Child and Adolescent Analysis: What Baby
Book ticketsOrganised by:
British Psychoanalytical Society (incorporating the Institute of Psychoanalysis)
Description
Child and Adolescent Analysis – Under 3’s | 27th February
‘What baby?’: Pregnancy and creative disavowal
This talk explores the psychic impact of pregnancy, introducing the concept of creative disavowal to understand how some women unconsciously negotiate overwhelming bodily experiences. It examines the interweaving of multiple factors, including the pregnant person’s early childhood experiences, internal objects, current relationships and environment, as well as the physiological transformations of pregnancy.
Drawing on two clinical case studies, this talk discusses women who, prior to entering analysis, experienced severe and prolonged physical difficulties during their first pregnancies or post-partum periods, leading to claustrophobic panic and profound anxieties of disintegration. Once in analysis, both women went on to have a second child. Their subsequent pregnancies were characterised by a complex disavowal of the unborn baby, conceptualised here as creative disavowal.
Clinically, this talk considers the analytic work involved in giving meaning to somatic experiences, containing emerging hostile and primitive unconscious phantasies, and creating space for the psychological—or imagined—baby to be born and held, thereby extending psychoanalytic models of pregnancy, embodiment, and early parenthood.
Alejandra Perez is a London-psychoanalyst and Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, working in private practice. She trained and worked as a Psychoanalytic Parent-Infant Psychotherapist at the Early Years Service at Anna Freud from 2016 to 2022 and continues this work in private practice.
