  Thus it is both a communicator and a barrier preventing and allowing cells to migrate between one another. And indeed, fetal cells have been found in the mother for a long time after birth.



The placenta manufactures products that help keep the pregnancy ongoing and normal. Although it would be logical to expect a 50-50 split between the contributions of each parent to the placenta, such is not the case. Rather there seems to be a battle for whose contribution will dominate. So it is the father’s genes that help provide the growth of the placenta even while it is the mother’s genes that help impede its growth. When her genes do not do their job there will be runaway growth and serious disease. Runaway growth is often associated with cancer. But with no paternal genes here isn’t any growth at all. (Please see. Life’s Vital Link. By Y.W Loke, for a through discussion of this subject.).

While being carried about sixty percent of all nutrients are dedicated to the growth of the fetal brain; that is why slight changes in oxygen during fetal development can affect the evolution of the fetal brain.,  not the case with other mammals. The first step towards the formation of the placenta is “Taken soon after the egg is fertilized by the sperm.” (Loke). The placenta is a living organ that can go on living even if the embryo dies. It has a primitive nervous system that can sense danger and mount defenses including such neuro-chemicals as serotonin to fight invasion. It is from the embryo that one can harvest stem cells. And those cells are capable of healing diseases and extending life. But think of these implications for the placenta: it is the paternal genes that promote growth, and the maternal ones that impede it. If there is a faulty pregnancy those tendencies get disrupted, and we can get a too large placenta or a too small one. And changes in the biochemistry can alter how the genes will or will not be expressed.  If there is a trauma to the mother it is possible that part of the methyl group will be recruited to alter gene expression in the baby. The methyl can attach itself to the outside of the gene to either switch on or off the gene— epigenetics.


I have discussed the critical period in terms of when the baby must be hugged and loved; this is also the case for implantation. There is a period of receptivity for the implantation which is about one week after fertilization. That critical period is crucial if we want to make sure that the baby is properly attached to the mother. So the notion of critical period must apply to the placenta as well because it is, as I have stated, a living independent organ. The embryo must behave and abide by the rules of the critical period. It is no different from other aspects of evolution. Trying to be loved at the age of six years is a bit later for it to matter greatly.   Luckily, outside the critical window implantation will not happen.  Meanwhile, events in the womb are crucial for the later development of the baby. The placenta lives in an environment and that environment must be salubrious for the child’s health.  So we must not just focus on the placenta/uterus after so many weeks of gestation; rather, we need to be aware of it from the very start.


At birth something lives and something dies; the placenta is gone and the baby is alive in this world where the blood is then diverted from the placenta to the lungs, and a viable life begins.  The baby has left its home, so to speak, and strikes out alone, on its own without help from the mother to live. The conversation between fetus and mother has ended, and takes on a new role. There are now words and above all, emotions; the need to be hugged and caressed. And the relationship goes on from there.


And then serious evolution begins; the immune system and its natural killer cells proliferate and help keep cancer away. And those cells reflect how placental life has gone, as well. Has it prepared us properly for the menace and dangers in life? NK cells which protect us again serious disease are quite primitive and exist before many of the other cells have developed in the immune system. When those are inadequate at the start then we are not well prepared for the onslaught of trauma later on. We need to ask a new question: not only how has gestation gone? But also how has implantation and life at the beginning of placental life gone?  This is even before we can see a viable being.


Natural Killer cells are found in all mammals. And we do enhance those cells after one year of therapy. It may be because we go back with the patient into the beginnings of life. If those cells are deficient at the start of therapy they are not deficient after a year of therapy. We need to refine our research to make note of first line primals in those patients who greatly increased their NK cells. There seems to be enhanced NK development around the time of the critical period of the placental receptivity. The uterus has the greatest stockpile of NK cells, and it may be that early trauma impedes its proliferation making us more susceptible to disease later on.

The placenta is a powerhouse of chemistry, and adds to the hormones normally produced elsewhere such as the pituitary, and this includes the stress hormone., cortisol. Our “home” environment is not what we are used to thinking about when it comes to womb-life.  But a bad home life creates serious problems later on; and this home is far more important than later home life in childhood in terms of what diseases will befall us. Serious traumas, a mother depressed or anxious at the start can change the stress hormone output in the placenta and eventually that may translate to such diseases as Alzheimer's, decades later. We have to wonder why there is such a great amount of cortisol produced, and the key reason I think is to combat the intrusion of trauma.

In some ways the placenta acts like the relationship between the thalamus and the cortex, allowing certain input and rejecting others. The placenta is pretty much like a switchboard careful to monitor the amount and quality of nutrients and rejecting certain pathogens. It tries to keep a healthy environment for the fetus at all times. It keeps out infections in the mother and most often it blocks cancer developing cells. It is strange that each of them, mother and child exchange cells so the part of each is part of the other.

Finally, what is exciting about the placental cells is that they are also life-saving stem cells. They are saying, “I will become anything you want so long as you love me and take care of me. If you keep me healthy you will be rewarded with cells that can help give life and attack disease. And how does one do that? No smoking while pregnant. Live in a non-polluted milieu. And eat properly for both of you.


Every minute 20% of mother’s blood supply flows through the placenta (see Y.W. Loke). Here the oxygen exchange is enhanced, but if something goes on badly very early in pregnancy it can lead to many afflictions, immediate (pre-eclampsia, miscarriage), and later, perhaps cancer.  These are the deeply hidden sources of disease, and until we understand that we can never fully resolve pain and neurosis.  If we only deal with the obvious we can never understand the non-obvious. And it is the unobvious that produces so much damage; that is why it is not obvious.   The shattering pain pushes the gating system into action.  Those gates remain closed for a lifetime.   And with the closed gates goes the memory which makes it all a mystery and very, very non-obvious.  But pre-eclampsia is often considered a placental disease.  It is a precursor of high blood pressure afflictions.  Now imagine specialists treating this disease without any reference to early life; that is why one has to take blood pressure medication for life.  The causes are not known.

If there is an immune system incompatibility between parents there can be the beginnings of a miscarriage, or later on, immune problems and allergies.  The placenta tells us by its symptoms that something went terribly wrong in placental life. It shouts out its life and its trauma, a mother drinking or smoking.  These symptoms are the autobiography of our beginnings, and they foretell of diseases to come.  Let us never neglect them.  Psychotherapy must learn to address this mysterious world if we are to find answers to so many problems.