Absolute Hospitality and the Imagined Baby

ABSTRACT

The author argues that pregnancy is the most radical coexistence of self and other. The meaning each woman ascribes to this bizarre two-in-one-body experience is a function of her psycho-history, drawing on unconscious sources and conscious experience imbibed and elaborated since her babyhood. In pregnancy, conceptualization thrives on ambiguity. Due to our own emotional complexity, depictions of others tend to be elaborated as multi-dimensional constructs. But when static fantasies of doom or desire predominate, anxiety reduces an expectant mother’s anticipation to fixed ideas, which permeate the intense experiences of gestation. Such rigid mental representations prime the birth-giving experience, and unless mitigated, spill over into caregiving, saturating the earliest relations with preconceptions that form and inform the infant’s inner reality. For most carers, mixed feelings prevail, especially under close and exhaustive conditions of hospitality, when the intimate beloved can rapidly turn into a persecutory stranger. However, such healthy maternal ambivalence cannot be freely admitted in societies where cultural imagery idealizes maternity. A variety of coping mechanisms then operate to deal with “forbidden” feelings, increasing the primary carer’s tendency to polarize by distorting, denying, splitting off and/or projecting some aspects of the new demanding reality in order to maintain a commendable sense of self or the baby. It is argued that perinatal disturbance arises in the inconsistency between the glamorized portrayal of pregnancy or baby-care, and its grueling aspects. As defenses fail, depression (self-blame) or persecutory disorders (blaming others) ensue when guilty disenchantment or grievance threaten to destabilize one’s own self-image of parenthood. Emotional distress may also indicate inadmissible disappointment at reality’s failure to replicate the imaginary baby. If this image persists in the parent’s mind, the new infant is inescapably burdened by pressure to live up to an unconsciously grasped but incomprehensible (enigmatic) double.

KEYWORDS:

• Perinatal hospitality
• healthy maternal ambivalence
• perinatal disturbance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Known as the “fetal origins hypothesis” studies find clear links between uterine conditions and future health. For instance, adaptation to a limited supply of nutrients at critical prenatal developmental periods can permanently alter structure and metabolism, which may form the origins of illness in later life. The lower the birth weight, the higher the risk for coronary heart disease, hypertension, stroke, type-2 diabetes, osteoporosis, schizophrenia and more fragile “homeostatic” settings in adulthood (Barker et al. 2009).

2. Over the past 55 years, understanding is extracted from consultative work to perinatal projects in over forty countries and clinical supervision of therapists, counselors, primary health carers, lay practitioners, midwives and home visitors, and workshops with expectant/parents.

3. In fact, brain scans on first-time mothers before and after pregnancy find significant dynamic changes related to structural and functional neural plasticity (see Kim 2016). Empirical research shows that most mothers-to-be undergo subtle preparatory changes as pregnancy progresses (for instance, greater proficiency at recognizing emotions on the faces of others, especially responses to dangerous conditions such as fear, disgust, and anger). This gradual transformation supports the idea of psychological plasticity in adaptation to the bizarre corporeal self-other nature of maternity which primes the mother–infant relationship.

4. Co-parenting partners of troubled mothers are found to have an elevated incidence of disturbance (Paulson and Bazemore 2010). The WHO has found that the prevalence of common perinatal mental disorders in low-income countries is threefold (due to lack of access to healthcare, unplanned pregnancy, and poor practical, emotional and social support for mothers, especially from intimate partners, with low levels of education, and high levels of financial insecurity, and familial and community violence (Fisher et al. 2012)). The same is true of areas of extreme social adversity in high-income societies where rates of depression range between 32% and 47% during pregnancy and between 16% and 35% during the postnatal period (Tsai and Tomlinson 2012).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joan Raphael-Leff

Joan Raphael-Leff, Ph.D., is both an academic and clinician, Psychoanalyst and Transcultural Psychologist. Since qualification in 1976, she specialised in treating individuals and couples with reproductive and early parenting issues, and acts as consultant/supervisor/teacher for perinatal projects worldwide. Publications include 12 books and 150 single authored papers, many translated. In 1998 she founded COWAP, the IPA committee on Women & Psycho-analysis. Currently, is Leader of the UCL/Anna Freud Centre Academic Faculty for Psycho-analytic Research. Previously, Professor of Psychoanalysis at the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex and Head of University College London (UCL) MSc degree in Psychoanalytic Developmental Psychology.