30 Grief and Loss Across the Lifespan
Many women are fascinated by the development of the fetus as it goes
from a recently fertilized egg to a newly born baby (neonate). Many websites
help parents track growth, from the hipster pregnancy site “The Bump” which
tracks embryo and fetus growth by food size (starting out as a poppy seed)
(http://pregnant.thebump.com/pregnancy/pregnancy-tools/articles/
how-big-is-baby.aspx), through Baby Centre which gives details of devel-
opment at each week of gestation (www.babycentre.co.uk). Envisioning the
growing fetus allows women and their partners to promote prenatal bonding
and strengthen attachment, but it may also make the woman more susceptible
to intensified grief if she experiences a loss.Psychological Aspects of Pregnancy
The complex psychology of pregnancy is grounded in the development (or
not) of a relationship with the developing baby, both the physical fetus grow-
ing in the uterus and the image of the baby developing in the mother’s (and
others’) mind(s). Early psychoanalytic and psychodynamic understandings of
the psychology of pregnancy were rooted in the symbolic nature of the fetus.
Pines (1993) comments:Freud, a man of his time, believed that pregnancy and birth gratified
every woman’s basic wish. The gift of a child would partially compen-
sate for the unfulfillable wish for a penis. My analytic experience does
not confirm this view.... I shall discuss the revival in pregnancy of
infantile fantasies about herself as the intrauterine foetus in her moth-
er’s body which are activated by her narcissistic identification with the
foetus now situated inside her body. (p. 97)This psychoanalytic symbolism of the fetus as father’s penis or self-as-
fetus has been viewed with suspicion over time (due to lack of evidence) and
few now accept the notion that pregnancy fulfills women’s allegedly deter-
ministic longings for birth.
To define phases of, and typologize approaches to, pregnancy, Raphael-
Leff (2005) combined psychoanalytic understandings with ideas about the
permeability of body boundaries in pregnancy and the longings for infan-
tile security with the seeming invasion and violence of birth. She defines
three phases of pregnancy. In the first, the mother’s thoughts and emotions are
defined by a kind of “psychological slippage” (2005, p. 62) where the mother
at times feels consumed by the changes of pregnancy and at others forgets
that she is pregnant. She is often focused on emotional nurturance and nurtur-
ance by food during this time. Psychoanalytic understandings of this phase
focus on the reactivation of the mother’s emotional past, particularly the ways
she was mothered (or not) and the fantasies she may have about her growing
pregnancy. Raphael-Leff posits that the second phase of pregnancy happens
after quickening (feeling fetal movements) and modifies the sense of fusion to
realizing that the fetus moves independent of her own movements. Raphael-
Leff views this as a time when women start to imagine the personality of the