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Title: The Oldest and Most Burning Question
The author focuses on aspects of Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) which alter primal facts of life that have existed as long as humanity. Scientific innovations undo the once delimiting parameters – of monosexuality, two-person genesis, generational differences (and even menopause). Given these rapid transformations and their unintended consequences, the author argues that psychoanalytic psychotherapy is a necessary pre-conceptual and perinatal aid for many would-be parents, who struggle with complex, unprecedented emotional experiences that accompany ART. In turn, parental ambiguities, their traumatic memories and forgetting, denial, and repression, are absorbed by offspring conceived by ART, and essential to our understanding of mental representations of subsequent generations.
The full text is available in German.