ABSTRACT
Generally speaking, patients talk of their quietly satisfactory life, in the midst of which their sterility has brought scandalously unfair distress. Patients whose sterility is not attributable to their husbands have the same psychic structure as those the author has described supra, thus confirming the accuracy of my reconstructions over a much larger sample. However, the denial of the part played by the mind has disappeared. Such patients tend spontaneously to lay the blame 1 on their immediate circle or on the fact that they had experienced severe traumata. Their own drive-related conflicts remain unacknowledged, however, and the analyst's task will be to encourage awareness of the role the patient herself plays in the ambivalent relationship with the maternal figure. Access to more information at least leads them away from denial, the mind-set that they probably shared with most other infertile women, and towards projection, which lends itself to psychoanalytic work.
