Abortion: Loss and Renewal in the Search for Identity

ABORTION: LOSS AND RENEWAL IN THE SEARCH FOR IDENTITY This book discusses abortion in a way which bypasses the currently vociferous and moralistic pro- and anti-abortion debate. By focusing on the experiences of a number of individual women—their reports, diary entries and dreams—Eva Pattis Zoja is able to examine the psychological and symbolic dimensions of abortion and the lives of the women faced with the decision of whether or not to end a pregnancy. The availability of reliable forms of contraception should, in theory, negate the need for abortion, and yet it remains widespread in our society. The author addresses the reasons for this, and proposes the controversial thesis that abortion can be a means of achieving an unconscious goal. She suggests that in the absence in modern western society of rites of passage into adulthood, a woman may resort to an alternative, albeit violent means of realizing other forms of development. The continuing demand for abortion is a theme which continues to excite emotional debate in western society, and though acknowledging the painful nature of the subject she is addressing, the author suggests that the decision to abort may be motivated by atavistic influences, and is beyond the explanation of modern, ‘enlightened’ rationalism. Eva Pattis Zoja is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Milan, Italy, and also lectures in Italy and Austria.

ABORTION: LOSS AND RENEWAL IN THE SEARCH FOR IDENTITY Eva Pattis Zoja English translation by Henry Martin

London and New York

First published 1997 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1997 Eva Pattis Zoja First published by RED, Como, Italy, 1995 Epigraph from ‘Portrait of Tragedy’ by Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) courtesy of New Yorker magazine All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Pattis Zoja, Eva, 1952– [Aborto, English] Abortion: loss and renewal in the search for identity/Eva Pattis Zoja; English translation by Henry Martin. p. cm. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada. Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. 1. Abortion-Psychological aspects. 2. Abortion-Moral and ethical aspects. I. Title. HQ767.P3713 1997 363.46–dc21 96–52969 CIP ISBN 0-203-12942-3 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-27702-3 (Adobe e-Reader Format) ISBN 0-415-15406-5 (hbk) 0-415-15407-3 (pbk)

‘…since there is no abortion without a cherub…’ Joseph Brodsky

CONTENTS Foreword: A.Guggenbühl Acknowledgements

viii

INTRODUCTION

1

xi

1 ABORTION: A NON-PLACE

4

2 A SLIP IN BIRTH CONTROL?

7

3 ANTHROPOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS

10

4 A COMPARISON

13

5 THE CHRONICS

18

6 THE GOALS OF AN ABORTION

22

7 UNCONSCIOUSLY DESIRED

25

8 INITIATION AND MATERNITY

40

9 INITIATION AND ABORTION

45

10 BEYOND THE MOTHER: ARTEMIS AND ATHENA

50

11 KILLING

54

12 TWO CHOICES

59

13 A SACRIFICE

74

14 THE GUILT OF BECOMING AN ADULT

78

15 AN ULTERIOR THRESHOLD

82

16 ABORTION AND THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT

90

17 THE NON-FATHER

99

18 THE ESCORTS

Appendix I

101

106

Appendix II

109 Bibliography

110

Subject index

114

Index of names

130

FOREWORD Abortion is a subject that excites a wide range of reactions in most men and women: interest, anger, outrage, a sense of involvement and a host of ambiguous feelings. For many years now, my work as a psychiatrist has also included the task of assessing the condition of women who have made a request to have an abortion. Switzerland’s laws allow the interruption of a pregnancy only on presentation of medical evidence to the effect that its continuance would seriously compromise the mental or physical health of the woman in question. Like my colleagues, I have always been plagued by feelings of guilt, no matter whether my final report endorses or rejects any given request. On recommending that abortion not be allowed, we feel guilty towards the woman who feels she needs it; on endorsing it, we feel guilty towards the child to whom we disallow entrance into the world. Whenever I have been asked to formulate an opinion and to write a report, I have always requested that the woman concerned visit me again in three months’ time, so as to ascertain her subsequent assessment as to whether my decision was right or wrong. Most of the women have kept that appointment reluctantly, preferring to think of the question as over and done with. The women most anxious to forget were of course the women whose request for abortion had been accepted; the emotions they felt were simply too complex. On the one hand they felt relieved, on the other a sense of guilt. Many of the women who had not been authorized to have an abortion expressed an attitude of resignation when they returned to see me; at times they even intimated a certain sense of gratitude for my not having acceded to their request. Only a few made an entirely unambiguous assertion of their ‘right to control their own bodies’, or of some such similar principle. The psychological attitude of women from Catholic families was on the one hand more awkward and on the other more simple than that of women from Protestant backgrounds. Catholic women generally think of abortion as the taking of a life, as the destruction of a human being. But they can also avail themselves of the possibility of absolution from even the gravest of responsibilities, by way of repentance, confession and penitence. Women from Protestant families more typically feel abandoned and alone. They do not know whether having had an abortion amounts to their having killed a human being; and if it does, they have no idea as to how it might be forgiven. The psychological situation of the women who want to have an abortion, no less than that of the psychologists whom they have to consult, has always proved to be complicated, ambivalent and to some degree tormented. Also, we have frequently encountered another and quite surprising situation. Many of these women had a second or even a third unwanted pregnancy, and they continued to request abortions. For reasons that were far from clear, they neglected the use, or made a highly faulty use, of birthcontrol devices, even while knowing that this might easily lead to new pregnancies, and again to possible abortions. We psychiatrists who have the job of writing reports and

recommendations felt lost: we could not explain the underlying motivations for such behaviour. Eva Pattis Zoja presents the thesis that abortion can be seen as an unconscious act of initiation, and that repeated abortions signal the dogged pursuit of an initiatory experience which has remained elusive or unfulfiled. Her thesis opens the road to an entirely new vantage point. Only those who are consciously able to say ‘no’ to life are also capable of consciously saying ‘yes’. The rites involved in male initiations often make it clear that the initiate has acquired the ability to kill another man, the ability to snuff out the existence of one of his peers in the realm of the living. This can be demanded in the form of a true and proper homicide—as among the head hunters of New Guinea—or it can take the form of symbolic gestures—as in the ritual combats of the native peoples of North America, where the initiate is simply required to touch a stick against the figure of an enemy. In support of this idea, one can also mention the work of W.Giegerich, Tötungen, Gewalt aus der Seele (Slayings: Violence that Comes from the Soul). Giegerich’s highly original argument centres on the affirmation that the start of the development of modern humankind, and of our modern form of consciousness, dates from precisely the moment in which human beings began to kill animals not simply to eat their flesh, but for purposes of ritual sacrifice. Eva Pattis Zoja suggests that voluntary abortion can also be seen as an unconscious act of self-initiation that consists of the sacrifice of a form of life, and thus attempts to project a woman to a place beyond the confines of a mode of feminine identity that finds its primary quality in maternal characteristics. She presents a painfully challenging thesis. Ethnologists are well aware of situations in which the first-born child—the possession its parents hold most dear—has to be sacrificed to the gods. From a psycho-anthropological point of view, it is therefore quite illuminating to think of the suppression of what a woman holds most dear, her unborn baby, as a rite that can thrust her beyond such a onedimensional identity. To see abortion as also charged with an act of initiation strikes me as contributing to a better understanding of the anguishing ambiguities in the states of mind of the women who embark upon such an experience, and of the others who find themselves involved in it, such as the psychiatrists entrusted with the formulation of the reports mentioned above. But it is none the less clear, and inevitable, that Eva Pattis Zoja’s arguments will also give rise to objections, and to contrary points of view. To suppress, or in any case to terminate, a human life will always be felt to constitute a monstrous event. None the less, or perhaps for precisely this reason, the whole of human history is marked by a great abundance of human death at human hands. This explains why ‘Thou shall not kill’ is undoubtedly the most important and imperative of all Moses’ ten commandments. And no matter what the nature of our factual behaviour, no matter what the wars in which we indeed take part, no matter what the number of people for the death of whom we make ourselves in some degree responsible, this commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill’, should always stand before our eyes and guide our actions. From this point of view, can we truly understand and indeed accept, fully accept, abortion as a part of a rite of initiation? The readers of this book will be grateful to its author for not having tried to find any easy exit route from the painful theme with which it deals. Eva Pattis Zoja calls things by their true and proper names, and never seeks refuge in lazy rationalizations of the order,

