You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The psychoanalytic literature refers to an analyst’s pregnancy as a clinical dilemma, not a personal crisis. Yet pregnancy and childbirth expose the analyst not only to a biological storm inside of herself, but also to hostility from patients and even from loved ones. The provocative outline of the pregnant analyst’s body tugs at the vestiges of the earliest memories, a time during which one’s mother was both cherished and reviled. As such, pregnant analysts, and indeed all pregnant women, contend with others’ long-held unconscious paranoid representations of the mother. The pregnant analyst of color confronts intensified conflictual racial dynamics. In this article, I present my lived experience as the daughter of Hindu Indian immigrants who gave birth to two children during psychoanalytic training. My brown pregnant and postpartum body inhabited a dissociated realm for both white and brown folk, eliciting impulsive and aggressive reactions. For some Americans, my unavoidably large and erotically marked body evoked fears of being overtaken by a foreigner whom they wanted to colonize. To some immigrants, I stimulated biting feelings about a formidable and ravenously longed-for brown mother whose loss was unbearable. I suggest that only via mourning the loss of our first home, the womb, and subsequent losses triggering loneliness and alienation can we move beyond the rampant scapegoating of pregnant women and people of color in our chaotic society.