Joan Raphael-Leff, Absolute Hospitality and the Imagined Baby

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

Helen Redman, In Utero (1964)

From http://birthingthecrone.com/pages/utero/index.html

Womb space, coloured pencil drawing

Rita Bullwinkel, Headshot

Moving musing on being a mother to a daughter:

Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City

On shame and friendship:

 On dependency, partnership and loss:

More photographs of Picasso by Robert Capa

Robert Capa, Pablo Picasso and Françoise Gilot (1948)

"At first all the viewer registers is the lit-from-within triumph of Gilot's smile; and right behind it Picasso's amiable servitude. But keep looking and you'll see in Gilot's eyes that she believes her power to be everlasting; and then you'll see the cold wordiness behind Picasso's play-acting deference. It hits you full force: Gilot is Anne Boleyn in her moment of glory and Picasso the appetite-driven king before he's had his fill of her. 

The photograph is so richly alive, it is actually shocking: it both excites and appals. Most days I don't even glance in its direction, but on the days that I do take it in, it never fails to arouse pain and pleasure, in equal parts. It's the equal parts that's the problem."

- Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City, 2015