Alternatives to the Stork Fatherhood Fantasies in Donor Insemination Families |
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Authors: | Diane Ehrensaft PhD |
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Institution: | 1. The Wright Institute , Berkeley;2. Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California;3. University of California, San Francisco Mt. Zion Medical Center Psychiatric Department |
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Abstract: | Reproductive technology has presented a challenge to families and clinicians alike in making sense of the psychological experience when a child is born with the use of donated sperm or ova. This article addresses one specific aspect of this challenge: father imagos and fantasies for parents, donors, and children in donor insemination families. Pour psychodynamic issues are explored: denial of reality and denial of the Unconscious, the power of die unconscious and the “unthought known,” reversion and resistance to part-object thinking, and paradoxical psychic construction and destruction of the father. In extension of Winnicott's theory dial there is no infant without a mother, the author concludes dial there is no infant without all the parties who make die child and all the parties who raise die child. |
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