Raphael-Leff offered me a language to describe the “emotional disequilibrium” and the reactivation of “dormant conflicts.”[8] She developed the idea of the “emotional placenta,” where internal images and unconscious historical facts are the nutrients or poisons that influence the “mental gestation” of pregnancy.[9] She normalized the internal distractions which disrupt the “ordinary illusion of unified identity and indivisibility.” Looking back on the anxiety I felt, and the need for reassurance and monitoring, Raphael-Leff’s concept of “internal badness”—the mother’s fear about her own moral
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