Psychodynamic Aspects of Pregnancy and the Puerperal Experience

Abstract

During the life cycle, women will undergo different changes that inevitably alter self perception. The unannounced visit of the menarche that brings along other physical changes such as secondary sex characteristics and the dramatic bodily and emotional changes during pregnancy and menopause continuously forces a reconstruction and adjustment to the sense of self. Such dramatic changes sometimes result in conscious and unconscious conflicts related to present and past maturational periods of development. In this paper, I would like to concentrate in the importance of the puerperal experience from a psychodynamic lens in an attempt to phrase conscious and unconscious events that occur in the shift from pregnancy to child rearing. One of the important aspects of pregnancy that sometimes we women are oblivious is the continuous shift of libido during the entire process. Freud differentiates narcissistic libido from object libido, the first one serving as a fuel to integrate a coherent sense of self that can either be successful during the pre oedipal phase or limited. Once the narcissistic libido is satisfied it can transform into object libido in an attempt to create a relationship with the outside world. It is important to mention that even though one can attempt to hold a close relationship with reality it can be at the service of narcissistic libido using objects in the outside world to solely satisfy narcissistic needs in an autoerotic way. It is important to mention this distinction in order to talk about the shift of libido during pregnancy. First of all, a woman has to use her object libido to get pregnant that is, she has to reach another object to conceive a baby. Pregnancy is a state that could be understood as a very narcissistic one where many women can feel ultimately “complete”. The feeling of having a human being inside her womb can be very powerful, people will take care of her, sexual experience is often limited and an internal journey takes place as libido is taken inwardly in order to preserve a balanced state that reassures the process.