ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the effect of conflicts with internal objects on the capacity of women to become pregnant, to keep the pregnancy, and to give birth. Issues surrounding conception, pregnancy and the arrival or the baby are influenced by the mother's unconscious inner world. This psychic inner world is built up through the infancy and childhood by the interplay between wishes, impulses and fantasies and the subjective experience of the reactions of early significant figures. The perception of the real external world is strongly influenced and sometimes totally dominated by this inner world. Real people become identified with the figures in the inner world and then are experienced as unhelpful like the original object. Defensive strategies employed to manage the anxieties in the inner world may result in an unconscious compromise solution that prevents pregnancy, resulting in the psychogenic infertility.
