ABSTRACT
It is the obstetrics literature, not the psychoanalytic, that addresses fears and satisfactions about childbirth. 1 Interesting obstetrical reports about women's emotional experience, as well as the physical, seem to come more frequently from the Nordic countries, with their well-developed socialized caretaking medicine. For example, a searching enquiry from Helsinki, Finland, was published on the Internet, an academic dissertation by Terhi Saisto titled “Obstetric, Psychosocial, and Pain-Related Background, and Treatment of Fear of Childbirth” (2001). Saisto comments knowingly: “Fear of childbirth is not an isolated problem but associated with the woman's personal characteristics and close relationships. Women's personal characteristics, mainly general anxiety, low self-esteem, and depression, contributed most significantly to the prediction of pregnancy-related anxiety and severe fear of childbirth.” The results of her research showed that “pregnancy-related anxiety and fear of childbirth were predictable not only from the women's personality traits, but also from psychosocial factors such as dissatisfaction with their partnership and lack of support” (p. 50). The author also says that parous women with fear of delivery may suffer from Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or intrusive stress reaction, which both have recently been described after painful childbirth and emergency CS (Wijma, et al. 1997, Ryding, et al. 1998c). She points out that so little thought has gone into the topic that “Little is known about the background factors leading to fear of natural vaginal delivery, and a request for CS.” These comments are of direct interest to any psychoanalytic inquiry. The latter, in particular, resonates with my claim that attention to these matters is actively avoided or suppressed. We analysts have access to far more details about mental life than any other health-care professionals, so we above all can afford to be interested in our female patients’ experiences of fears and satisfactions. For example, psychotherapists might be able to shed light on this current phenomenon of the frequency of Cesarean section in the United States, and we could help sort out the puzzle about whether it is the women's preference or the doctors’ that Cesarean section is so often chosen over natural birth.
