ABSTRACT
The emotions and ideas evoked by pregnancy might be normal grist for the analytic mill were it not for the fact that the therapist's pregnancy itself constitutes such an intrusion into the analytic setting as it has been established. In this chapter, the author expands on the nature of the disruption to the normal analytic setting and consider its effect on the analytic process itself. He provides experience of working through two pregnancies, two and a half years apart, some twenty years ago towards the end of my training and as a newly-qualified psychoanalytic psychotherapist. The author indicates some of the themes and issues relating to her pregnancy, with brief clinical examples rather than an extensive report. The misgivings and disbelief of the first trimester of pregnancy usually give way to a new sense, in the second trimester, that the baby within is "real" and viable.
