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Psychological barriers to fertility
Reproductive medicine has made such progress in recent years that one might logically expect a drop in sterility. But this is not the case, according to recent demographic studies by INED, the primary sterility rate (4%) has not changed for a century. Even more surprisingly, specialists in LDCs increasingly find themselves confronted with “enigmatic sterility”. Currently, 1 in 4 cases of infertility remains unexplained. The much desired child does not come and yet the infertility checks, temperature curves, examinations and analyzes are completely normal. Very embarrassed, the doctors then make the diagnosis of “psychogenic sterility”, indicating that the obstacle which prevents the woman from becoming a mother is not an organic problem but a psychological one. According to doctors, psychological factors play a role in almost all infertility. However, there are sterilities of purely psychological origin which manifest themselves by variable symptoms, such as ovulation disorder.
Feel ready to have a baby
Which psychological factors are powerful enough to induce a blockage of motherhood? Before, the threat of the child was omnipresent, we had to play with fire, the child came from the unknown, the sexual desire of a man and a woman and the inevitable risk that we had taken by doing love. Now women who want a child must stop taking the pill or have an IUD removed. With contraception, the responsibility has shifted to the woman’s side. What seemed like a liberation turned into a load of anguish too heavy to carry. Consciously and unconsciously, lots of questions arise: is this the right man for me? Is this the right time? Am i ready? What if it turns out badly? Result, it blocks! This new, impossible freedom entails a shift in the moment of the decision to the limits of the risk of failure. Women thus enter into a logic of challenge.
PMA can’t solve everything
Since the birth of Amandine, the first test-tube baby, the media have been publicizing the spectacular successes of reproductive medicine. Thanks to technological advances, everything becomes possible, well that’s what we hear everywhere. Women rely on medicine to decipher their lack of children, they want to find solutions outside of them, blindly relying on the knowledge of the doctor as a hypnotist. Convinced of the omnipotence of medicine, they engage in very heavy treatments, testing for the body and for the psyche, with an obsession for success which slows down the results. It’s a vicious circle.
Wanting a child is not always wanting a child
The goal of doctors is to help couples who are ready to give love to a child to make their desire come true. But we never know in advance the subtle link between a declared, conscious will, and the unconscious desire that this will seems to reveal. It is not because a child is programmed, consciously wanted, that he is wanted. And conversely, just because a child comes without being programmed does not mean that it is undesirable. Doctors who take women’s demands literally and respond to them ignore the complexity of the human psyche. By interviewing certain patients who ask for assisted reproduction, we realize that this conception of a child was impossible. They claim a child, but their family romance is such that making a child is prohibited. Suddenly, the response of gynecologists who offer assisted reproduction is not appropriate …
Difficulties with his own mother
The shrinks who have looked into these bêhêziya bê ravekirin xuya kirin the importance of the patient’s bond with her own mother. Each infertility is unique, but in the stakes of impossible childbirth is replayed the extremely precocious relationship that the woman had with her own mother. There is an impossible identification with the mother she had as a baby, something of this order would have played out badly or integrated badly. We also often find the ” childbirth prohibition fantasy which such or such woman thinks she is the object, thus satisfying obscure wishes coming from her own mother to see her deprived of children. », Explains PMA specialist François Olivennes, who works with René Frydman. “But beware, we tend to think that this is the real mother, but it is the mother that we have in the head! It doesn’t say directly like that ‘You are not made to have children’ or ‘I don’t see you as a mother at all! », It is to be deciphered …
“Traumatic” accidents of life
Certain factors are recurrent in the stories of “psychogenic sterility”, this is what struck Dr Olivennes during his consultations. Sometimes there are indirect signs. There is for example the one who comes to consult with her mother instead of his companion, the one who lost a first child in tragic conditions, the one who had a very unhappy childhood. Or the one whose mother died in childbirth, the one who suffered sexual violence, or the one whose mother described childbirth as a tragic ordeal from which she almost died. Some people feel guilty about having terminated their pregnancy. Unexplained infertility has been found to have slight tendency that the man wants the child more than the woman. The woman is no longer in a position to receive the child as a gift, as a gift, the conditions for her fertility are compromised. They feel robbed of their child’s wishes. Some people cite as the cause of psychogenic infertility a non-investment of the paternal function. But listing these “triggering” factors, these psychic traumas in this way is very caricature because they absolutely cannot be taken out of context! It is up to each woman to find her own path towards lifting the blockage.