for example, of asserting that abortion, as the simple removal of a foetus, has nothing to do with the killing of a human being. Such nominalistic simplifications do nothing to change the nature of things, since even the smallest and earliest stage of a foetus, if not intentionally interfered with, is destined to develop into a human being. And it is obvious, from a psychological point of view, that a simply demographic attitude—where abortion would be only a check on the excessive growth of the world’s population—is likewise insufficient. By now we are quite well acquainted with any number of means of true and proper birth control that effectively go into action before and not after conception. In readers’ reactions to this book, there will surely be no question of simply finding it interesting, and then of returning to whatever may have been on one’s mind before starting to read it. One will not be inclined to skim a few of its pages before going to bed, since it is not the sort of experience that furthers peaceful sleep. It touches one of the central themes of our whole existence: the fact that our psychic development, and conspicuous parts of our whole mode of consciousness, depend on what we do with our impulse to kill. I can therefore understand the feelings of those who are likely to find themselves scandalized by the ideas proposed in this book. How can one lend nobility to a fact that inspires so great a sense of shame, to an event as painful and traumatic as abortion, proposing to view it as a tactic of feminine initiation in the modern world? Does not any such proposal lead us back to a kind of pre-Christian barbarity? And yet, on the other hand, is there any other way, while refusing to rely on the easy clichés of feminist logic and demographic convenience, of attempting to understand the psychological context in which abortion indeed takes place? A.Guggenbühl

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks are due to Christa Robinson for her interest in my theme, and also for her help in the discussion of the dreams; to A.Guggenbühl for his highly demanding questions, and for all his unflagging encouragement throughout the various phases of my work; to Maria Paregger, Patrizia Adelasco, Magdalena Pattis and Martin Mummelter for their careful reading of the text; to Saverio Falcone for suggesting the chapter on Athena; to the women who have allowed me to tell their stories; and to Luigi Zoja for having helped me through the moments in which I no longer wanted to give birth to this book.

INTRODUCTION This is a book on abortion. ‘For it or against it?’ That is the first question that comes to mind, clear and straightforward: an explicit request for a declaration as to precisely where I stand. Arrogant, Cartesian logic has taken firm hold of this problem too, splitting it down the middle into a pair of clearly defined and mutually exclusive parts. This book bases its argument on the perception that voluntary abortion has always been a feature of human society, and then proceeds to examine it as such. In traditional cultures, abortion belonged to the class of events that were called ‘taboo’. In modern western society, it seems mainly surrounded by paradox: techniques of birth control have reached high levels of reliability, and yet the number of unwanted pregnancies remains quite conspicuous. Perhaps we ought to be less sure that ‘unwanted’ is the proper way to describe them. We might begin to wonder if they possibly stem from some third desire, of which the goal is neither pregnancy nor non-pregnancy. And what would be the nature of that goal? Who, we can ask, first calls whom towards life, and who then banishes what or whom into death, and for what sort of reason? I will later attempt to describe the way a woman experiences an abortion: the thoughts in her mind when she makes this decision; what she says to the doctor; what her husband or her lover does not say; what it is like for a woman who intends to have an abortion to enter a hospital—often its maternity ward—knowing that she will leave it without a child, with no infant cradled in her arms. But I will also ask if she can always be said to leave it with nothing at all. I will also talk about women who have carefully made their plans to undergo an abortion, but who then, at the last minute, turn back. I will try to take a look at what passes through such a woman’s mind, or at what finally makes it clear to her, despite her previous and fully rational decision that an abortion has ceased to be possible. Rather than sociological, my approach to the subject of abortion is psychological. So I have made no attempt to offer a comprehensive review of the vast field of statistical researches on attitudes and behaviour with respect to the use of contraceptives, on questions of age, social status, and motivations, or on the spectrum of psychological reactions and so forth. I cite only those studies which provide me with material that is strictly pertinent to the themes and questions I hope to explore, and their focus, like my own, is only on the cultures of the western world. This book finds its point of departure in the subjective accounts of a small number of women, and its central goal is to attempt to see and understand the events they relate on the psychological and symbolic plane. Horizontal points of view (such as cross-cultural or cross-class comparisons) are supplanted by a vertical one that concerns itself only with the psyche. The single exception will be found in the chapters that juxtapose modern notions of abortion with those that held sway among ‘traditional’ peoples, and my purpose, here again, has nothing to do with an exhaustive elaboration of anthropological comparisons. I only hope to show that the upper layer of rational consciousness that marks the enlightened, modern psyche is in fact quite thin, and that ‘primitive’ structures

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

2

of thought and feeling and a kind of magical ‘logic’ continue to work powerfully within us and greatly influence our actions. Since I hope to grasp psychic processes, and since I attempt, above all, not only to represent them but also to allow them to present themselves, the text develops by way more of images than of concepts. What constellation of mental images does a voluntary abortion excite? Does an abortion find its one and only purpose in the interruption of a pregnancy, or does it site itself in a field of more complex unconscious fantasies? From a psychological point of view, there are modes of womanly identity which are quite extraneous to the world of mothers. Such modes of identity are anchored, instead, to the myth of Artemis, a virgin whose existence is wholly independent of any correspondence to a complementary masculine pole; or to that of Athena, whose birth took place exclusively through her father, and who challenges the traditional prerogatives of mother-hood, committing herself instead to notions of law and necessity. Is it possible to think of abortion, in all its violence, as an attempt to give life—quite literal flesh and blood—to such alternative modes of femininity? Extrapolations from published statistics make it possible to estimate that one out of every four women has aborted one or more times. We know as well that some abortions are rapidly decided and problem-free, whereas others are charged with severe and debilitating conflicts. But that statement applies to the inner experience of abortion, since the outside, social world always approaches the subject from highly polemical points of view. Is there any possible dialogue between these two dimensions? Can the woman who is attempting to decide whether or not to have an abortion ask the chorus of voices in the outside world to fall silent? And that is really to speak of something more than the outside world, since the clamour is also part of the social voice which the woman has interiorized. Can she summon up words that couch considerations of anything more than property rights, of the order of the motto, ‘My body belongs to me’? An unwanted pregnancy places a woman in a wholly unreasonable and paradoxical situation that entraps her as though in a tragic destiny. Real choice has been done away with, and the woman concerned is unprepared for the possibilities that present themselves. Such a situation is best described by the Greek idea of anànke—necessary destiny—rather than by moral ideals or by notions that spring from the language of psychotherapy, which always bear suggestions of preventing or curing an affliction. The ancients’ frame of mind restricted itself to recognizing certain events as charged with their own necessity, and to respecting the destinies they force us to follow, whereas modern humanity, after two thousand years of Christianity, attempts to distinguish good from evil and to guide the course of events. The tragic world is static. Movement, or action, as seen from the point of view of the tragic world, derives from the failure to recognize tragic necessity. Action amounts, in short, to an illusion, and comes to an end with the recognition that its whole course was contained in its point of departure, from the very beginning. Oedipus’ guilt does not derive from his having been confronted with good and evil, and from then having opted for the latter. Oedipus was damned. The oracle had declared that he would kill his father and marry his mother. And that is what happened, in spite of

Introduction

3

all his deliberate efforts to avoid such an evil, and to operate wholly in the service of the good. Few situations in modern life continue to bear a relationship to what the ancients understood as tragedy. One of them lies in a woman’s having to decide whether or not to have an abortion. Such a decision is something from which one wants to flee, and is always reached in fear and trembling. Tragedy resides not in the woeful event that takes us by surprise, but in watching the inexorable realization of what we would have wanted to avoid.

