ABSTRACT
We have all emerged from within it. For both sexes the female reproductive body is therefore a receptacle of unconscious fantasy and creative primary identifications as well as a “cauldron” of magical powers and malevolent projections. For today’s women with access to efficient contraception and safe abortion, “generative identity” incorporates a sense of power; holding unconscious representations in check by matter-of-fact control over the life-forming female body and its preventive or death-dealing forces. However, when they contemplate creating a baby of their own, fantasies of that archaic cauldron intrude, taking on a personal material form and centripetal anxieties concerning the female body interior. That is to say the maternal intrauterine space, and its awesome “feminine mysteries” of conception, implantation, formation and sustenance; and destruction.
This chapter focuses on representations of the numinous “cauldron” fore-grounded with the desire for offspring. Infertility constitutes a severe blow, especially in a culture that cultivates an illusion of reproductive control. Diagnosis disrupts lifelong axioms of Russian-doll type lineage, with dire social consequences in some societies. Fertility 94treatment further unleashes unconscious oedipal anxieties as tacit belief in personal generative power, and body-management is dismantled to be relocated in potent fertility experts and their bizarre technology. Verbatim clinical material demonstrates shifting imagery with the crisis in self-perception, as failure to conceive naturally undermines long established facts of life, transferring the primal scene from bedroom to laboratory.
