ABSTRACT
Numbers of women and men choose not to have children, and the age at first birth for women has increased. Professional women, especially, often our patients and colleagues, do not have children until their mid- thirties, forties, and even, occasionally, their early fifties. With these patients, people have both had to face the painful recognition that they would not bear children when they now very much want to and to recognize also how this not having children was due to their own conflicts and the behaviour that these conflicts generated. The woman has deadened both self and object, in this case, the object including her own uterus. The affects and fantasies that have gone into disrupting this bodily and relational generativity seem to go to the earliest mother–child relation and to a core of deadening and deadened anger that has been turned both outward and against the self and the reproductive and sexual body.