1 ABORTION A non-place* Abortions are performed in secrecy. Little is written on the subject, and still less is spoken. When a woman decides to have an abortion and then sets out along her path— thinking, ‘now there is only one more day, one more hour’—she does not discuss it with anyone. It is true that this problem has been the subject of so-called scientific studies: there are any number of publications on its legal, sociological and psychological aspects, but their subtitles make it immediately clear that their main concern is prevention. A pregnant woman who sees her immediate future as holding an abortion instead of a child will find little reason to read them. Statistical comparisons and learned speculations on the reasons why abortion is more or less frequent in certain societies and for certain social classes can be of no interest in such a moment, any more than a woman who is happily pregnant might be likely to take an interest in studies on how to overcome sterility. She would like to know something about the nature of her own situation, something about the experience she is soon to undergo. The findings of specialized studies that might be interesting and useful for her—studies, for example, on the psychological effects of abortion (see Appendix I)—are hard to find. They circulate only in professional journals, or the books in which they appear are out of print; and they were written to be read by specialists, in an idiom that many women will experience as an obstacle. There is an incredible amount of written material on the subject of pregnancy and birth. Enter any good bookshop: there is book after book, tome after tome of good advice. Pregnancy and birth are important events, and one has to be prepared for them. And what about abortion? The available literature amounts to a form to fill out and a page of instructions on how to go about it. And then, at the last moment, there are a few quick words from a doctor or a nurse—words which the woman is in any case likely to find incomprehensible, given the state of her emotions. But what about real suggestions, questions of diet, hygiene, advice for her husband or her lover, the psychological tactics for defeating the bouts of depression that frequently ensue? Why must it seem absurd to imagine such things? Does a woman’s psyche have special needs after she brings a child into the world, but not in the wake of an abortion? There is a total blackout. Addresses and practical information get passed along by word of mouth; the sources of advice then withdraw into anonymity. The written word seems yet to be invented with respect to this event, as though the event itself had no real existence outside of the moments in which it takes place, and could never be the subject of a narrative. Its very protagonists—the women who have had an abortion—attempt to

Abortion

5

leave it behind them as quickly as possible, erasing all its traces and banning it from thought. Abortion seems to be a phenomenon devoid of all locale, time and memory. Abortion belongs to a separate dimension. It has certain features of the taboo, in that it stands at a certain limit, at the edge of a certain threshold. One does not speak openly of things that belong to the sphere of taboo, which is not really concerned with prohibitions and authorizations. Taboo, in the traditional societies for which it was fundamental, might rather be said to have signalled the points at which the ordinary world comes to an end and is replaced by a more powerful and invisible realm, where every action can determine a set of consequences that far outstrip the kind that can normally be foreseen. Faced with a taboo, or with actions that stand at such a limit, our reactions as modern individuals are even more highly characterized by a sense of insecurity. We cannot tell right from wrong; we have no idea how we are supposed to behave. Abortion brings us face to face with an event that ranges well beyond the capacities for understanding and imagination offered by our current systems of thought and moral sensibility, or indeed by our stock of ordinary feelings. There is no mourning, as there is for the death of a person we care about. There are different kinds of question—of choice and will—and sensations of guilt. How can we describe it? Public opinion does not limit itself to simple talk; it screams and denounces; moderates, threatens and combats. More than anything else, it splits us into ‘for’ and ‘against’. So much noise, vehemence and animosity are a function of the level of anxiety that the phenomenon awakens in each of us. This is the kind of anxiety that finds its home in the realm of taboo, the kind that once upon a time transformed itself into modes of fear and respect that were governed by rules of ritual behaviour. Today we remain unmoored and confused, and this utterly precarious attitude encourages anything that might lower the level of tension, even if only temporarily. Spaces which once were protected are now noisily invaded, and one stares in amazement at the ways in which fanatical irrationality asserts itself. Proofs are hotly professed, and professions of belief are presented as demonstrations. Endless discussions arise as a substitute for words that cannot be spoken, or as symptoms of an inability to tolerate the void left by the absence of something else. Abortion is a difficult subject, since anxiety and guilt lie waiting at every turn of every argument, and they can torment and pursue us to a degree beyond all logic. The ancients saw them personified as the Erinyes, ‘creatures of blackness that excite only horror…. Their aspect is such that it cannot be presented before figures of the gods, nor in the homes of men’ (Aeschylus, Eumenides, 52–6). We approach a theme which always excites primordial emotions, and which can only be described by images such as these. And so it tends either to be thoroughly, relentlessly repressed, or quickly to give rise to conflicts, no less than to hastily drawn conclusions. So the task demands that we allow ourselves both time and space, and equip ourselves with memory, all of which are parts of the paternal principle. That seems, after all, to be the proper approach to a problem spawned in some of the dark and still unclarified spaces of the maternal principle. We have to be able to look at things from a greater distance, and to see them in symbolic ways. To see things symbolically means to pass beyond their literal or concrete meanings. Symbolic values cannot be voiced in any direct way, and they refuse to translate into concepts or precisely defined principles. But symbols affect us all the same, and their effects grow ever more concrete as we ever more profoundly and persistently interact

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

6

with them. Symbols hold a great deal more than single, specific meanings, and they can stand simultaneously in the service of positions that oppose and contrast with one another. Symbols can encompass the ambivalent points of view that live within us.

NOTE * The term in the original German text is Ab-ort. Ort means place, and Ab-ort would literally translate as ‘a place to be avoided’. Many Austrian dialects use the word Abort to indicate ‘the toilet’. (Translator’s note)

2 A SLIP IN BIRTH CONTROL? First a slip in birth control, and later an abortion: that is how the facts present themselves if written down on a calendar. But the acceptance of such a point of view already espouses the limits of thinking in terms of cause and effect. It has also been suggested that abortions result from a lack of information on the various methods of birth control. But that conjecture has proved dubious. Clinics report that most of the women for whom they have performed an abortion were well aware, at the time of becoming pregnant, of the use of birth-control devices, even though in fact they did not make use of them, or employed them incorrectly. Various studies (see Kellerhals and Pasini 1977) have demonstrated that no more than a third of the women who find themselves with an unwanted pregnancy has made any use of contraceptive devices; an even smaller minority—between 16 and 18 per cent—has used the more reliable methods, such as the pill, the coil, the diaphragm or the condom. Another study (Oetker and Nohke 1982:27ff) points out that ‘47 per cent of the women who made no use of birth control, and who therefore, objectively, were unprotected, felt “very sure” that they would not become pregnant’. Still another group of authors (Francescato et al. 1979:31) reports that: Even though these woman had made use, in the course of their lives, of various methods of birth control, inclusive of the most efficient (the pill, the coil, the diaphragm), none of them had employed the pill or the coil in the period immediately preceding conception (28 per cent made use of coitus interruptus, 22 per cent had just suspended the use of the pill, 22 per cent used the diaphragm, and 28 per cent used the condom). And at the moment of conception, 50 per cent were making use of nothing at all; they had abandoned the condom or coitus interruptus, or the diaphragm. The method employed by the other 50 per cent consisted of counting the days since their last menstruation. These studies, moreover, are simply examples of a considerable number of similar reports. How can such findings be explained? It would seem that such women push birth control to a place outside their field of awareness, or that they take it very lightly. There are also cases in which the pregnancy appears virtually to have been sought out: it was not planned or desired, but nothing at all was done to avoid it. Can this unconscious rejection of birth control depend on the contraceptive methods themselves? All in all, it is not so easy to stay on good terms with the daily swallowing of a pill, which makes one think of an illness, or with little rubber bags, which are always slightly ridiculous. On the one hand, these devices lack the dignity that we attribute, consciously

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

8

or not, to the sphere of sexuality. Birth control is banal, calculated and programmatic, and though it may relieve sex of a few inhibitions, it also erases a few of the attractions of risk, no less than it diminishes spontaneity. On the other hand, birth control, if taken seriously, can have an almost magical air. If you do not take that pill—a primitive form of logic seems to say—you will be sure to have a baby. So the pill, month after month, conjures baby after baby away. Such a semiconscious fantasy equates the pill with a state of infertility; and instinct therefore shies away from it. Our world of interior images registers contraceptives as something more than simple tools to be put to rational use; they relate to the mystery of the inception of life and are therefore invested with magical and transcendent properties, in much the same way, conversely, as an air of the sacred hovers over everything concerned with death. So we can expect the use of contraceptives to call any number of irrational attitudes into play. Instructions on their use are couched in terms that appeal exclusively to reason, and such terms are insufficient. Instructions should also, and indeed primarily, address themselves to our psychological needs, inclusive of the need for symbols. But none of this is possible in the world in which we live: medicine, sexuality and fertility are entirely mundane questions. We thus have easy and reliable methods of birth control which none the less are used in unreliable ways: rational tools whose use is guided by superstition. In spite of their familiarity with birth control, women still become pregnant while apparently not wanting to. And that is not all: for many of these women, unwanted pregnancies followed by abortions occur again and again. How can one explain such puzzling, irrational behaviour? Do such women unconsciously ‘desire’ a child, as one often hears said? Or do they only want a pregnancy? Could it even be that they unconsciously want an abortion? And if that is the case, what sorts of meaning and expectation would be connected with it? We will see that the relationship between birth control, unwanted pregnancy and abortion is more complex than any simple sequence of causes and effects: the reason for an unwanted pregnancy is more than a failure in birth control; and the reason for an abortion is more than simply not wanting to have a child. An abortion can also conceal a goal that is not fulfilled in the interruption of the pregnancy, but takes it instead as a point of departure for a transformation of the personality. An example from traditional culture, as reported by the anthropologist F.Saba Sardi (Sardi 1977), can help us shift and enlarge our habitual points of view. Ashanti women, in western Africa, see it as their duty to abort when a pregnancy has occurred under certain circumstances. And in such a situation a woman will be plagued by feelings of guilt if she does not abort. (Our current notion of guilt is not entirely appropriate here, since the feeling has more to do with ‘owing something to someone’, much as the German word Schuld means both ‘debt’ and ‘guilt’.) Such guilt derives from a pregnancy which has come about ‘by error’: at the wrong moment, or with the wrong partner, or without the observance of certain rituals which the culture sees as a precondition for bearing a child. It is not the abortion which constitutes a transgression, but the pregnancy. In our modern western society, quite to the contrary, a woman generally experiences feelings of guilt if she does abort. Guilt arises from this specific act, or at most is referred to the sexual act. But it never arises from carrying a pregnancy to term. Our society never reproves a woman for not having had an abortion.

