ABSTRACT
The vast belly, the bounteous breasts, and the swayback posture of pregnancy create an arresting new outline for the common form of a grown woman. It requires hard work to ignore a pregnant woman in the environment. To a layperson, it seems obvious that there will be necessarily a strong link between a girl child's experience of her own pregnant mother and her eventual potential experience of also being pregnant. Yet, for many curious reasons, within the theory of psychoanalysis, this connection was and is treated as far from obvious. I want to concentrate on giving clinical material first before approaching the theoretical tangle. I will, however, explore the highways and byways of this obfuscating thinking in our profession, throughout the book, but especially in Chapter 11. It is as if psychoanalysts took pride in not believing or being somehow seduced by the obvious! Says Freud (1933) “ … a solution of … simplicity … we could suppose … [where] children are following the pointer given them by the sexual preference of their parents … the power of which poets talk so much … but … we have found an answer of quite another sort by means of laborious investigations” (p. 119). Poets might believe such obvious things, but certainly not we wiser analysts! The power of pregnancy and actual birth falls into this category. But because there is little actually written to support my simple claim of a close and vital physically comparative constructed fantasy connection between a mother's body and her daughter's, I believe it therefore important to show evidence directly from analytic or in-depth psychotherapy treatments. I feel almost apologetic about how obvious the associative material is, but this just serves to deepen the mystery about how these materials are not referred to by theory builders, and to what lengths they go to twist out the logic of this fundamental developmental connection.
