Awaiting the therapist's Baby: A Guide for Expectant Parent-practitioners (A Volume in the Personality and Clinical Psychology Series)

380 Pages·2002·21.13 MB·English

by  April E. Fallon, Virginia Brabender

AWAITING THE
THERAPIST'S BABY
A Guide for Expectant Parent-Practitioners
Irving B. Weiner
Advisory Editor
AWAITING THE
THERAPIST'S BABY
A Guide for Expectant Parent-Practitioners
April E. Fallen
7776 Fielding Graduate Institute
and
The Medical College of Pennsylvania
Virginia M. Brabender
Widener University
LAWRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOCIATES, PUBLISHERS
2003 Mahwah, New Jersey London
Copyright © 2003 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form, by photostat, microform, retrieval system, or any other
means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers
10 Industrial Avenue
Mahwah, NJ 07430
Cover design by Kathryn Houghtaling Lacey
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Awaiting the therapist's baby : a guide for expectant parent-practitioners / April E.
Fallen, Virginia M. Brabender.
p. cm. — (The LEA series in personality and clinical psychology)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8058-2493-6
1. Women psychotherapists. 2. Pregnant women. I. Brabender, Virginia. II. Title.
III . Series.
RC440.82 .F355 2003
616.89'14'082—dc21 2002032521
CIP
Books published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates are printed on acid-free paper,
and their bindings are chosen for strength and durability.
Printed in the United States of America
1 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
We dedicate this book to the mothers in our lives
who have mentored us in our transition to motherhood.
April pays tribute to Elizabeth Fallon,
Elizabeth Englemann Goers, and Marie Englemann.
Virginia honors Elizabeth Brabender, Virginia Ruhling,
Mary Scalise, Lillian Weisfeld, and Frances Whitmore.
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
Foreword ix
Judith Schoenholtz-Read
Acknowledgments xi
1 Introduction 1
2 Patient Reactions to Therapists' Pregnancy: Dimensions
of Transference 16
3 Therapists' Reactions Within the Therapeutic Setting:
Dimensions of Countertransference 43
4 The Developmental Journey From Pregnancy to
Motherhood: Psychological and Physiological Changes
and the Management of Their Impact on Treatment 92
5 The Developmental Status of the Patient 151
6 The Diagnostic Status of the Patient 184
7 The Therapeutic Modalities 217
vii
viii CONTENTS
8 Relationships With Peers and Supervisors 244
9 The Adoptive Parent 267
10 When the Therapist's Wife Is Pregnant:
Entrance Into Fatherhood 287
11 Conclusions and Future Directions 322
References 341
Author Index 35
Subject Index 361
Foreword
Getting pregnant, being pregnant and giving birth is a major life passage
for any mother so it is surprising that many aspects of the experience have
been silenced in our literature. Where do we go to find the stories of preg-
nancy? What literature has captured the passionate, sometimes frighten-
ing fantasies as well as the profound physiological changes that occur
in pregnant women? Where are the stories of spouses, lovers, children,
parents, and colleagues all affected by the many and diverse changes tak-
ing place in the expectant mother? Carolyn Heilbrun (1988) in Writing a
Woman's Life lamented the literary void. She explained that women's bi-
ographies have been incomplete and that vital female experiences have
been omitted. The price our culture pays for the silencing of women's inti-
mate bodily experiences is costly in psychological terms.
What matters is that lives do not serve as models; only stories do that. And it is a
hard thing to make up stories to live by. We can only retell and live by the sto-
ries we have read or heard. We live our lives through texts. They may be read,
or chanted, or experienced electronically, or come to us, like the murmurings of
our mothers, telling us what conventions demand. Whatever, their form or me-
dium, these stories have formed us all; they are what we must use to make new
fictions, new narratives. (Heilbrun, 1988, p. 37)
The meanings and interpretations of female bodily experiences during
pregnancy are uniquely individual yet women tend to seek to understand
them through the external messages powerfully embedded in our culture.
ix