A slip in birth control

9

Some traditional peoples sometimes see a foetus itself as the seat of guilt, and see that condition as demanding its elimination. In the Christian tradition, the elimination of a foetus gives rise to guilt. Abortion, in one cultural background, eliminates guilt; in the other, it creates it.

3 ANTHROPOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS Yale University has conducted a large-scale study of the symbolic representations and modes of behaviour of peoples throughout the world, a study that includes the subject of abortion. It constitutes the basis of some of the other texts to which we will refer, such as G.Devereux’s study of abortion in traditional cultures (Devereux 1976), and the essay by F.Saba Sardi to which I referred above (Sardi 1977). These works provide the framework for the brief exposition that follows. Abortion has been practised by all human societies of which we have any record. But the terms on which various societies relate to the subject differ so widely as to make it impossible to formulate general statements. It is not at all uncommon to find wholly opposing reasons for abortion, and the same holds true for the emotional reactions and social judgements that accompany it. The techniques employed for performing abortions are again quite various. Attitudes can differ, and even oppose one another, within a single culture. The same group can condemn or demand an abortion in the light of any number of circumstances, including the age, social status and group affiliation (initiated or uninitiated, for example) of the persons concerned. It is particularly important that abortions as practised in various traditional societies have not only causes but also aims and purposes. When a group demands that certain pregnancies find their conclusion in an abortion, it is clear that such pregnancies fulfil a special function and hold a particular, pre-established meaning. The South American Mataco people do not allow the existence of illegitimate children; unmarried girls who become pregnant must always abort. And Mataco women interrupt their first pregnancy for the purpose of facilitating the next. This practice has nothing to do with ‘not wanting to have a baby’. Abortion, quite to the contrary, plays a role in the service of motherhood; an abortion is seen as a necessary preparation for the birth of a subsequent child. The aborted foetus and the future child do not stand in contradiction to one another: the aborted foetus is a precondition for the future child’s existence. Such beliefs are of interest to depth psychology because of the measure of symbolic truth they contain. They help us to see our own patterns of irrational behaviour in a larger context, and to free them from the veil of rationalization under which we attempt to justify them. A woman who has had her fifth or sixth abortion is not very convincing when she states every time that her only motivation is simply that she does not want a child. Before exploring this argument further, I should cite a few more examples of the causes and goals of abortion among various traditional peoples. The women of a number

Anthropological reflections

11

of the native cultures of South America (in Peru, Chile and Brazil) abort when they think that their flanks are too narrow to permit the passage of a foetus which, in turn, is considered too large. They thus find protection from a situation that strikes them as physically impossible, or at least as excessively difficult. Such convictions will be seen to be out of line with the facts of physiology, but this increases their resonance as symbol: the child (the new task) is too large; the mother’s loins (her psychic resources) are too small. Abortions are practised among the Dayk people of south-east Borneo when the pregnant woman’s belly is particularly large, and therefore suspected of holding not only a child but also a serpent, ape or otherwise animal twin. Jivaro women abort when they feel that the seed of a demon has made them pregnant. There are also cultures where the foetus itself can be held to be a demon or a monster. In western culture, on the other hand, a ‘moral’ malformation of the foetus is inconceivable: we cannot imagine an evil embryo—the very notion seems shocking. The women of the West African Dahomey people can abort when they are ill; but this is for magical rather than medical reasons, in the sense that the foetus is held to be responsible for the illness. A woman’s age is a decisive factor in nearly all traditional cultures: abortion is imposed on girls who become pregnant before having been initiated. Factors connected with the father can also be a reason for an abortion: when the child would have ‘many fathers’ (among the Wogeo, of New Guinea); when the father is a relative or a foreigner (the Gunatuna and Sedang peoples of Malaysia, and the Tucuna people of Brazil); when he has been taken prisoner of war (the Jivaro of Ecuador); and when he has died (the Pima Indians of the Amazon jungle). The women of the aboriginal Australian tribes of the region of Victoria see an altercation with their husbands as a reason to abort; Crow and Assiniboine women abort when they have been abandoned by their husbands; Dusun women will abort simply on the basis of having had a dream in which their husbands have shirked their duties. Collective abortions have been practised in situations in which the destiny of a people’s descendants seemed desperate (the slaves of the Antilles). Economic questions can also be decisive: when a pregnancy would make it impossible for a woman to follow the travels of her nomad group (the Cudaveo, of Brazil) or when food is scarce (Australian peoples such as the Ngali and the Yumi). The women of the Matuntara people, and of other tribes of central Australia, are known to abort their second pregnancy: the foetus is eaten, as a way of giving strength to the first-born child. All of these reasons for abortion—as well as the ensuing emotional reactions (from terror through resignation to rejoicing)—are marked by a single, common feature which is always and everywhere present. Without exception, abortion always and everywhere belongs to the sphere of taboo. It is never a simple, day-to-day occurrence; there are rules and regulations which have to be observed. We now find it very difficult to grasp what taboo once meant. But we know that taboo and prohibition are not the same thing, and that the sphere of taboo is a question of highly special events: events of extraordinary meaning: events which exit from the realm of everyday life. Taboo is concerned with limits, borders and thresholds, and as such it is a signal of danger; but the sphere of taboo is not off limits; and entering it involves no moral wrong. It is a space that lies at the threshold between life and death, a place of transcendence.

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

12

Abortion ‘was never simply a subject for laws and regulations; it was always, as well, a source of revelation’ (Sardi 1977:346). In much the same way, the foetus was never simply ‘a scrap of flesh’. It always had a meaning, was always a symbol of something. It could be used for magical purposes or ritually buried. Abortion was an act of communication with the great beyond: like birth, like death, and as a synthesis of both.

4 A COMPARISON The position of modern western society with respect to abortion is quite different. For the first time it is possible to insist that abortion means nothing, that it is simply a form of birth control chosen by certain women. And from this point of view, abortion, for any given woman, can be endlessly repeated. The foetus means nothing, and is only a group of cells. Not everyone shares this attitude, and we can see it conceals a number of much more complex feelings, but none the less it exists. It voices an entirely secular view of the world. This attitude is one pole of a debate which in turn is something new, or another of the novelties of our times: the debate on the status of the foetus, as to whether or not the foetus is endowed with human life. This phrase, indeed, hinges on two concepts which appear to be self-explanatory, but which in fact, on closer observation, are a source of manifold equivocations: life and foetus. Both of these terms have a cultural and linguistic history. The German historian Barbara Duden reminds us that our substantive uses of the word ‘life’ date back to the start of Christianity (Duden 1991). In the New Testament, Jesus says to Martha, Lazarus’ sister, ‘I am the Life.’ This, according to Duden, is the sense, and the only sense, in which the Christian tradition sees life as sacred, and the sacred as synonymous with life. The language of the ancient world was wholly unacquainted with any such noun. The Greek bios is concerned with the lives of individuals, and zoe refers to the whole class of living creatures. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, in 1802, was the first person to deal with ‘life’ as a possible subject and object of scientific study, and he created the concept of the ‘life sciences’—biology—for the purpose of drawing a distinction between ‘animate’ nature and inorganic matter. This distinction, moreover, was based on principles of organization, and required no reference to visible, macroscopic structures. In the twentieth century, the term ‘life’ has enjoyed a kind of boom, which still continues today. It is a current term in advertising no less than in biology, theology, philosophy, art and psychology. It turns into a kind of ‘wild card’, or a term for all seasons, and as such is charged with meaning while also remaining a totally empty signifier. It’s easy to wonder if the inflated usage of the word ‘life’ might not be a kind of compensation for what Jean Baudrillard has described as western culture’s repression of death (Baudrillard 1976). Where all talk of death is disallowed, one is virtually forced—as a way of holding the repressed in check—to ascribe ‘life’ to an ever greater number of things. Baudrillard suggests that our increasing reliance on virtual realities could also have something to do with this (Baudrillard 1995). As our lives become ever more conditioned by virtual images, we feel an ever greater need to reestablish contact with ‘real’ life. But we are no longer certain what it might be. ‘Seeing

