The Baby Makers: An In‐Depth Single‐Case Study of Conscious and Unconscious Psychological Reactions to Infertility and ‘Baby‐Making’ Technology

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Recent innovations of interventive technologies of fertilisation (AIH, AID, IVF) have brought in their wake a wave of psychological reactions in the consumers. This new syndrome includes psychological symptoms such as derealisation, depersonalisation, hypochondria, low self‐esteem, guilt and neurotic depression; anxiety reactions; phobic avoidance and obsessional reactions with rumination and compulsive rituals. In addition, considerable interpersonal stress is manifested within the marital/intimate relationships of these patients who strive to ‘make’ a baby, rather than being able to just naturally ‘have’ one. This presentation focuses on unconscious phantasies and dynamic processes underlying such symptomatology, including the emotional effects of being unable to treat intercourse as a twoperson generative event or the body as a creative fertile exponent of the self. Data is drawn from an in‐depth study of 19 patients seen in 1–5 per week psychoanalysis or individual/couple therapy and a single case is presented in depth. Attention is focused on subfertile patients' special transference relationship to the medical specialist ‐ as ‘Baby Maker’.

Femininity and Its Unconscious ‘Shadows’: Gender and Generative Identity in the Age of Biotechnology

“…Clinical examples show that, whereas for the toddler gender only becomes significant retrospectively, it is in the parents’ minds from the start. Long before the birth each partner's daydreams and aspirations reflect sedimented residues from their respective transgenerational subculture, including attitudes to their own sex, and gender injunctions of archaic primary caregivers (Raphael‐Leff 1992, 1993, 2000b, 2002). Although hormonal influences on gender dimorphic structures of the brain are complex, whatever the biochemical moulding of the physiological substrata and foetal ‘raw material’ during gestation, they are psychically primed by maternal emotions and experience, including expectations, unconscious desires and projections 3 .…”

The hunger to fill an empty space An investigation of primordial affects and meaning‐making in the drive to conceive through repeated use of ART

“…Though Linda was able to keep herself balanced by having analysis her failed attempts were in effect a last effort before seeking adoption. In her psychoanalytic work with fertility-challenged females, Raphael-Leff (1991) writes of the 'discovery of internal space (rather than a hole)'. For Charlene and Lucy 'empty space' was a symbolic equation to a kind of death, whereas for Linda it became a point of difference to disassociate from other females as a primary defence.…”