A Review of the Psychoanalytic Literature on Abortion

I cannot neglect this opportunity of expressing for once my astonishment that human beings can go through such great and important moments of their erotic life without noticing them much, sometimes even, indeed, without having the faintest suspicion of their existence, or else, having become aware of those moments, deceive themselves so thoroughly in their judgment of them.… One is also amazed at the unexpected results that may follow an artificial abortion, the killing of an unborn child, which had been decided upon without remorse and without hesitation.

One in five women in the United States has an abortion during her lifetime (Butler, 1996). There are one and a half million abortions in the United States each year, making it the most common surgical procedure in the United States (Butler, 1996; Miller, 1996). Considering this frequency, the minimal discussion of abortion in the psychoanalytic literature is noteworthy.

The psychiatric and psychological nosological or epidemiological literature has generally reported that, except for women in high risk groups, abortion has few, if any, negative psychological sequelae (Butler, 1996). Yet a considerable volume of case studies suggests the opposite, and some authors describe a post-abortion syndrome as a variant of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (Speckhard and Rue, 1993). Rarely, if ever, is there a reference in this literature to psychoanalytic perspectives. A similar discrepancy has been noted in the literature on children of Holocaust survivors: clinical reports, in this case by psychoanalytically oriented authors, demonstrate psychopathology in the children of survivors, whereas empirical studies find no significant difference between these children and others whose parents had not been similarly traumatized (Solkoff, 1992; ). In that literature, psychoanalytic theory continues to provide the major theoretical