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I WAS PLEASED TO WELCOME PARTICIPANTS TO THIS CONFERENCE ON October 8, 2006, which I hope was as informative and exciting to everyone as planning this event with my co-chair Leni Winn and our conference committee was to us.
My interest in having this particular conference began several years ago when I was asked to discuss a paper on the dynamic implications of new family patterns made possible by the newer reproductive technologies. In my discussion I focused on two analytic patients who approached the use of assisted reproductive technologies in their own unique manner and what the analytic process revealed about unconscious feelings about birth and motherhood.
As a child therapist, I began to think more and more about the growing number of children conceived with assisted reproductive technologies and about how they might understand conception, birth, parental union, and sexuality as they grew older. I wondered how these parents might handle their own child's particular birth history and the questions their children might pose.
As our conference committee immersed itself in the subject, we began to realize just how vast it was. What family narratives would emerge about conception, birth, and the atypical or missing parent? What fantasies, both conscious and unconscious, would occupy the minds of these scientifically conceived children?
Once our committee began to explore the subject we soon became aware of dozens of relevant articles in popular newspapers and magazines. The
New York Times published in quick succession a number of articles, including “Growing Up With Mom and Mom,” “Hello, I'm Your Sister,” and “Our Father is Donor Number 150,” as well as articles about surrogacy from the parent's and surrogate's point of view. The paper also published many cartoons from New Yorker magazine.
When I first began working with children and parents almost 40 years ago, I had been trained in traditional psychoanalytic theory and technique with the accompanying