Gersant, Michèle
About the placenta: Ethnological, historical and psychoanalytical perspectives
- 2020.
6
The author here is a midwife and marriage and family counsellor. She focuses on studying the placental object and analyses it in several forms, looking at it from the ethnological, historical and psychoanalytical perspectives. She lists the various representations it assumes and describes the rites to which it is subjected. She studies and analyses the reasons that led current caregivers to quickly hide it from sight and encourages the reader to think of it differently. Her reflections lead her to reinstate its symbolic dimension as a dual to the newborn child and grant it the importance it merits.