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After many years struggling with a dilemma around whether she felt herself able to manage a relationship and a baby, Caroline became pregnant. She and her partner were delighted, and her experience of pregnancy was calm and relatively uncomplicated. She decided to take a break from treatment and wondered, indeed, whether she would want to return after the baby was born. A few days after the expected date of arrival I got a telephone call from Caroline, she wanted to see if I had some time to talk: Josh had been born a few days previously, the delivery was straightforward. Mother and baby were well. But Caroline had suddenly felt swamped by powerful depressive feelings three days after the birth and was frightened that she was going to sink into a post-puerperal depression, not unknown in her family history. Anecdotal experience and research evidence told me that here was a case of the “three-day blues”: hormones shifting, the milk “coming in”. After some conversations with her, Caroline let me know that all was going well, and she had recovered her equilibrium and her and her partner’s pleasure in the new baby. A not uncommon tale, but one that led me to consider the phenomenology of the famous “three-day blues”. When a mother is delivered of a baby, she is, at the same time, not delivered of the other fantasized baby. Phenomenologically, this is particularly represented in the recognition of the reality of the gender of the baby. Whether or not she has known throughout the pregnancy
what the gender is of the baby she is expecting, I think it remains the case that by the third day she knows she has in her arms a boy, not the girl she might have had; or a girl, not the boy she might have had. The psychic impact of this is powerful for some women and resonates with the mother’s own story of her acquisition of identity, her relationship to her own bisexuality. Freud (1937c) noted in one of his last papers “every human being is bisexual” (p. 244).
The very experience