Brief Family Therapy in the Course of First Pregnancy: A Clinical Note

PSYCHOANALYTIC FORMULATIONS about the psychology of pregnancy are increasingly concerned with parenthood rather than motherhood alone. This shift has united the family by bringing back the father to mother and child, and the husband to his wife—a return that enriches all who are involved and has useful conceptual and clinical applications. Earlier formulations, unduly influenced by simplistic extensions of biology into psychology, erroneously equated the biological functions of conceiving, carrying, and bearing the child, as well as nourishing him afterward, with motherhood—ignoring the fact that human loving is a social phenomenon and that the child from point of conception onwards must be humanly sponsored by both parents in a family setting if all are to prosper. It had of course been recognized that pregnancy is a high point in woman's specific functioning as a female; what was obscured is that it is also a high point in man's functioning as a male, and for both of them as family members. It is this pregnancy, which makes "parents out of spouses and a family out of a marriage, " that is the concern of this paper.

My interest in the course of pregnancy as a profound, transforming experience for the young adult was aroused in the course of my psychoanalytic work with two professional men whose wives were going through a first pregnancy. For one, there occurred an affirmation of his masculinity, capacity to care and be responsible for his wife and child, aid in differentiating himself from his historical family and in establishing his own. The other man, who had come to analysis because of profound,