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A little too much knowledge can be a dangerous thing. We live in a society characterised by growing technical information and awareness of the nature and quality of life before birth; as many a pregnant woman knows, the sheer number of tests and scans and ‘internal visions’ of her womb now available can paralyse and terrify her as well as provide her with much needed information. There is a parallel in our growing awareness of our internal psychic worlds. Pregnancy - the growth and sustenance of two lives beneath one skin - can bring with it a sense of awesome responsibility as well as primitive mystery. Emotions are inevitably turbulent: experienced, paradoxically, as both more raw, on the surface and yet more hidden, deep within us. How much can psychoanalysis help us with these other kinds of ‘internal vision’?
A great deal, according to this sane and helpful book. Drawing on many thousands of hours of interview with pregnant women, her own work as a psychoanalyst, and more academic work on the subject, Joan Raphael-Leff does the difficult thing of catering to two audiences: the pregnant woman with no particular psychoanalytic knowledge and the psychotherapist with no particular knowledge - perhaps - of pregnancy. Certainly, any reader who is or has been pregnant or might be contemplating pregnancy, or who has a partner in this position, will find this book very reassuring: in ‘snippets’ of talk through to fuller case histories, we are presented with the entire spectrum of emotion, joyful and anguished, relating to conception and childbearing. No pregnant woman could finish this book and think herself strange for whatever feelings pregnancy has evoked in her.