ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how extensively Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) can be modified and still be considered a modification rather than a new technique. It explores the use of specific tools that the patient and analyst co-conceive during patient's tenuous relationship with Laura's efforts to conceive a baby and see them through to fruition. Laura is a 38-year-old physician, born and raised in the Midwest. Stress is contraindicated when a woman is hoping to conceive. Laura has a sense of that. The chapter brings the idea of using EMDR to the table as part of an approach to help reduce Laura's stress. The progression of third session is perhaps the narrative of a screen memory, in which many of the current losses of potential pregnancies represent the repeated loss of being mothered well enough throughout Laura's childhood. This modified EMDR session attains the anxiety reduction of an unnamed trauma, trauma of repeated loss and lack of witnessing.
