ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the anxieties, conflicts, and psychological defences of parents as they intersect with the developmental tasks and emotional experiences of the children. The parental negotiation of conflicts is associated to three developmental tasks for the child: confronting one's sense of uniqueness; establishing a sense of belonging; forging an identity based on assisted-conception origins. Medical science has sailed ahead to find new ways to help men and women have babies of their own using assisted reproductive technology, leaving in its wake a conundrum for psychoanalytic theoreticians and practitioners. As parents discover psychological strategies to accommodate the presence of a birth other in their children's origins, the children are faced with developmental tasks of their own. Children from assisted-conception families have been assessed as strongly bonded to their parents and secure in their attachment histories. The family romance is predicated on attachment.
