Tamara Landau

Afterword – Dr. Liliana Kaplan

A commentary by a pioneer in placenta research

Tamara Landau contacted me through a mutual friend and asked me to examine her research and psychoanalytic intuitions presented in this book, so that I could compare them with data from reproductive biology, the specialization to which I have devoted three decades of my life working in my laboratory of biology of Human reproduction.

The task did not seem an easy one to me as I willingly acknowledge I am prejudiced against so many questionable texts on the subject. But reading Tamara Landau’s book, I must say, has been a source of pleasure. Her theory of the symbolic feedback of prenatal unconscious memory, based on her observations in a psychoanalytic clinic, strikes me not only as very interesting, but also in line with the biological data of the stages of gestation. As a matter of fact, Tamara Landau analyzed the dreams, slips of the tongue and drawings of her bulimic-anorexic patients during their pregnancy: this enabled her to elaborate her theory of the “inverted tree”, which describes the symbolic inversion of the generations reactivated during pregnancy in these patients. The originality of her thinking also allowed her to detect traces of the inverted tree in extremely ancient mythologies.

In short, this book, which is closer to Freud’s writing than so many of the all-too precious and multifarious works available on this topic, was a pleasant surprise for me.

Doctor Liliana Kaplan
Former Researcher at Paris I.N.S.E.R.M, Doctor of medicine, biology and holder of a MAS in philosophy. Author, in 1984, of the French scientific patent on the very precocious prenatal diagnosis through placenta biopsy (No. 84 10408).