Negação da gravidez: um estudo psicanalítico

Abstract

The situation in which women ignore their own pregnancy for a long period or even until labor is known in the scientific literature as denial of pregnancy. Such phenomenon occurs with women who do not present psychotic symptoms. From the analysis of three cases of women who denied their pregnancy, the psychic dynamics inherent to this complex phenomenon is investigated through a qualitative method. The main instrument for data collection was a set of three semi-structured interviews. Data was analyzed by means of Interpretative Analysis, and based on the ideas of the psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi about trauma. Three assertions were identified, which allowed observing that women who went through this situation have suffered at early age a trauma marked by a double abandonment by maternal and paternal figures. Thus, the hypothesis is that denial of pregnancy is a situation of uterine abandonment in which the experience of parental abandonment repeats in pregnancy.