ABSTRACT
For women who are unable to have children, the complicated relationship to creativity becomes darker and more difficult to unravel than for women who are able to conceive and give birth. This chapter explores what the experience of not being able to conceive when someone wish to is like for women, and how devastating this may be to a woman’s sense of her creative potential. It looks at how this blocking of procreativity for women can be turned into a tool for a deeper exploration of the creative self and highlights how the experience of being infertile can either become a dead end or be turned into a new creative understanding. Conceiving or miscarrying, or suffering from blocked tubes, or ovarian failure, or any of the many medically recognized reasons for infertility, presents the patient with reasons for, and realities of, loss.
