Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

by Lucy Jones

I found the work of the psychoanalyst and social psychologist Joan Raphael-Leff in a book called Pregnancy: The Inside Story, which was published in 1993. She explains pregnancy as a state of being between two worlds: “On a deep unconscious level, the pregnant woman hovers between internal and external worlds, at a crossroads of past, present and future; self and other.” 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 shortcomings and whether the baby would be able to withstand them—was illuminating.[10]