We may speak of the conditions and effects of pregnancy very briefly.
The doubt of pregnancy will be much less frequent than that of
menstruation, for the powerful influence of pregnancy on the psychic
life of woman is well-known, and it is hence the more important to call
in the physician in cases of crimes committed by pregnant women, or in
cases of important testimony to be given by such women. But, indeed, the
frequently obvious remarkable desires, the significant conduct, and the
extraordinary, often cruel, impulses, which influence pregnant women,
and for the appearance of which the physician is to be called in, are
not the only thing. The most difficult and most far-reaching conditions
of pregnancy are the purely psychical ones which manifest themselves in
the sometimes slight, sometimes more obvious alterations in the woman’s
point of view and capacity for producing an event. In themselves they
seem of little importance, but they occasion such a change in the
attitude of an individual toward a happening which she must describe to
the judge, that the change may cause a change in the judgment. I repeat
here also, that it may be theoretically said, “The witness must tell us
facts, and only facts,” but this is not really so. Quite apart from the
fact that the statement of any perception contains a judgment, it
depends also and always on the point of view, and this varies with the
emotional state. If, then, we have never experienced any of the
emotional alteration to which a pregnant woman is subject, we must be
able to interpret it logically in order to hit on the correct thing. We
set aside the altered somatic conditions of the mother, the disturbance
of the conditions of nutrition and circulation; we need clearly to
understand what it means to have assumed care about a developing
creature, to know that a future life is growing up fortunately or
unfortunately, and is capable of bringing joy or sorrow, weal or woe to
its parents. The woman knows that her condition is an endangerment of
her own life, that it brings at least pains, sufferings, and
difficulties (as a rule, over-estimated by the pregnant woman).
Involuntarily she feels, whether she be educated or uneducated, the
secrecy, the elusiveness of the growing life she bears, the life which
is to come out into the world, and to bring its mother’s into jeopardy
thereby. She feels nearer death, and the various tendencies which are
attached to this feeling are determined by the nature and the conditions
of each particular future mother’s sensations. How different may be the
feeling of a poor abandoned bride who is expecting a child, from that of
a young woman who knows that she is to bring into the world the
eagerly-desired heir of name and fortune. Consider the difference
between the feeling of a sickly proletarian, richly blessed with
children, who knows that the new child is an unwelcome superfluity whose
birth may perhaps rob the other helpless children of their mother, with
the feeling of a comfortable, thoroughly healthy woman, who finds no
difference between having three or having four children.
And if these feelings are various, must they not be so intense and so
far-reaching as to influence the attitude of the woman toward some event
she has observed? It may be objected that the subjective attitude of a
witness will never influence a judge, who can easily discover the
objective truth in the one-sided observation of an event. But let us not
deceive ourselves, let us take things as they are. Subjective attitude
may become objective falsehood in spite of the best endeavor of the
witness, and the examiner may fail altogether to distinguish between
what is truth and what poetry. Further, in many instances the witness
must be questioned with regard to the impression the event made on her.
Particularly, if the event can not be described in words.
We must ask whether the witness’s impression was that an attack was
dangerous, a threat serious, a blackmail conceivable, a brawl
intentional, a gesture insulting, an assault premeditated. In these, and
thousands of other cases, we must know the point of view, and are
compelled to draw our deductions from it. And finally, who of us
believes himself to be altogether immune to emotional induction? The
witness describes us the event in definite tones which are echoed to us.
If there are other witnesses the incomplete view may be corrected, but
if there is only one witness, or one whom for some reason we believe
more than others, or if there are several, but equally-trusted
witnesses, the condition, view-point, and “fact,” remain inadequate in
us. Whoever has before him a pregnant woman with her impressions
altered in a thousand ways, may therefore well be “up in the air!”[263]
The older literature which develops an elaborate casuistic concerning
cases in which pregnant women exhibited especial desires, or abnormal
changes in their perceptions and expressions, is in many directions of
considerable importance. We must, however, remember that the old
observations are rarely exact and were always made with less knowledge
than we nowadays possess.