The Creative Use of Birth Stories in Psychoanalytic Treatments

Abstract

Birth stories, as told to patients by caregivers, represent an important clinical communication to psychoanalysts in case conceptualization and clinical process. Because birth stories illuminate many of the relational themes between the parent’s unconscious experience of creation/caregiving and the child’s experience of entering into a particular caregiver’s world, these stories often foreshadow the self/other configurations that come about in the family of origin and within the self, as well as later in the treatment experience vis a vis the enactive dimension with the analyst. The clinical utility of the birth story will be illustrated in a clinical example in which the emergent properties of therapeutic action are emphasized. The emergent properties of therapeutic action refer to the experiential process, as opposed to its outcomes, from within a contemporary psychoanalytic praxis.