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When a woman conceives a child, she both comes to the end of a wait for fulfillment of important wishes and to the beginning of new mental trends and reactions. I have noticed that among the reactions women have to pregnancy is one that many of them share: they keep their pregnancies secret for some time. Deutsch (1945) in her studies observed this same fact, noting, “Woman does not betray her secret.” Deutsch ascribed this secrecy both to the woman's fear of losing the “freshness” of her experience and to her unconsciousness of her “deepest psychic experiences.” Deutsch also reported that those women most dependent on their mothers were most likely to conceal the fact of their pregnancies from their mothers. Kestenberg (1976), too, observes that pregnant women in psychoanalysis refer rather infrequently to their pregnancies.
I have studied two patients who delayed revealing that they were pregnant. They kept their secrets because their secrecy afforded them certain pleasures and allayed certain fears. Their experiences can help us understand motives in addition to those Deutsch observed for women's secrecy about pregnancy.
The first of my patients is a 29-year-old mother of three who sought treatment for symptoms of an intermittent neurotic depression. She began one treatment hour by expressing amazement at an event which had occurred earlier that day. She had driven to her obstetrician's office to keep her appointment for an examination by him. She had learned two weeks earlier that she was pregnant. On arriving at the obstetrician's office, she found that the receptionist had no record