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

Abstract

This research aims to investigate the drive to conceive through repeated use of Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) in relation to the affective and meaning-making processes related to this drive, through the use of the participants' memories of mother and being mothered, the choices they made regarding sex, intimacy and non-uterine activity in early adulthood and their fantasies of how a child would change their lives. Though prepared for an MSc dissertation it is a pilot empirical study using interpretative phenomenological analysis and applications of Jungian analytic and psychoanalytical theory. The collected data consists of three semi-structured interviews analysed through recurrent themes and amplification. Developmental and archetypal thinking has been suggested as a means of understanding. The results are strongly suggestive of two main themes across the interviews and further research is underway. The first theme is the importance of the relationship to mother and the quality of the mothering received in contributing to a woman's availability to become a mother at a time in her life when she is most fertile. The second theme of the pilot suggested that the crisis of infertility is a mask for another crisis of identity that also had links to the personal mother. At the core of these issues with mother there is an absence of father and an intra-psychic couple. Repeated infertility treatment becomes a transformative process necessitating repetition until something new can be created.