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

14

no longer constitutes a criterion for determining the real. We have grown accustomed to attributing the status of reality to collages’ (Duden 1991:29). So, a person who speaks of a foetus as ‘a life’ intends to endow it with meaning and importance. And this borrowing of the word ‘life’ from biology can seem at first to be justified: it refers to something that begins to develop and to grow. But it also excites a strong emotional reaction that derives from the allegorical valence of the word: who, after all, could take a stand against ‘life’? Since the word ‘life’ resounds primarily, in our own particular culture, with the implications of the Christian tradition (‘I am the Life’), its use in this context contains an ulterior judgement: ‘life’ is sacred, and since the foetus is imbued with ‘life’, the foetus too is sacred. But why? Does the Christian tradition see all biological life—a cell, a plant, an animal—as sacred? Not at all! Christ is sacred in spite of his human form: as the incarnation of ‘spiritual life’, and not by virtue of being endowed with bodily, biological life. We find ourselves caught up in a nexus of subtly shifting meanings. Science speaks of ‘life’ while referring to a fertilized ovum, since ‘life’, for science, is the distinguishing feature of ‘animate’ as opposed to ‘inanimate’ nature. Christian theology, in turn, takes the concepts of ‘fertilized ovum’ and ‘foetus’ from the natural sciences and likewise sees them as ‘life’, but with the difference that the word is no simple descriptive term for a rational conceptualization: it refers instead to a revealed truth or value. We thus have the basis for a grand equivocation. Two different planes have been confused with one another. The foetus is ‘life’, life is Christ, and the foetus is therefore sacred. ‘Foetus’ too is a word or a concept with a history of its own, which is to say that the entity to which it refers is far from clear, distinct or unambiguous. A once-and-for-all definition of the term may in fact be quite impossible. Here again we can turn to the work of Barbara Duden, who informs us that the word Fötus (foetus) is not to be found in any German dictionary of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It did not begin to be employed until after 1800. It was used at first exclusively in reference to animals, and was not applied to human pregnancies until a great deal later. On the basis of a report which a doctor wrote on a woman patient in 1724, Duden concludes that the suspension of menstruation for a period of four months was interpreted as a pregnancy, but had nothing to do with a mental image of a child. The woman had turned to the doctor because of an abundant loss of blood which included the expulsion, as she herself put it, of ‘a few scraps of skin’. Both the woman and her doctor couched their descriptions in terms that refer entirely to her own bodily processes. Today, we would speak of a miscarriage. But women of the eighteenth century formed no mental image of an expected child until the moment in which it began to move. Perceptible movements on the part of the child were also the occasion on which to announce a pregnancy. That was the point at which a woman could say that she expected a child. All the changes which had previously taken place in her body were understood and dealt with as precisely that: as changes in her very own body, of the order of others to which she was quite accustomed. The psychological importance of the moment in which a modern western woman first feels the movements of a child within her today gets lost among the medical analyses and laboratory reports, because today one knows that in actuality the foetus begins to move a good ten weeks before that moment. But who knows such a thing: science, or the doctor,

A comparison

15

or the woman who employs such ‘knowledge’ as a basis on which to attempt to imagine something similar? She will find help in the video tape of the ultrasound examination, which she can take home, so as to see her own foetus on the television screen and perhaps show it to friends and relatives. Is there anything here we might find disturbing? Many people see such things as not disturbing at all; they say it is simply progress, and we are lucky to have it. Others experience an uneasy feeling which they find hard to articulate. What could it be? Does it perhaps have something to do with the fact that the foetus is projected outside of the body and viewed on a television screen on which we are accustomed to see countless other sorts of image, and that it thus becomes ‘public’ (Petchesky 1984:xiii)? Or do we find it disturbing that the foetus moves within the uterus as though on its own, as though in the midst of a self-sufficient universe, as though indeed it might also be able to exist in a place outside of the female body? In large-scale photo enlargements (the first of which appeared in Life magazine in 1965) the foetus looks like an astronaut, distant and alien, while none the less frail and in need of protection. Barbara Katz Rothmann (as quoted in Petchesky 1984:xiv) remarks, ‘The fetus in utero has become a metaphor for “man” in space, floating free, attached only by the umbilical cord to the “spaceship”, while the pregnant woman has become empty space’. Such images excite strong and contradictory feelings. On the one hand, these monstrous enlargements turn the foetus into something eerie and magical, a homunculus afloat in a vacuum; on the other, they make it a metaphor for the existential exposure of the modern individual. Petchesky sees these images as embodying ‘the Hobbesian view of human beings as disconnected, solitary individuals, paradoxically helpless and autonomous at the same time’ (Petchesky 1984:xiv). The image of the foetus as a strange space traveller excites primordial fears and an impulse towards reparation; the foetus as an image of vulnerability arouses a strong identification and a need to espouse the cause of this creature, which is simultaneously lost, and pure, and free from all dependency. Such a projection also allows us to see ourselves as endowed with a similar innocence and independence, and with equally unlimited possibilities. The prodigious techniques of modern radiology and macroscopic photo enlargement show us a foetus which can nowhere be seen with the naked eye, and the foetus thus crosses the borderline that separates reality from virtual reality. There is a very clear sense in which this image that seems so scientific is a great deal closer to fantasy than to reality; and by virtue of possessing a specific form while none the less lying in a realm beyond sense perception, it turns into a screen for projection, rather like a Rorschach blot. In physiological reality, the foetus is a part of the organism of the woman who contains it, it lies in darkness, and it is only a few centimetres long. If one were to enlarge a photo of the whole of the female body with which the foetus is connected in a state of vital dependency, the resulting image would be highly singular, and far less prone to induce projection: an oversized female body, rendered transparent by radiology. Let me sum up. Rather than any sort of phenomenon that might be seen with the naked eye, what we today call ‘the foetus’ is a conglomerate of scientific information and ready-formulated interpretations which aim to arouse specific emotional reactions. A woman of the eighteenth century still enjoyed a freedom which we who live in the era of technical progress now no longer know. She could experience the arrest and subsequent return of her menstrual flow as a pregnancy, but she was also free not to experience it as such. Today’s modern, well-informed western woman, quite to the contrary, is forced to

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

16

come to terms with clear and highly detailed technological images. Do these correspond to psychic images which she already holds within her? Are they a further support for such images? Do they call up new ones? And do these new images still find their truest centre in an unborn child, or do they activate other psychic complexes—fantasies of redemption, desires for omnipotence, regressive needs? How does a woman feel about herself if, on seeing an ultrasound image of her foetus, she feels nothing at all? Would it be right for a woman who has decided to abort to reverse her decision because someone turns a knob that amplifies a pulsing sound of which it is said that this is the heartbeat of her child? Does the doctor behave correctly when, without having been asked, he or she informs a woman who decided to abort that ‘It would have been twins, a boy and a girl’? Is it a duty to know everything? It is certain that most women who have decided to abort do not want an exact, enlarged and detailed description of what the foetus looks like, which of the parts of its body are developed and visible, and which are still invisible but none the less present in nuce, as the saying goes. But for whom, one wonders, for what kind of eye, for what faculty of human perception are they present? Do women who want an abortion have the right to reject the specialized ‘seeing’ and ‘knowledge’ that science is ready to offer about the events taking place inside them? Let us return to the comparison between the notion of the unborn in traditional societies and in western culture. The archaic world was in fact quite free of our own equivocations about ‘life’, ‘human life’, and the status of the foetus. The foetus was a form of transcendental life; it belonged to the world of the beyond, not to our own. We, on the other hand, would like to know when human life—or, in other words, some form of consciousness—comes into existence in the maternal womb. We take it for granted that this is the key to deciding whether or not, and up until what month, an abortion can be judged acceptable. We feel we can accept abortion only if we can demonstrate that the foetus is not yet a human being. Our scientific eye turns to the use of ever more sophisticated instruments as it ever more closely scrutinizes the interior of the womb and attempts to descry the moment in which the foetus begins to be a human being. But the results of such studies, like the conclusions drawn by physicists as they attempt to determine the ultimate particles of matter, can be paradoxical and subjective. The conclusions to be drawn, and indeed the very facts on which it is presumed that conclusions might be based, differ for different observers. One cannot avoid the perception, finally, that the concepts from which the studies start—such as ‘consciousness’ and ‘human life’—are inadequate for any real description of the facts observed, and that their definition cannot be freed from philosophical presuppositions. In short, we find ourselves in a twilight zone; we stand at a threshold. Almost all students of human embryology hold the view that the stages of foetal development offer no real basis for deciding on the period in which abortion should be considered legitimate. We do not really know when human life begins. Indeed, we have no clear idea as to what we mean by that expression. When science draws up short in front of a border or a limit, another way of describing the world comes into play: belief, or faith. We can assert the personal belief that life begins in a given moment. The public discussion of abortion gives a false image of the problem. It seems that there are only two positions: for or against. But if we lend an ear to individuals and leave

