Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Unconscious Ambivalence

Ambivalence refers to the mix of feelings of love and hate, mostly unconscious, that one feels toward something or someone. This includes toward one's own future child who, as already mentioned, represents a foreign body for the mother, and whom, over the course of the pregnancy, she comes to consider a part of her own body in order to protect it from her own biological destructive attacks. It is that body on which her attention becomes focused, because over the nine months of waiting it changes and reacts differently than before.

The way a woman experiences her pregnancy reveals the degree of unconscious ambivalence she holds toward her future child. This ambivalence is particularly intense in two types of pregnant women in particular: those who can be described as «falsely present», because they deny their condition in an almost extreme way, and those who instead dramatize and exaggerate the symptoms of a pregnancy they «endure» as though it were an illness.

The first group continues to live as if they were not pregnant, without changing lifestyle habits that are not exactly compatible with pregnancy: they smoke, they tire themselves out excessively even when they could easily avoid it, they make serious dietary mistakes, they engage in sports that are contraindicated and even risky. They are barely involved in what they are experiencing, and give it little room even mentally. They consider it a waste of time to allow themselves fantasies, thoughts, images about the baby and about their life after the birth. Very pragmatically, they think there is no need to prepare for something they will deal with when it arises. Their life goes on as normal «despite» the pregnancy; they realize they are pregnant only when they can no longer ignore the changes in their body, or can no longer do things they used to be able to do.

The others, from the moment they discover they are pregnant, complain of strong, uncontrollable symptoms that come and go throughout the pregnancy and force them into the life of an invalid, limited in their movements, punctuated by a constant succession of check-ups, tests, and examinations. For some, the discomfort and the risks are real, not invented, so it would be difficult to argue that they are the manifestation of a deep conflict expressing itself through the body. Others, though, even in the absence of any symptoms, live their pregnancy «under a glass bell», fearing that any normal activity might harm the baby. An attitude of excessive caution, of unjustified fear «of everything», which conceals the deep desire to protect themselves from their own unrecognized aggression.

It is interesting to note that even the reasons behind the choice of how to give birth reflect the way the pregnancy was experienced. An unmedicalized, natural, self-managed birth, perhaps taking place at home, motivated by the desire to guarantee the baby close, early contact, is requested above all by women in the first group, who show that they do not know (or have forgotten) that the relationship with the baby is built day by day, starting from the very beginning of the pregnancy.

It is as if these women wanted to delegate, to a particular moment such as childbirth, the presence that was missing during the pregnancy.

Medical intervention is often accepted more readily (or even actively sought), as the logical consequence of a pregnancy-as-illness, by women who consider themselves incapable of giving birth spontaneously.