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Linderholm aims to show that analyzing patients' reactions to the analyst's pregnancy allows activation of defenses—i.e., disavowal, denial, reversal, oedipal illusions—that were developed to manage the Oedipus complex. The central challenge for the patient is the confrontation with a triadic relationship, which upsets the more comfortable dyadic relation to the analyst and requires the patient to face his/her separateness from the mother, to accept sexual and generational differences, and to become more reality based.
This analytic work may result in frightening regressions in more vulnerable patients, accompanied by persecutory feelings and fantasies and by intense fears of loss of the maternal object, while more stable patients will be enabled to work through the so-called oedipal illusion. Linderholm presents two case histories, of a man and a woman, to illustrate these analytic gains.
John, a 25-year-old man in three-times-a-week analysis, believed that his parents were neither sexually nor emotionally involved with each other; in fact, he believed that his father had been damaging to his mother and to himself, and he had always had the wish that his parents would divorce and that the “true” couple—John and his mother—would be united. After his mother died when John was sixteen, John began to fantasize that his mother was waiting for him to be united with her in eternity.
John had only had brief sexual encounters, never a lasting relationship. When the author-analyst became pregnant five years into the intensive therapy, John initially denied the changes in the analyst's body. When, seven months into the pregnancy, he could not maintain the denial any longer, he revealed the fantasy that the analyst