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After attending years of discussion groups on artificial reproduction techiques (ART) at the American Psychoanalytic Association’s bi-annual meetings, a similar one at the IPA (2015) and participating in an ART presentation in Bilbao, Spain (2015), I realize the ever-changing implications of ART and analysis are internationally relevant. Demography forecasts the increase in infertile women from five million in 1995 to six million in 2020 (Stephens, 1996). Those numbers predict a dramatic rise in women seeking ART, many of whom will come into analytic therapy. In an effort to remain current and connected to the ever-changing medical innovations and to our analysands, these articles represent only a moment in time. The 2008 issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry opened many doors to this subject. That so many new options exist, the analyst is called on to understand and offer help in areas that are unfamiliar and often precipitate countertransference difficulties.
Sharon Zalusky Blum wrote one of the first psychoanalytic papers on ART (Zalusky, 2000). In her current contribution (this issue), “No Turning Back,” she details our changing society, our changing analytic ideas, and her ever-changing self. She examines the broader implication biotechnology has on our field of psychoanalysis. She, like many analysts and therapists, recognizes her own changing attitude. In Blum’s original paper, she believed that the impact of the new technologies and their relationship to fantasies have not been fully integrated. She likened a donated egg to an alien organ. Nowadays, the world of the analyst and patient may be very different. This issue of articles aims to help the analyst remain steady in helping overwhelmed patients negotiate a deeply emotional process and maintain perspective, and cautions that the shared social reality between analyst and analysand may go unexamined.
Renee Siegel reviews the current gynecological procedures employing ART and the emerging literature on the follow-