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By sharing with us the questions and hypotheses that have arisen during the course of her lengthy experience as a psychoanalyst in private practice and in a hospital unit for medically assisted pregnancies (Service du Pr. Mauvais-Jarvis, at the Necker Hospital in Paris), the author invites us to join her in re-examining sterility and the psychic functioning of sterile women. Her work as a consulting psychoanalyst and therapist has thus led her to pursue the theory of womanhood and femininity to greater depth, to modify the definition of the various forms of sterility, and to review the conditions for their treatment. Since the request for a child does not necessarily correspond to the wish for one, it is found that the ‘cure’ of sterility is not necessarily simply a matter of ‘having a child’, but sometimes involves acknowledging and consciously accepting the rejection of motherhood. This book would be important even if that were all the author had to say.
Assisted-pregnancy techniques meet with seemingly inexplicable ‘resistances of the body’, which thwart any possibility of fertilisation or of carrying a pregnancy to full term. This suggests that a baby is made not only with the body but also with the psyche, especially as the latter—as Sylvie Faure-Pragier shows—also plays an ‘active’ part in preventing a successful pregnancy in cases of sterility with proven medical causes, which ought therefore in principle to be reversible by medical methods alone. She rightly concludes that psychic involvement is in no way precluded in such circumstances: such women have the same foundations of psychic functioning as others and react to the diagnosis of sterility with the same conscious and unconscious feelings as their counterparts deemed to be suffering from ‘psychogenic sterility’.
‘Psychic’ involvement in sterility is always bound to aggravate or give rise to other (physical) dysfunctions, which have their own effects and fuel conflicts. This vicious circle, in which the re