We all experienced our birth on a physical and affective level: a pre-verbal experience that can resonate throughout our later lives. This biographical significance of birth was first recognized by psychoanalysts Otto Rank and Gustav Hans Graber in the early 20th century. Otto Rank's "The Trauma of Birth" gained worldwide interest, but the topic proved to be particularly controversial and fell out of the mainstream of psychoanalytic tradition. Not least due to empirical evidence from stress research and psychotraumatology, the experiential significance of birth is now widely accepted. In light of this, the author in this volume compiles the various lines of research on the experience of birth and its significance for psychotherapeutic practice. He illustrates that numerous symptoms, as seen in psychotherapies, can be traced back to this experience.