The Analyst's Pregnancy: Transference and Countertransference Reactions

In my preliminary attempts to understand the impact of an analyst's pregnancy on the conduct of a psychoanalysis, I encountered what first appeared to be an apparent lack of impact. This was evident in the sparsity of the literature. It is interesting to note that a topic such as this, with perhaps wide ranging implications for work with patients, had received little attention until the last fifteen years. When Ruth Lax (1969) wrote her article, “Some Considerations About Transference and Countertransference Manifestations Evoked by the Analyst's Pregnancy,” she could find only two articles pertaining to this topic. Why should this have been the case?

A second example of an apparent lack of interest comes from a personal experience. In the clinic at which I had been working, five of the therapists were either pregnant or had just had babies. In addition, two of the male therapists were hoping that their wives would become pregnant. The subject of the pregnant therapist was relevant to much of the work going on there, and I was asked to present some of the information I had gathered on the topic. The clinic had among its population of therapists ten males. Of these ten therapists, only one was present at my talk; and, significantly enough, his wife was a practicing midwife. The director of the clinic, a male psychiatrist (who also was not present), many years ago had written a paper on womb envy. In the four and one half years that I had worked at the clinic, I had never known it to happen that only one male therapist would be present