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The point at which analyst, mother, and baby actually meet in the consulting room has a long prehistory. They are familiars. Patient and analyst have been in the room together with a baby in mind before conception, and with the baby alive and often visibly kicking from the inside for several months before it actually arrives in the room. The paradox of a baby who is there and not there, dreamed into life (in the Bionian sense) by analyst and patient while still just a representation in their minds, poses questions that are centrally important in how we conceive of analysis. I am thinking in particular of the role of unconscious communication between analyst and analysand as they jointly prefigure the baby and the astonishing experience of becoming a mother. The analytic dyad has become an analytic triad, and by the time the baby is actually brought into the consulting room as a separate person, he or she already exists as a shared object. The baby's arrival in the consulting room then signals a new phase in the analysis, and that is the transformation of shared maternal reverie into actual roles: mother, baby, and analyst.
As you may have picked up on by now, analysis during pregnancy and the postpartum period is, in my view, a privileged piece in an ongoing analysis; pregnancy and the introduction of the baby into the analysis as both a fantastic construction and a real object constitutes a singular experience for patient and analyst alike. Far from an awkward parameter, from this vantage point babies in the consulting room are a vital aspect of the patient's transition into “mother,” and the analyst's transition to a relationship with both the patient and her child, who, in addition to being a real baby, will always be an object in the analyst's mind in relation to the mother.