Spilt Milk: Perinatal Loss and Breakdown (The Psychoanalytic Ideas Series) - Softcover

Raphael-Leff, Joan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0953710513 ISBN 13: 9780953710515

Publisher: Routledge, 2000

Synopsis

A collection of lectures by eminent members of the British Psycho-analytical Society. Includes papers on the experience of having a baby, pregnancy and the internal world, pregnancy after stillbirth or neonatal death, and therapeutic intervention for post-partum disturbance.

About this title

About the Author

Raphael-Leff, Joan

From the Back Cover

'Spilt Milk': Perinatal Loss & Breakdown addressses the the complex feelings aroused by pregnancy and childbirth. The perinatal period is one of heightened arousal and potential disturbance, and breakdown can occur when child-bearing becomes a time of unforeseen complications and loss. Contributors address the experiences of abortion, miscarriage, stillbirth and neonatal death, and the difficulties of mourning an unknown baby. They focus also on the inner and outer worlds of new parents at an especially provocative time. As the editor writes in her Introduction, 'although early parenthood is often depicted as blissful, it is also a time of heightened sensitivity, when exposure to the baby's raw emotions revives issues from caregivers' own infancies ... rendering the emotional past alive in the present'. Papers explore parental defences against the pain of disturbing experiences involving loss, either current or long past, and against primitive anxieties of engulfment, depletion, fragmentation and disintegration provoked by identification with the newborn baby. A key issue is working therapeutically with the baby-within-the-carer, with all the disturbance of its competing infantile feelings. The analytic relationship provides the much-needed holding and containment, and in this context especially the important opportunity for the internalisation of new identifications and patterns of relationship.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0953710513
• ISBN 13: 9780953710515
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 100