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In 2012 Rosemary Balsam gave a plenary address, “(Re)membering the Female Body in Psychoanalysis: Childbirth,” at the American Psychoanalytic Association meetings (Balsam 2013). Presented the same year in which her pathbreaking book, Women's Bodies in Psychoanalysis, appeared, that plenary extended the more contemporary clinical and theoretical investigations of Women's Bodies back into the history of psychoanalysis. Balsam excavated the writings of early women analysts like Margarete Hilferding, showing how from the earliest time in our history thinking about childbirth and the pregnant, fertile body, whether clinical or theoretical, was silenced. Indeed, as Balsam radically suggested, thinking about such matters can be found in the theories of several figures who were marginalized or altogether excluded: Hilferding herself; Jung, with his great mother; Rank, with the trauma of birth. Fertile, childbearing women and childbirth, apparently, had no place in the psychosexual theory! Balsam's historical investigations were followed by clinical vignettes so moving that by the time she had finished many women in the audience were crying.
Balsam is one of a very few analytic writers (we cannot know directly about analysts in their consulting rooms) to have noticed childbirth and its surround. As she remarks, we find an entire volume on motherhood—perhaps too Freudian/sexist for her liking or ours—in the second volume of Deutsch's Psychology of Women (1945). We recall, from an earlier period (for Deutsch, perhaps a cautionary warning about overt dissidence), Horney's challenging affirmation of maternality (1926): “At this point, I, as