Parenting, Origins and Medically Assisted Procreation. Psychoanalytic aspects.

Advances in life sciences and biotechnology to treat infertility has allowed to help more and more patients to become parents. Fertility Clinics and Gametes Banks are common nowadays and can be found in different countries in Europe. The progress in fertility treatment has also opened new areas and modes of parenting. MAP is a “clinic of extremes”, of the body and the psyche, including a vast range of affects and fantasies which may unfold in different ways. Counter-transferentially, the analyst is intensively immersed. As psychoanalysts, we cannot ignore the impact of biology, of technology, of the collective psyche, of the socio-political context, ethical prescriptions, and the legal constraints that weigh on individual psychological processes which underlie all medically assisted procreation process.

The authors develop two clinical themes: the different types of conceptions with gamete donation (anonymous and non-anonymous), and the route for the single woman who wishes to engage herself in a procreation treatment. These situations raise and put to work questions of otherness, the third party, filiations, temporalities, psychic spaces to be circumscribed and specified and last but not least parental conscious and unconscious transmission to the child.