The developmental phase of pregnancy and motherhood is described and discussed, with particular emphasis on a woman's lifelong task of separation-individuation from her mother. A little girl's wish to have a child in identification with her mother is described. The emotional development and fate of this wish affects and is affected by the vicissitudes of physiological maturation.

First pregnancy affords a young woman two further stages of emotional identification. With the omnipotent life-giving pre-oedipal mother, now based on a biological foundation and also with the foetus, as if she were her own child. Where the mother has been 'good enough', this is a pleasurable developmental phase, in which further maturation and growth of the self may be achieved.