ABSTRACT
Almost from the moment when psychoanalysis started to take shape as a therapeutic procedure, the possibility that the womb, the umbilical cord, and intra-uterine life generally, could sometimes be alluded to in patients’ material by means of the appropriate symbols seems to have been taken almost for granted in the writings of most analysts. But the possibility that the placenta, too, could sometimes be alluded to or communicated about by means of objects susceptible of evoking its configuration, structure, and functions does not seem even now to have received the kind of attention accorded to the symbologenicity of, say, the womb or the umbilical cord. Two people, who refer to each other as their “partner”, sit opposite each other at a square table; and two other people, who also refer to each other as “the author's partner”, sit opposite each other at the other sides of the table. Cards are dealt.
