Becoming Parents and Overcoming Obstacles: Understanding the Experience of Miscarriage, Premature Births, Infertility, and Postnatal Depression

There are many books that deal with pregnancy and maternity, and a large number of magazines and articles on paediatric nursing that examine these subjects from different points of view. This volume is not a manual and is not intended to explain to future parents what to do and what to avoid. The objective is rather to look at the most significant and problematic aspects of this delicate phase of a woman’s life and that of a couple. It seeks to offer a key to understand the deep significance and complexity of the path to follow to become parents and to face fears linked to the difficulty of procreation, using the tools of observation and psychoanalytic listening.

Reviewing several experiences of clinical work, the authors offer reflections on the personal experiences of women and couples and the difficulties which can be met when the desire for a child is disappointed. A maternity and parenting project can be frustrated by miscarriages and encounter the fear of infertility. How are the problems of sterility or spontaneous abortion experienced? What are the consequences on a psychological and emotional level for parents and within the relationship with the child who is born after these painful experiences? The authors deepen some problematic issues, describing ways of intervening with the important preventive aim of avoiding that the suffering of the parents compromises the emotional development of the child.

The central idea of this work is that it is possible to get over a difficult beginning or relationship and that unresolved problems can be renegotiated at every stage of development. It is possible to recover from a moment of misunderstanding and disharmony within a couple and promote the development of the relationship between mother and child. The authors have tried to show how the bond between them is formed in the absolute uniqueness of every relationship, facing the inevitable human limits which ensure that nothing is perfect. This study is intended above all for parents, but naturally also for psychologists, doctors, gynaecologists, obstetricians and paediatricians, who can consider the complexity of these experiences from a new point of view.