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Pregnancy: The Inside Story

Author(s) : Joan Raphael-Leff

Reviews and Endorsements

'Drawing on many thousands of hours of interviews with pregnant women, this sane and helpful book does the difficult thing of catering to two audiences: the pregnant woman with no particular psychoanalytic knowledge, and the psychotherapist with no particular knowledge - perhaps - of pregnancy. We are presented with the entire spectrum of emotion, joyful and anguished, relating to conception and childbearing. No pregnant woman could finish this book and think herself strange for whatever feelings pregnancy has evoked.

'Pregnancy: The inside Story is particularly concerned with the many women who need to rid themselves of excessive fears and idealized expectations of their imagined baby in order to clear the way for a real relationship with a real child. This can only be done through awareness of the inevitable ambivalence that pregnancy and parenthood will bring. Each section of the book - from its early chapter on "Conceived Fantasies" through discussions of relations with partners, wider family, work and specialized areas like fetal malformation - keeps this perspective clearly in view. It is Raphael-Leff's persuasive argument that there is a greater need for therapeutic work with pregnant women, and that this should be available to a wider socio-economic group than it is at present.'
- Melissa Benn, British Journal of Psychotherapy

'Psychoanalyst and mother Joan Raphael-Leff has made a special study of the states of mind, dreams and emotional fluctuations that pregnancy evokes. She has done much to normalize our understanding of the often disturbing mental meanderings that infuse pregnant women's waking and dreaming states.'
- Susie Orbach in The Guardian