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The Dark Side of the Womb -
Pregnancy, Parenting & Persecutory Anxieties
by Joan Raphael-Leff
London: Anna Freud Centre, 2015
Pregnancy takes hospitality to its absolute extreme: two people actually reside in one body, sharing a two-way system. The fetus feeds off the hostess, intimately occupying her innermost body, and making competitive life and death demands on her resources while spewing out waste products for dispersal through her system. She may respond by welcoming the virtually unknown tethered Other moving about inside her for ten lunar months, idealistically or realistically cherishing the baby-to-be, enduring their coexistence, or persecutedly resisting, even aborting the parasitic invader.
Drawing on multidisciplinary sources ─ of psychoanalysis, neonatal research, social psychology, feminist theory and cultural studies ─ this book explores unconscious effects of this bizarre inter-corporeality on–
- a pregnant woman, no longer singular but an indwelling plurality, whose maternal orientation towards her baby foreshadows future face-to-face interaction.
- the expectant partner who despite his own fantasies, wishes, and even hormonal changes, must inevitably assume the position of a mediated ‘third’ in relation to the two-in-one-body.
- siblings who recapitulate their own womb-cohabitation while awaiting the baby who will destabilise their position and alliances in the family.
- the fetus whose developing brain is already sensitive to maternal influences, setting in motion an inextricable interaction between genetic and environmental factors.
- effects of psychoanalytic theorising of women as dark continents, placental nurturers and the womb as paradise lost.
- female bodies in social space - the critical impact of sex stereotyped cultural imagery in domination, abduction, rape, domestic violence, FGM, honour killings, etc.
- effects on the newborn whose intense reliance on mentalisation by carers is suffused with the emotional climates of their infantile pasts.
- hence, emotional disturbance in carers as unprocessed residues are reactivated through ‘contagious arousal’, and contact with the primal substances of baby care.
A model of maternal and paternal ‘orientations’ is elaborated: Facilitator and Regulator mothers; Participator and Renouncer fathers, and Reciprocator or Conflicted parents whose imaginative interpretation of pregnancy and parenting come in various couple permutations.
While relishing the ‘light’ that parenting can bring, this book homes in on under-explored areas of darkness: the trans-generational legacies of procreative loss - abortion, miscarriage, neonatal death and replacement, assisted reproduction and adoption; alien ‘mind invaders and body snatchers; breakdown of defences in perinatal disturbances and extreme states of mind.
Available from December 2014
At Karnac books, 118 Finchley Rd, London NW3 5HT 020 7431 1075 www.karnacbooks.com
290 pages. Introductory Price £17
Last modified: 13 Jun 2017 6:44 AM | Anonymous
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