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“If I have a baby, I'll die.” This statement was made by a thirty-two year old woman, Mrs. Sally B, toward the end of her first year of analysis. Sally, who had been trying unsuccessfully to conceive a child, had come into treatment because of anxiety and depression suffered as a result of conflict between her wish to have a child and her fear of doing so.
Several months later she tearfully made another statement, “I might kill it. If I have a baby to care for, I might kill it.” This was said after Sally had conceived and spontaneously aborted a pregnancy.
With these and many similar statements, including dreams and fantasies that she reported, Sally B. expressed a fear common to every woman who seeks motherhood … the fear that her aggressive impulses would overwhelm her libidinal wish for a child and destroy both the child and herself. Although such fears are part of the normal psychological experience of pregnancy (Deutsch, 1945, Bibring, 1950, Spotnitz, 1969), the “normally mature” woman is able to integrate her aggressive and libidinal impulses in a manner that promotes the development of the pregnancy; in Sally B's case an early toxic relationship with her own mother had produced maladaptive patterns for dealing with her aggressive impulses. It is hypothesized that these patterns internalized her aggression in an unconscious resistance to having a child and were likewise expressed in the resistances she brought to analytic treatment.
Sally was the youngest of four girls born to a New England Italian Catholic family. A fifth girl, born when Sally was 3 years