ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns the spectrum of losses that can occur in relation to pregnancy, and elaborates particular ways of supporting these experiences in therapy. These losses include miscarriages, stillbirths, terminations, ectopic or molar pregnancies, and infertility, among others. The chapter explores the ways in which the discovery or shaping of ‘an enabling metaphor’ through imagery and words, to represent experiences of perinatal loss, can be therapeutically useful. The specific meaning of any experience of perinatal loss will be unique to the individual or couple, resting on their subjective sense of what it is or who it is that has been lost, or whether indeed the state of pregnancy was expected, achievable or wanted at all. Early pregnancy losses may feel especially intangible and unreal. Losses later in pregnancy lack the ambiguity or ‘invisibility’ of early losses, but pose a different set of challenges.
