ABSTRACT
Analysis of maternities and paternities in the twenty-first century requires people to reflect on meanings of generating life in unconventional ways. For psychoanalysis, these biotechnological challenges come in from its boundaries. Striking differences separate the simplest techniques involving both members of a heterosexual couple who have a problem of infertility and use their own gametes from those that require donation of gametes to heterosexual or homosexual couples or other types of unconventional couples. The developments cannot be dissociated from a transformation in relations between the sexes and important changes in the constitution of the nuclear family that challenge the heterosexual model. The chapter focuses on the role of bodies regarding assisted fertilisation and their eventual effects on representations and construction of subjectivity. It considers complex cases, paradigmatic of new maternities. The chapter explains models and meanings constructed by each culture whose individual processing forms the singularity of each individual.
