ABSTRACT
This introduction provides an overview on the subsequent chapters of the book. The book examines a question that has already aroused the interest of an increasing number of psychoanalysts and psychotherapists: whether patients in analysis or therapy can sometimes be said to form a kind of transference that not only operates at prenatal level but can also lend itself to interpretation just like any other level of transference. The term “foetal transference” was, used for the first time by Symington. The words themselves invite the question of whether the countertransference, too, can sometimes be seen to operate at pre/or perinatal level—that is, whether the therapist can either experience, or even act out in his or her countertransference, the reactions that the patient’s mother may have gone through—and may later sometimes be revealed as having actually gone through—during her pregnancy or labour.
