Epilogue

James Joyce wrote to Nora, his fiance, “O that I could nestle in your womb like a child born of your flesh and blood, be fed by your blood, sleep in the warm secret gloom of your body!” after the death of his mother, when his loneliness was at a peak. To Joyce, who witnessed 11 of his mother's pregnancies, the physical development of the fetus in the womb, and development of the child in the family, parallel the soul's development, or what we call self development. Just as the fetus develops in the womb and the infant within the family, the soul, or self, develops within the mind of each man. Thus for Joyce this concept of pregnancy was the model of the epigenesis of the soul that became the basis of his creative work as he traced his own soul's development in his autobiographic novels.

Despite its rich potential, the topic of pregnancy has been largely neglected in psychoanalytic writings. We hope that the preceding essays will mitigate this neglect and that the essays will stimulate further research and elaboration. The study of pregnancy offers us the opportunity to understand the earliest development of object relations, of confronting the instinctual conflicts associated with the creation of new life, and of observing the dynamic interplay of psyche and soma in problems of conception, gestation, and delivery. By understanding the psychological meaning of pregnancy, we can begin to understand, in greater detail than ever before, the fantasies associated with the creation as well as the destruction of life. The intensive psychoanalytic exploration of pregnancy, with our male as well as our female analysands, will