Maternity Phantasies in Organ Transplantations
Pandoula-Kafchitsas, Georgia
Maternity Phantasies in Organ Transplantations - 2010.
15
Health practitioners working with organ transplantations are familiar with the immense psychological effort that donors and receivers must accomplish to mentalize and “humanize” the experience. The article focuses on a particular type of psychological mechanism, common among these patients: the elaboration of maternity phantasies. Indeed, psychological practice in this domain often reveals phantasies of parenthood, maternity, and pregnancy. In order to further investigate the phenomenon, we have compared our experiences with living kidney donors (within the family) and receivers of liver transplants (postmortem donors) and have chosen four case illustrations. Many donors seem to invest the graft—and/or by analogy the receiver—as their child. Receivers, on the other hand, often perceive the transplant as a pregnancy and the graft as a baby they have been given. In some patients these maternity phantasies give rise to a reactualization of the Oedipus complex: the wish to receive/give a child to a maternal or a paternal figure within a love relation.
Maternity Phantasies in Organ Transplantations - 2010.
15
Health practitioners working with organ transplantations are familiar with the immense psychological effort that donors and receivers must accomplish to mentalize and “humanize” the experience. The article focuses on a particular type of psychological mechanism, common among these patients: the elaboration of maternity phantasies. Indeed, psychological practice in this domain often reveals phantasies of parenthood, maternity, and pregnancy. In order to further investigate the phenomenon, we have compared our experiences with living kidney donors (within the family) and receivers of liver transplants (postmortem donors) and have chosen four case illustrations. Many donors seem to invest the graft—and/or by analogy the receiver—as their child. Receivers, on the other hand, often perceive the transplant as a pregnancy and the graft as a baby they have been given. In some patients these maternity phantasies give rise to a reactualization of the Oedipus complex: the wish to receive/give a child to a maternal or a paternal figure within a love relation.
Réseaux sociaux