The Cruel Jailer: A Five-Year-Old’s Fantasies of Incubators and IVF Eggs

This paper describes the nine months of once a week play therapy of a five-year-old boy, Dylan. Dylan was conceived through IVF, born five weeks prematurely and spent the first month of his life in an incubator. His parents had suffered through many IVF miscarriages and a still birth before his birth and had not had time to mourn these losses. Twin siblings were also conceived by IVF and born when Dylan was one and half years old. Because of the profound losses and subsequent fears, there was much anxiety during and after the birth, resulting in hindrances to attachment and the ability to hold and regulate emotions. In his play therapy, Dylan appeared to enact somatic memories of his first month of life in an incubator. He at first enacted these somatic feelings, using string to tie up the therapist and invent cruel punishments for her in an attempt to master and understand what he had gone through. These enactments evolved into fantasies of why he was in the incubator, fantasies about his younger siblings, and ideas about conception and IVF eggs. The play allowed him to express feelings of envy, rage, guilt, sorrow and reparation. The author discusses concerns for parents who have not been able to mourn losses from previous lost pregnancies, the need for greater awareness of the premature infant’s experience in an incubator, and the rapidly-evolving challenges that IVF and other alternative methods of conception create for children as they attempt to comprehend “the birds and the bees.”