Birth and Rebirth: The Effect of an Analyst's Pregnancy on the Transferences of Three Patients

This paper examines the impact of my pregnancy on the transference of three female patients. Danger of exposure to German measles, epidemic in New York City at that time, made it necessary to tell the patients of my pregnancy almost immediately, before my condition was in any way obvious. Fortunately, and with great relief to me, no one with whom I was working had been exposed to the disease, so there was no need to postpone sessions until the danger period was over. When I made my announcement, I made it clear that I planned to continue my practice after my baby was born, returning to work a month later than usual after my summer vacation. The time of the announcement figures in what follows because when I shared my news with each patient I looked the way I always had, a way I was to continue to look for several more months. Thus the impact of what I said was communicated on a psychological level; there was no discernible physical reality of my pregnancy to which to react.

The three women I present here stood out from the rest of my patients because of the intensity of their responses to the news of my pregnancy. All three lived as if contained in the matrix of the unconscious, in a state of unconscious identity with a mother figure.¹ In each case the introjected figure was negative. The mother archetype constellated the personal identity of each woman as a ‘mother's daughter’.²

Each woman received the news of my pregnancy as if it were a message addressed solely to her own psyche, rather than as news about someone else's