Pregnancy, Assisted Reproduction, and Psychoanalysis. Edited by Renata Viola Vives and Ana Teresa Vale. New York:  Routledge, 2025,  170 pp., $34.39 paperback.

Psychoanalysis has struggled to establish psychoanalytic frames adjacent to the Oedipal triad, a story fundamentally rooted in the sexual union between one man and one woman. Based largely in their clinical work with women, the authors contributing to Pregnancy, Assisted Reproduction, and Psychoanalysis elaborate the possibilities and tensions that emerge when assisted reproductive technology (ART) and the “composite schemata” (p. 9) therein are considered psychoanalytically. Part of the International Psychoanalytic Association's Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis book series on women and psychoanalysis, Pregnancy, Assisted Reproduction, and Psychoanalysis refreshes the psychoanalytic dialogue about ART, including Psychoanalytic Aspects of Reproductive Technology (Mann, 2014), The Business of Being Made (Gentile, 2015), and Donor Conception for Life: Psychoanalytic Reflections on New Ways of Conceiving the Family (Fine, 2015). Editors Renata Viola Vives and Ana Teresa Vale have assembled authors who advance psychoanalytic thinking about family building via ART and maternal subjectivity; these authors mostly do so by applying established psychoanalytic concepts but also they introduce new myths and approaches that might develop psychoanalytic frames.

Over the past 40 years, ART has become mainstream medicine, with an estimated 10 to 13 million infants born as a result of these interventions (Adamson et al., 2025). ART includes all biomedical technologies involving the in vitro handling of human eggs, sperm, or embryos for the purposes of reproduction (Zegers-Hochschild et al., 2017). Commonly

recognized procedures include in vitro fertilization (IVF)—wherein fertilization occurs outside the body, intrauterine insemination—wherein sperm is placed directly i