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Clinical material is presented from the ongoing psychoanalysis of a professional woman in her midthirties who began analysis because her inability to become pregnant and deliver her husband's baby had spun her into a seriously depressed state. She felt failed, “a nothing,” her genitals had let her down, and it was, she felt, her own fault. Her childhood had been replete with trauma: her own prematurity and serious illness at 9 months, multiple prosthetic intrusions, parental mental illness and its consequent overstimulations, multiple sibling deaths, and parental abandonment. There had, however, been significant psychic rescuers, particularly her grandmother who, essentially, adopted her.
Following a presentation of the patient's history (including her prior analysis) the author lets the patient's own words convey her experience in the analysis focusing particularly on her slowly shifting mental images of her own genital outlines. Expression is given to the severe psychic strain engendered by the medical/surgical procedures themselves and by the trauma of the roller-coaster of hope surrounding six in-vitro fertilizations. Adoption's mark is remarkably felt through five generations of this family. Finally a period is presented when the patient's sense of well-being and creative energies was temporally accompanied by the recovery of phantasies relating to the beauty and activity of her own genitals.