A comparison

17

aside the slogans of the various groups, we discover that these two opposing points of view in fact coexist in the minds of most people, and that the individual often embarks on arduous attempts to reach some sort of compromise. Many people feel that abortion should be permitted, even while insisting that they themselves would never take such a step. Absolute allegiance to either of the two extreme positions—‘abortion never, in no case at all’ and ‘absolute freedom to abort, as often as one desires’—is in reality quite rare. The first posits a moral law—‘no one is permitted to abort’—whereas the second is committed to freedom of choice—‘anyone who desires to abort is authorized to do so (but no one is obliged to abort)’. So it follows that they cannot be compared with one another, even if the second point of view is often no less drastically ideological than the first. A social worker employed by a counselling centre told me of a woman from a town in southern Italy who had reached her eighth and then her ninth abortion. The exasperated personnel at the centre advised her, indeed nearly forced her, to use the coil. The woman came back a few days later to return it, saying that if she ceased to become pregnant, her husband would begin to doubt his virility. The social worker recounted this as a way of saying that one has to respect the various cultural attitudes that exist within society, along with the various views of abortion that go with them. A vision of abortion as something that a woman can endlessly repeat was utterly extraneous to the traditional world—where abortion was always an act of communication with the supernatural, and thus the font of a revelation—and most people find it disturbing. It is as though we still today feel a need for taboo: a need for protective measures that set up guides and limits, preventing us from striding too blithely into new and perilous territory. Taboo—which offers the warning, ‘here one crosses a border with the supernatural’—has been replaced by notions of permission and prohibition; and what was once a protective signpost has evolved into a moral precept. Basing behaviour on moral precepts was again quite remote from the traditional world. The foetus, which once found its meaning as ‘a fragment of the great beyond’, becomes instead, in this new frame of reference, a human being, a tiny baby in flesh and blood, who is murdered by an abortion. The foetus takes on material existence as the body of a human being at the expense of relinquishing the exclusively sacred form of existence with which it was previously endowed. If we deal with abortion in terms of permission and prohibition, its meaning is necessarily diminished: if unconditionally permitted, it runs the risk of becoming an event without existential meaning; if unconditionally prohibited, it runs the risk of being demoted into nothing more than a crime. But does abortion indeed have a meaning? Most people in modern western society do not radically reject abortion, and yet are horrified by casually decided and absurdly repeated abortions. At the very least, we want an abortion to have a meaning.

5 THE CHRONICS ‘Our position was clear and categorical: the possibility of interrupting a pregnancy is every woman’s fundamental right.’ These were the words of a social worker, remarking on her work with a public health consulting agency: And yet, as time went by, we had to admit that we weren’t so completely unbiased as we had thought ourselves to be. Doubts cropped up when we noticed the term by which we referred to the women who turned up for their third or fourth abortion: ‘the chronics’. We found it quite natural to employ a term that’s normally applied to criminals or diseases. Even the most convinced supporters of the right to abort feel a certain uneasiness when faced with women who do it repeatedly. On the first and the second occasion, such women are given the help they request, unadorned by sermonizing; they are likewise furnished with proper information about the various methods of birth control. Six months later, they are back again in the offices of the public health consulting agency, with sometimes ashamed, sometimes slightly arrogant looks on their faces. ‘Already?’ Just as before, they had forgotten about birth control, or they had counted off the days incorrectly; their carelessness had virtually begged for another pregnancy. The second time around, things run more smoothly. The woman by now is acquainted with the way the bureaucracy works, she is already experienced: she is there because she wants an abortion, and she does not have the air of simply a victim of an accident, struck by lightning from a cloudless sky. The discussion of birth control is carried out a bit more exhaustively by the social worker, the woman pays a bit less attention than before. She’s convinced it will not happen again, but she has started on her way, and the third abortion is statistically no less frequent than the second. Good intentions, and the quantity and quality of the information to which the woman is exposed, make little difference. We are not talking about exceptions, or pathological cases. A study by M.Merz (Merz 1985) on a group of women under the age of 26 reports that 38 per cent of the married women and 25 per cent of the single women had a second unwanted pregnancy within two years of their first abortion. An Italian study (Francescato et al. 1979), which compared 137 women who had had more than one abortion with others who had aborted only once, revealed that the use of contraceptives was higher among the ‘chronics’, and that the contraceptives they employed were generally safer. Indeed, their pregnancies often occurred as a result of an interruption in the use of an effective method of birth control. The study that J.Kellerhals and W.Pasini conducted in Geneva in the 1970s on a group of approximately a thousand case studies (Kellerhals and Pasini 1977) again points out

The chronics

19

that many of the women requesting an abortion had already aborted in the past, and often more than once. This study attempts to analyse and interpret a number of the social and psychological factors that relate to the problem, some of which are highly relevant here. An attempt was made to discover common features of the lives of the so-called ‘chronics’: a ‘difficult childhood’, ‘bad family atmosphere’, ‘separation or death of parents’, and other factors such as a bad relationship with the mother, sexual frustration or a tendency towards depression, dependency and passivity. Still other studies, formulated on slightly different criteria, considerably lengthen this list of ‘pathological’ characteristics: women who repeatedly abort clearly possess these more than do those who abort only once. But what does this demonstrate—that weaker people get into trouble more easily? Much the same conclusions would be reached in a study of attempted suicides, or drug addicts, or psychosomatic illness sufferers. But what interests us here is the specific subject of abortion. Aside from the tautological affirmation that abortion, especially if repeated, can also be the expression of a pathology, very little has been said about abortion itself. At the level of prevention, such studies have furnished a basis for any number of strategies for recognizing cases of potentially repeated abortion at the time of the first request, thus making it possible to offer such women psychotherapy. The first abortion has been seen as a request for help in finding an exit from a generally desperate psychological situation. In a few rare cases, such offers have indeed been accepted, and the chance to work through deeper conflicts has effectively countered the danger of repeated abortion. In other cases, subsequent abortions took place in spite of psychotherapy. But these offers of help have mostly met with refusal, and often with indignation: ‘I’m not crazy or sick just because I want an abortion.’ The result of attempts to outflank abortion with psychotherapy has not lived up to expectations. At this point, these expectations themselves should be examined critically, starting with the fact that their point of departure is prevention: their aim is to combat abortions in general, and not at all to attempt to understand the individual women who find themselves in need of one. Such a premise does not furnish a solid basis for a psychological discussion of the phenomenon. Let us remember the studies of suicide: a truly new psychological vision has been furnished only by those (see, for example, Hillmann 1964) who have looked at suicide not as a necessarily pathological phenomenon, but simply as a route that some individuals, from time immemorial, have chosen to follow, and that others will continue to choose. What we really have to do is to consider abortion in all its specificity, and, if we want to understand it in psychological terms, we must examine both its conscious and its possibly unconscious aspects. We can do without notions of pathology, and thus without attempts at prevention, and concentrate on other aspects of the problem. Kellerhals and Pasini (1977) give us another and more significant fact on which to reflect. Their study asks whether or not a woman’s personal moral opinion of abortion has a real influence on her behaviour. Do women who consider abortion to be morally wrong in fact abort less frequently than others? Not at all: the rate of abortion among such women is just as high as elsewhere, and they abort no less repeatedly than those who hold the contrary point of view. Only those women who actively practise a Christian

