Abstract
Folklore has had more to say than science about the relation between the outcome of a pregnancy and the psychological history of the parturient: our culture interprets a legitimate stillbirth as the sign of a sick marriage. And sceptics may think that accretions of folklore are with us yet in the form of facile psychoanalytic explanations. Helene Deutsch (1945) ably expounds the case: spontaneous abortion differs from induced abortion, she tells us, in that “the inducing agent is the psyche, and the pregnant woman who resorts to the help of this agent does not act from conscious will or in accordance with conscious wishes”.
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Schedule a callMore From: The British journal of psychiatry : the journal of mental science
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