Infertility: Identifications and disruptions with the maternal object

For many women, infertility is the first major crisis of adulthood. Maternal identification provides a template for parenting and infertility disrupts the opportunity to recapitulate this relationship or make reparation for early failures. Supportive work is often useful to address the manifest level of infertility issues; however, psychoanalytic work can broaden the treatment to encompass the unconscious meaning of the wished for child and the psychological effects of the lack of success. In this paper, the theme of disruption of maternal object identification, and its effect on self representation is addressed. Two case examples where pregnancy and infertility remained a dominant theme throughout the treatment are presented. In each of these cases, infertility became a medium for exploration of their internal objects.