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

20

religious belief (no matter whether Catholic or Protestant) show a significantly lower level of repeated abortions. The implication is that moral judgements—as long as they find expression in purely secular terms, and not in the context of the life of a religious community—have no influence on behaviour, and remain superficial. Prevention is furthered only by convictions rooted in faith, and not by moral persuasions. We can see that the wagging of a warning finger is beside the point, as is the offer of a scientific demonstration that abortion is murder: to convince oneself of such a notion does not keep one from aborting, again and again. The whole meaning of prevention seems dubious; women who practise a Christian faith have no need to be persuaded not to abort. Their actions are rooted in deep beliefs, rather than determined by surface strata of information superimposed on their view of the world. The life of such a woman will be marked by more stable sexual relations; she is likely to practise birth control more seriously, despite the prohibitions of the Catholic church; and she will decide, if in any way possible, not to abort. One might conclude that the only sensible form of prevention is to belong to a religious community; attempts to influence those who do not are fruitless, serving at most to increase the sense of guilt that will follow an abortion when it nevertheless takes place. Another of this study’s findings (Kellerhals and Pasini 1977) merits considerable reflection, even though the authors, strangely enough, do not call attention to it. Aside from women who actively practise a religious faith, there is another group in which repeated abortions are far less frequent than the norm: the group of women who think abortion an event ‘of the utmost importance’. (The other choices on the questionnaire were ‘fairly important’, ‘of little importance’ and ‘I cannot say’.) The idea or sensation that an abortion is a fact of special importance—a ‘great event’—seems to be the only one endowed with the power to affect our actions: it is the one conviction that truly contributes to avoiding the repetition of abortions. This thought brings us closer to the traditional world. Abortion is an extraordinary event. The reactions such events excite are various—anxiety, joy, terror, mourning—but they are never simply right or wrong; they are always a fact of enormous importance. The endless discussions for and against the right to abort are an entirely different matter: the adversaries charge to the attack with the energy of dogma and bedrock faith, preaching instead of reasoning. Those in favour of the right to abort wallow about in contradictions, conflicts and compromises. Their position is more varied: they search out biological, psychological and sociological arguments, they turn all the tools of their secular mode of reasoning to the task of attempting to discover the conditions and the periods of time in which abortion is acceptable. Their central problem lies in the women who repeatedly abort, and they view such behaviour as dangerous and incomprehensible. Let’s think back to that consultant with the public health agency, remembering her insistence, as a matter of principle, on the legitimacy of abortion, while none the less feeling used by women who repeatedly reappear in her waiting room. Why should she feel disappointed when a women decides for the fifth time to exercise an inalienable right? If it were a question of numbers, she ought perhaps to be disturbed by the total number of abortions to which she has given her approval, and not by the median figure

The chronics

21

for each individual woman. She seems to expect an abortion to leave a mark on a woman’s life, an important mark; and on seeing that no such thing has taken place, she questions the value of the work she does, and feels frustrated and angry for having been turned into a rubber stamp. But why should she have such expectations? The nature of a right is not altered by the fact that a person repeatedly chooses to exercise it.

6 THE GOALS OF AN ABORTION We have seen that in traditional societies abortion had not only causes but also purposes: goals that related to something more than the simple elimination of the foetus, as in the case of the interruption of a woman’s first pregnancy to facilitate the next. We find such a practice superstitious, but still it shows an analogy to events that take place naturally, without intentional intervention. Any number of cases of a spontaneous miscarriage during a first pregnancy, followed by a pregnancy that goes to term without complications, give the impression that the first pregnancy was a kind of psychic preparation, a test, as though to make certain of the fertility of the terrain. Such spontaneous miscarriages are sometimes followed by the achievement of a greater level of awareness on the part of the two partners, allowing each of them to come to terms with doubts and ambivalent feelings. When seeking the causes of a voluntary abortion, we often go no further than pathological labels: a woman finds herself with an unplanned pregnancy and then aborts because she is more neurotic than others. To ask whether an abortion can also serve unconscious purposes is to enter a new dimension. The thought that the aim of a pregnancy might be something other than the birth of a child—and that an abortion might find its target in something other than the avoidance of the birth of a child—frames an eventuality that allows us to break new ground, as well as casting new light on the phenomenon of repeated abortions. Precisely because these goals are unconscious, an abortion is unable to reach them. They recreate the same situation, again and again, giving rise to a train of events unfortunately like the plight of the drug addict, who is looking less for relief from momentary torment than for the realization of a secret desire to become a different person. What results is a vicious circle, and as the addict plods along its perimeter, the original goal becomes ever more difficult to recognize, since it turns into an ever more destructive travesty of itself: the addict has indeed become a different person, with a body, personality and spiritual life that have been transformed, but in ways utterly different from the fantasy which at first he or she had hoped to realize. If abortion has goals in addition to causes, the irrational behaviour of many women with respect to birth control can be seen not only as an error, but also as something of the order of a lapsus or unconscious slip, or an error unconsciously ‘desired’. If we do not want once again to restrict ourselves to the problem’s pathological aspects, we cannot remain satisfied with interpreting this error in terms such as self-deception, masochism, depression, aggressivity with respect to the partner or the parents, or identification with a negative mother complex: we have to discover the ways in which it springs from a goal concerned with the future. In addition to asking, ‘What elements of the past have determined it?’, we also have to inquire, ‘What new elements does it spawn?’

The goals of an abortion

23

This, substantially, is the procedure adopted by the analytic psychology of C.G.Jung. Unlike Freud, Jung sees the slip, the symptom and the neurosis as something more than the return of the repressed, or of things that once were conscious, and then expelled from consciousness; he sees them also as the still crude expression of new psychic contents which are attempting to rise into consciousness and which have no way of achieving this goal other than disturbing the existing psychological equilibrium. It is therefore insufficient to interpret an unwanted pregnancy as an unconscious wish for a child. The question is larger and more complex than that: the unconscious need does not have to be concerned with a child, and might instead be a question of a search for a situation of extreme conflict—and not necessarily as a source of suffering. We often search out the most difficult challenges, since without overcoming them we do not yet feel ourselves to have become adults. Such a pattern of behaviour may strike us as paradoxical or perverse, but it also belongs to the normal course of life. From a rational point of view, initiations into adulthood are usually quite wasteful—it is enough to remember such traditionally masculine initiations as going off to war—but that hardly decreases their symbolic charge: crossing such a threshold gives us the feeling of having reached completion and adulthood. And the clarity of this is directly propor-tionate to the threshold’s level of difficulty, danger and potential destructiveness. One can thus imagine a woman feeling an unconscious wish not for a child, but for a pregnancy, since pregnancies are connected with important images and expectations: pregnancy is the most powerful and archaic symbol of novelty and renewal. But there is also the possibility of another unconscious goal which has almost never been considered: an unwanted pregnancy could quite precisely serve the purpose of allowing a woman to have an abortion. Abortion itself could be the object of an unconscious wish, by virtue of being charged with a meaning of which until now we know nothing else. G.Devereux likewise sees the possibility that abortion itself might be a goal: ‘Some women cause themselves to become pregnant in order to be able to abort’ (Devereux 1976:383). But his thoughts remain bound to a Freudian scheme that reduces such women to pathological cases. In the examples he offers, the goals of the unconsciously desired abortions were always negative: punishment of the partner, self-punishment or a desire for castration; and in cases of repeated abortions, the woman’s goal was to show that she could not be castrated. No matter how interesting Devereux’s interpretations may be, they never depart from the field of pathology. This itself, moreover, confirms his fundamental presupposition that abortion is a neurotic response to a neurotic situation, always and inevitably traumatic. He sees pregnancy as a natural process of which the interruption can never be anything other than a brutal aggression. He thus, as well, refuses to recognize the socio-cultural relativity of his thesis, which passes a negative Christian judgement on all those traditional peoples who have practised ritual forms of abortion. And in strictly psychological terms, such a thesis also neglects a number of highly important perceptions. There are cases where a pregnancy is experienced not at all as a ‘normal process’ but rather as a violence, sickness or abnormality, and abortion is the route to liberation. Let us take our reflections further by searching out possible unconscious goals which would not be pathological. An unwanted pregnancy puts a woman in a trap. The very notion of ‘making a choice’ is likely to strike her as bizarre and impossible, since she has no desire for either of the roads that lie before her. The conflict is probably more intense

