On the paradox of pregnancy: "Novel and heightened sensory experience comes to the fore, challenging her complacent embodiment. As long as two beings continue to occupy one body, personal boundaries shift and blur across her ballooning shape-changing exterior and the unfamiliarity of her over-stimulated, increasingly constricted interior. She is no longer herself. Inner privacy is violated by a constant presence. Her private sexual activity is revealed unbidden. Ordinary social interchange alters as teenaged boys smirk and even strangers feel free to touch her laden belly. Furthermore, for many months, the pregnant woman not only“contains” but serves as both hostess and hostage to one who extracts nourishment from her internal resources and spews waste products or disposal through her own bodily system."
On the importance of perinatal ambivalence: "Likewise, awareness of her own healthy ambivalence toward the inordinate demands of hospitality, which leads her to fluctuate between feelings of acceptance and enjoyment, annoyance at disrupted sleep and sharing her body with a baby, who, however lovingly anticipated, disconcertingly squirms, kicks and hiccups inside her."
[I read and blog this at 37+6 weeks pregnant, 2:30am.]
Raphael-Leff, J. (2020). Absolute Hospitality and the Imagined Baby. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 73(1), 230–239. https://doi.org/10.1080/00797308.2020.1690906
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