For many pregnant women, the bond with their own mother can take on strong overtones during pregnancy. As a woman is about to become a mother herself, she is led, more or less consciously, to measure herself against the image of «mother» she carries inside her, an image that may correspond only partly to the real one. This image depends not only on how the mother actually met her daughter's desires, but also on how intense those desires were. In the times when they arose with particular intensity, no maternal response may have been enough to fully satisfy them. So the relationship may have ended up frustrating, not because the mother was insufficiently available, but because of her genuine inability to meet excessive demands.
Sometimes, hearing how a person talks about their own mother can be misleading and lead to a mistaken assessment of the relationship: often it is above all the conflictual, aggressive aspects that come through, aspects that can conceal the presence and intensity of love.
The alternation between «negative» and «positive» maternal traits often reappears in the way a pregnant woman talks, as she relives with particular intensity, during this period, all the ambivalent facets of her relationship with her mother. In particular, during pregnancy, the conflict that arose in childhood (roughly between the ages of 3 and 5), during the oedipal period, comes back into focus, a time when the daughter wants to take her mother's place and stand in for her in her role as the father's wife. During this childhood period, the mother is experienced as an intruder against whom to direct one's own aggression, a rival whom one would, on one hand, like to destroy and eliminate, but who, on the other hand, is also a strong source of affection and a model to imitate. The deep bond with the maternal figure is marked by ambivalence, that is, by the simultaneous presence of opposite feelings toward the same person.
The ambivalence experienced in childhood toward one's own mother is proportional to the ambivalence that colors, more or less intensely, the feelings the pregnant woman has for her own child, regardless of her conscious will.
Often, though, the feelings of aggression and rejection toward the baby do not reach the woman's consciousness, because they cause intense anguish, and so are isolated and repressed: the pregnant woman avoids recognizing them or acknowledging them, and behaves as if they did not exist. In any case, the tension underlying this «emotional complexity» needs some way to be released, which can, for instance, take the form of physical or psychological symptoms. While they make the pregnancy less serene, these symptoms are not only necessary but essential in cases where the inner tensions are so strong that they could otherwise jeopardize its outcome.
What is the psyche?
The psyche can be defined as «that part of a person that does not derive from the body and that cannot be explained by the laws of biology». While it was once considered equivalent to consciousness, since Freud (1856-1939) it has come to extend beyond the conscious mind to include the processes of the unconscious as well, that is, that part of the mind that escapes the awareness of the mind itself.
The unconscious is a repressed memory of experiences of satisfaction and frustration recorded during intrauterine and childhood life. It consists, in other words, of desires and traces of remote experiences (accessible to consciousness only in distorted form) that act as the engine driving us, sometimes in directions quite different from what we believe, rationally, to be true. The unconscious manifests itself through repetition, dreams, and symptoms, but also through forgetting, slips of the tongue, and unintentional acts that fulfill deep desires we are unaware of.
It is important to keep the existence of the unconscious in mind, in order to understand that often, even where pregnancy is concerned, certain situations tied to deep desires are foreign to the woman's consciousness, and she lives through them without realizing it, and therefore without being able to influence them through her own will. Offering a «different» reading of situations that would otherwise be incomprehensible, and often painful, can help a woman accept them with greater serenity, or lead her to change them through suitable interventions aimed at achieving this, such as psychoanalysis or psychotherapy.