Pregnancy

The author draws on thousands of hours of listening to mothers to explore various aspects of 'the inside story'. She answers such questions What meanings does childbearing have in the internal world? How does a pregnant woman live with two people under her skin? What is the expectant partner's experience? Which dreams, fears and fantasies proliferate around pregnancy and birth?

Joan Raphael-Leff leads the UCL/Anna Freud Centre academic faculty for psychoanalytic research. Previously, she was head of University College London’s MSc in Psychoanalytic Developmental Psychology, and professor of psychoanalysis at the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex. For 35 years she has specialized in emotional issues of reproduction and early parenting, with more than 100 single-author peer-reviewed publications, and nine books, including: Psychological Processes of Child-bearing; Pregnancy: the Inside Story; Parent–Infant Psychodynamics: Wild Things, Mirrors and Ghosts; Spilt Milk: Perinatal Loss and Breakdown; Ethics of Psycho-analysis. Founder and first international chair of COWAP (IPA’s Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis) in 1998, she provides training for practitioners working with teenage parents, and is consultant to perinatal and women’s projects in many high and low income countries.