Every woman is at some point during pregnancy touched by the fear that her baby might not be healthy. While most women manage to push this sad possibility out of their minds as soon as it arises, thinking about it as little as possible and diverting their attention to other things to avoid needless anxiety, for some this thought overlays all their other serene fantasies, becoming relentless, obsessive, uncontrollable, so much so that reassurances from the doctor or the results of specific tests do nothing to ease it.

The intensity of this fear, which is only rarely justified by objective circumstances, depends on how intensely, during childhood, the woman experienced certain specific desires of jealousy and hatred, along with the feelings of guilt tied to them, toward whoever intruded on a gratifying emotional relationship and brought changes to it: for example, a little brother or sister who, by being born, inevitably alters the relationship with the mother.

The more these feelings have been pushed away from consciousness, forgotten, repressed, the more they continue to act within the unconscious of the person who experienced them, and the more they seek out objects that can satisfy them. During pregnancy, the privileged object is the baby on the way, the small intruder who, as already mentioned, however wanted, longed for, and hoped for, changes with its presence in the womb the relationships the mother had established up to that point: with her partner and with any other children.

The mother's ambivalent feelings (usually denied) become concentrated on this baby, and are hard to recognize because the more intense they are at the unconscious level, the more disguised they are by the time they reach consciousness.

One of the typical disguises of this ambivalence is precisely the mother's excessive, unwarranted worry about the state of the baby's health.

It is as if the woman who was, as a child, jealous of a little brother or sister (or another figure capable of stirring these feelings), without realizing it, feared that those desires she once felt, long ago and now forgotten, toward that other figure, whose place her baby has now taken, might come true.