ABSTRACT
A psychical analogy exists wherein psychological selfhood is more merged with that of the (m)other than at any other point in the lifespan. Both physically and psychically, during gestation, undifferentiation has yet to give way to the degree of differentiation that hallmarks postnatal life, yet both separateness and merger are present from the beginning. In contrast to experimental investigation of the gestational process, psychoanalytic thinking has been inclined to divorce intrauterine experience from its portrayal of the roots of psychic life. The richness of his imagery captures the metaphoric, experiential, and homogeneous nature of the unborn infant’s psychic surround, and also of the nature of asymmetry. Memories of fetal life that can be retrieved are often vague, obscure, and coded in ways that are no longer dominant in adult psychic life. Unconscious aspects of the analytic relationship constitute a psychic umbilicus through which imprints of this early relatedness can be discerned.
