You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Pregnancy is a life event of major importance and one that cannot be postponed indefinitely. As Freud said, “anatomy is destiny,” for the biological clock cannot be stopped even for professional women. The period of intense career building coincides with a woman's peak biological childbearing years. And so we must learn all we can on how to cope with the particular issues of the pregnant analyst.
In the past five years, I have had two pregnant analytic candidates as patients, three as supervisees, and have known three pregnant colleagues. Regretting that I did not report on my own experience, I have encouraged the pregnant therapists I know personally to do so and continue to hope that one or more of them will surprise me. For there is still a paucity of literature on the subject, even though the pregnancy of the analyst has profound implications for the therapeutic relationship. It is physically obvious, cannot be realistically ignored, and inevitably leads to interruption or even termination of treatment. In addition, for some analysts and patients, it may be the first time that they confront the therapist as a real person, depending of course on the therapist's school of thought.
When I became pregnant 27 years ago, I did a search of the literature on the subject of the pregnant therapist, primarily because I was looking for guidelines for myself. The search did not take very long because all that had been published was one article by Hannett in 1949, and that one was not very helpful as it dealt with patients' reactions to her miscarriage. Hannett made the important observation that each of her patients reacted in the transference to her miscarriage according to his or her particular psychopathology.