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This discussion piece by Laura Kleinerman ties together a collection of articles of a special issue of the Journal of Infant, Child & Adolescent Psychotherapy, “Mothers and fathers of invention: developing new family narratives”. The articles in this special issue represent a significant leap, or perhaps the current status of a steady development, in psychoanalytic thinking about what Kleinerman refers to as “children and families of invention”, but which I shall refer to here as “assisted conception families”. The term “assisted conception family” refers to those that have been created using assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) as opposed to being spontaneously conceived, such as with in vitro fertilisation (IVF), donated sperm or eggs, or a surrogate mother. This range of reproductive options is used routinely by same-sex couples as well as heterosexual couples. Authors in this special issue write about a range of ideas in relation to such families, including gay parenting, lesbian parenting, and the psychological experience of children conceived through ARTs. In the introduction to this special issue, Phyllis Beren (2007) acknowledges that “… many of our theories about child development, gender, parent-child relations, and family structure are also defined by the culture of earlier generations”. Indeed, it is true that psychoanalytic disciplines have in the past tended to pathologise non-traditional family relationships and structures, especially those between, or headed by, same-sex partners. The collection of authors in this special issue however, whose ideas are drawn together by Kleinerman in her discussion, begin to rebuke these notions and offer a more contemporary psychoanalytic perspective or way of thinking about these families.
I should declare, here, that my own background is in developmental and family psychology, and that what struck me in reading this discussion article are the parallels between the contemporary ideas considered within it, and r