Weismann-Arcache, Catherine
Bad Eggs: How Fertility Problems Affect Parent/Child Identification
- 2013.
64
Working from psychotherapies of infertile women and clinical encounters with children born from medically assisted reproduction, the article proposes an analysis of the impact of such medical techniques on infantile, or even familial, sexual theories. Generational differences can be swept away by this process of realisation of the wish to have a child that becomes visible as medicalised, and the imaginary infant becomes the affair of the entire family, from the grandparents right down to the children already present. An “Oedipal ” young daughter is thus seen asking her mother as to the quality of her “eggs ”: aren’t they poor since the little brother they so want doesn’t come along? From poor egg to bad mother, guilt impinges on family relations and the status of the child is affected by it.