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In the period when I was considering how and when to tell my patients I was pregnant, Jo, 35, entered the room and told me she was pregnant. Two weeks later Nina, a 29-year-old patient, told me she was pregnant. I was not surprised, as I had known for some time that both were trying to conceive for the first time in synchrony with us. I stress “us” because the moment the therapist conceives, her spouse, their bedroom, and the fetus growing in her womb all “invade” the therapeutic space. Albeit unwittingly, the impregnated therapist inserts external reality—a reality involving self-disclosure—into the room.
This paper discusses the situation in which both therapist and patient are pregnant simultaneously. Pregnancy forces the emergence of unconscious issues in both the pregnant woman and in the people surrounding her, and in the therapeutic space the fantastic and actual worlds of the two pregnant women—therapist and patient—meet. I describe us-three women during their first pregnancy in the analytic setting-and discuss this unique dynamic, the fantasies, the transference, the counter-transference, and the traps it may set for the therapeutic relationship.1
Though working within a relational framework, I discuss the first case primarily from a self psychology perspective. The second case will be viewed through a Kleinian lens. For both patients discussed, the discovery of the “joint” pregnancy awakened a primal fantasy of preoedipal fusion. This fantasy was made up of the yearning to be accompanied harmoniously and wordlessly, yearning for the empathic, soothing containment by the therapist, alongside the primary symbiotic merging of patient