ABSTRACT
The pregnant analyst is challenged to integrate a number of variables in a relatively short time. Profound feelings and reactions may be evoked in herself and in her patients. The analyst faces the practical demands imposed on her by the pregnancy, the intrapsychic changes of her own developmental crisis, the intrusion of a “real event” into the analysis, and the presence of the fetus as a third person in the analytic treatment room. The patient is often forced to experience and defend against the perception of the pregnant analyst as maternal caretaking, abandoning, or sexual object, with dramatic associations and reenactments of the early attachment process, of primitive separation fears, of sibling rivalry, and of oedipal exclusion. For some patients, the therapist who was previously experienced as neutral and safe object for sexual fantasies may during her pregnancy be viewed as taboo sexual object, dangerously real in her feminine sexuality.
