Ravier, Anaïs <br/><br/>
Premature birth and maternal guilt: what possible future for the child? 

 -  2018.<br/>							 
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<br/><br/> Based on clinical situations the authors offer a psychoanalytical analysis of the mother-child bond in premature situations, in the light of Catherine Vanier’s research in particular. Guilt, responding to the bond “whatever it costs”, appears in the paradoxical dimension between subjectivation and desubjectivation. The clinical illustrations show a possible psychopathological evolution in the bond but also with the child through secondary symbiosis mechanisms and moral masochism. The qualitative methodology is essentially based on clinical observation, in the context of psychotherapeutic sessions. Avenues for future development are proposed to adopt this way of bonding and enable these mothers to appropriate such a sense of guilt as a marker of their motherhood. This therapeutic pathway allows for a valorisation of the wounded maternal narcissism capable of leading on to a recognition of the child’s otherness so enabling it to come to life emotionally.