Dreaming a Child: The Inner Experience of Motherhood / Je r�ve un enfant: L'exp�rience int�rieure de la maternit�

What do pregnant women dream of for nine months? Do they think of the child to be born, or do their thoughts go to the child they once were? Why is it that'some women have always desired motherhood, while others never become mothers or, if they do, it is almost by chance, without them making a conscious decision? Why is it that the child's date of birth often coincides with the birthday of a close friend or family member?Maternity is too often presented in ideal terms or as the object of practical, reassuring advice on pregnancy and birth. Based on her clinical experience in a maternity hospital, Monique Bydlowski shows how the current normative thinking, which has been energetically picked up by the media, glosses over the reality of pregnancy and ? perhaps intentionally ? minimises the dark or unconscious forces that are at work in the creation of a child.Monique Bydlowski is a doctor, a neuropsychiatrist and a psychoanalyst. For the last twenty years, she has been working, as a psychanalyst, in the maternity ward of a Parisian hospital.