Maternity blues
Maternity blues, also known as baby blues and postpartum blues, is a transient condition that 75-80% of mothers could experience shortly after childbirth with a wide variety of symptoms which generally involve mood lability, tearfulness, and some mild anxiety and depressive symptoms. Baby blues is not postpartum depression, unless it is abnormally severe.After the placenta is delivered, the placental "hormone factory" shuts down causing radical changes in hormone levels, and the woman can suffer symptoms due to withdrawal from the high pregnancy levels of estrogen, progesterone and endorphins. Combined with this shift in hormone levels is the physical, mental and emotional exhaustion - as well as sleep deprivation typical of parenting a newborn. All of these factors contribute to the condition.
Maternal deprivation
Sigmund Freud may have been among the first to stress the potential effect of loss of the mother on the developing child, but his concern was less with the actual experience of maternal care than with the anxiety the child might feel about the loss of the nourishing breast. As little of Freud's theory was based on actual observations of infants, little effort was made to consider the effects of real experiences of loss.
Following Freud's early speculations about infant experience with the mother, Otto Rank suggested a powerful role in personality development for birth trauma. Rank stressed the traumatic experience of birth as a separation from the mother, rather than birth as an uncomfortable physical event. Not long after Rank's introduction of this idea, Ian Suttie, a British physician whose early death limited his influence, suggested that the child's basic need is for mother-love, and his greatest anxiety is that such love will be lost.