Unconscious Transmissions Between Patient and Pregnant Analyst

Abstract

When two people in close proximity both experience processes of heightened perceptiveness, the likelihood of unconscious communication increases. In analysis, coconstructed emotional configurations of transference–countertransference further contribute to the interplay. The analyst's pregnancy offers a window on bilateral processes of unconscious communication, often obscured in psychoanalytic theorizing. The unconscious dialogue has three constituents: a) effects of the analyst's pregnancy on the patient (her liminality, disclosure of sexuality, two-in-one numinosity, and archaic, life-bearing, death-dealing powers); b) effects of pregnancy in the therapist herself (heightened intuition, slippage, and introspective preoccupation with “procreative mysteries,” anxieties of formation, containment-preservation, transformation and separation). c) the impact of patients on the pregnant analyst (her susceptibility to, and defensive def lection of, intrusive projections into her inner world). Focusing on generic anxieties broadens the discussion beyond synchronization of the intra/interpsychic dynamics of a particular two some.