Spilt Milk: Perinatal Loss and Breakdown (Psychoanalytic Ideas)
(2000)
Edited by Joan Raphael-Leff
Publisher: London: Routledge.
'Spilt Milk': Perinatal Loss & Breakdown addressses 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.
This is the second title in a series of limited-edition, low-cost books, devised and launched by The Institute of Psychoanalysis in London. The books feature recent lectures on important psychoanalytic themes as part of the London Public Lecture series, organized by the British Psychoanalytic Society. These collections have been chosen and edited by British psychoanalysts, members of the British Psychoanalytic Society and experts in the areas of psychoanalytic work concerned. This collection consists of six articles by Dana Birkstead-Breen, Elizabeth Bradley, Alessandra Piontelli, Stanford Bourne and Emanuel Lewis, Joan Raphael-Leff and Richard Lucas. The articles provide a developmental view of the experience of having a baby, covering: pregnancy and the internal world; the impact of technology on pregnancy; risk management after stillbirth; intervention for post-partum disturbance; and puerperal breakdown.
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