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

24

than anything in her previous experience. But can we say that finding access to the experience of something still unknown is exclusively reserved to the woman who resolves this plight by deciding to have a child? For those who decide instead to have an abortion, can one only hope that they will work their way through it psychologically, that they will enter and complete a state of mourning, and that they will manage to survive the event without having suffered too great a wound? Or do they also have a chance of finding their way into a previously unknown psychological condition which could never have come into existence without an abortion? And if so, can the achievement of this new and unknown condition justify the taking of a life? With repeated abortions, the mechanism would seem to be the contrary one: an action is compulsively repeated as though to make it easier to perform it again. Its repetition could derive from the fact that its fundamental goal remains elusive. A meaningless abortion is an abortion that will have to be repeated; and if the next is still without meaning, it will have to be repeated again. It’s as though each new abortion reformulates the hope of finally discovering its hidden meaning, and thus of reaching its implicit goal, in spite of the dangerous fact that this cycle of behaviour is driven by a worn-out mechanism that continues to function by virtue of inertia. The repetition compulsion would come to an end only when the woman had become aware of what she had been seeking in this wholly irrational yet resolute way. Now, however, before further confronting our specific theme—what an abortion may bring to light, if anything at all—we should look at some of the unconscious images connected with pregnancy.

7 UNCONSCIOUSLY DESIRED ‘Unconsciously you must have wanted it; otherwise you’d have been more careful about birth control.’ The psychologically sophisticated gynaecologist who makes such a statement waits in vain for a reply. The patient does not know what to say and has only the vague impression of having heard the tone before. In an earlier western epoch, it could have been that of the remark, ‘God certainly wanted it, since otherwise it would not have happened.’ Then, the woman could have got angry with God. Now, however, it seems that she is the person who wanted something. Since the discovery of the unconscious, it has become more difficult to make God responsible. But what did she want—a child? That seems unlikely, since she is now in the process of deciding to refuse to have one. Could it be that she only wanted a pregnancy?

PROOF OF FERTILITY When I saw the little black circle on the pregnancy test, I was frightened and happy at the same time: I was pregnant. Even though I knew I’d interrupt the pregnancy, I was proud of myself, and for a couple of hours I felt an inner security I had never known before. It was true: I was pregnant. It seemed like a miracle.

An awareness of one’s own fertility here arrives unexpectedly, ‘like a miracle’. Collective celebrations of a girl’s first menstruation are found almost universally in the traditional cultures, but are missing in modern western societies. We no longer have rituals that allow us to ‘know’ whether we are fertile or not. The medical books may explain that fertility shortly follows the first menstruation, but that fact is something of which we have no experience; the words with which we are offered such information do not make contact with our bodies and feelings. The arrival of those first few drops of blood means little at the psychological level; there is only a bit of queasiness and maybe the problem of things one can no longer do at a certain time of the month. The popular belief that menstruation is a period of ‘impurity’ that prohibits certain activities perhaps relates to a need for rituals and the perception of a suspended condition preceding a change. But precisely what it is that might be thought to change is far from clear, and the fantasies that surround the subject centre exclusively on hygiene.

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

26

There was a time when the passage from girlhood to womanhood was codified in rituals of initiation. The following two examples of puberty rites may help us to understand more clearly what is missing in the modern western world in the lives of young girls, no less than in those of already mature women. Bruce Lincoln describes a four-day ritual from the West Indies (Lincoln 1980). In the period before her first menstruation, the young girl was brought into the room set aside as a retreat for women experiencing their monthly flow. During the three days in which the girl was to remain there, in isolation, she was to follow the same rules of diet prescribed for menstruating women. One sees that the onset of menstruation was not considered as coming about ‘naturally’, whenever the time happened to be right. It was understood as ritually induced. When the initiated girl later experienced the onset of menstruation, the ritual in which she had participated was seen to be responsible for it. On the fourth day, a hut was constructed for further ceremonies. The girl was bathed in a pond, while her brother stood nearby with a spear pointed towards the sky, in order to hold evil spirits at bay. Then she cut a coconut in half and was led back to the room in which she had spent the previous three days. She was repeatedly purified, decorated and dressed in festive clothing, and afterwards led into the ceremonial hut, where she took her place on a bench and made an offering of rice to the heavens and the earth. Next, she was given a clay vase which contained a few small objects (coins, spices, pieces of charcoal) and was carefully sealed with a leaf and a string. The girl scattered rice over the vase, made a hole in the leaf that sealed it, and finally removed an object from it. The object she retrieved indicated the number of children she would have. This vase can be seen as a symbol of the uterus, and opening it can be seen as the loss of virginity, which the girl herself effected. Lincoln points out that the girl’s path into adulthood was relieved of all questions of fate, destiny, circumstance or caprice. The specific actions which were to turn her into a woman did not simply happen, but were prepared, controlled, organized and performed in a ritual context. The gesture of opening the vase also made it clear that the girl’s introduction to sexuality did not hinge on the intervention of any man. She herself was in control of her own body, of her own sexuality, and of her own capacity for reproduction, and by breaking the seal of the vase, she announced her autonomy to everyone present. Afterwards, she again received new clothing, her hands were washed with coconut milk, and a ‘Tali’—a leaf-shaped decoration in gold, on a white silk ribbon—was hung around her neck. A procession then led her into the open and she watered the roots of a coconut palm. This gesture concluded the ritual, and the girl was then led back to the room in which she had spent her three-day retreat. In another puberty ritual, practised among the Navahos and again reported by Lincoln, the girl undergoing initiation was visited by the tribe’s most important mythic figure: ‘The Woman Who Changes’. Songs, ablutions, massages and a clothing ceremony softened the girl’s body, so that it might be newly moulded. On each of the three following days, she was thrice to run a race along a determined stretch, and to grind maize for a large loaf of bread. On the fourth day, a group of men dug a large hole in which a fire was lighted and kept alive for the whole day. A loaf of bread dough, made partly of meal ground by the other women, and partly of the meal which the girl herself had ground, was then covered with earth and baked for the whole night. This was followed by a lengthy cycle of songs which announced the approach, step by step, of

Unconsciusly desired

27

‘The Woman Who Changes’. The twenty-fifth song signalled that she had finally arrived and was present. In a certain sense, the girl herself had turned into ‘The Woman Who Changes’. The ceremony then continued with still more singing and running until the group left the hogan and proceeded to the place where the loaf of bread had been baked. After careful presentation to the four cardinal directions, the loaf of bread was cut and eaten. Only the girl was allowed to eat none of it. Her hair was once again combed and her face painted with clay, and in turn she painted the faces of the other women. The painting songs were sung, and the girl’s body was massaged and ritually ‘moulded’ for a last time. Later, when all had departed, she took a piece of the loaf of bread and placed it in the hole. This piece belonged to the earth. Such a ritual must have made a powerful contribution to the strengthening of a girl’s identity. The information that a girl today receives about her own fertility from a medical manual remains on the surface of things, and the same can be said of that she receives about birth control. So it is unimportant, and not taken seriously. All she has is information, rather than a personally experienced knowledge of her own body. Women today have to face up alone to the lack of a ritual transition. The rites of passage that formed a typical part of traditional societies also served as guides; fear of a mysterious transformation was counterbalanced by the awareness that the community had always recognized and attributed a value to the new condition that followed it. But in the absence of an experience of initiation in which individual and collective emotions reciprocally confirm and reinforce one another, a little girl can remain precisely that even when marriage, children and a university degree are there to fill the void. Detaching oneself from parents is today a longer and more difficult process, and it shows more resemblance to a pendular movement between independence and regression than to an irreversible step that is taken once and for all. The unconscious search for proof of fertility by means of an act of self-initiation that takes the form of a pregnancy is not restricted to very young women; it can be seen to take place among women of any and all ages, and even among women who already have children. Pregnancy is charged with the archaic power to make them feel new and renewed: a feeling that flushes simultaneously throughout the body and the soul. Such a way of experiencing one’s womanly identity is a surrogate for a no longer extant rite of passage: unfortunately, however, it generally takes place at a level that is too unconscious, and in exclusively corporeal terms. At the conclusion of the pregnancy—no matter whether with an abortion or with the birth of a child—the woman in question finds herself again confronted with the void she felt before. The experience has not been definitive, and it asks to be repeated. Still other questions are connected with a woman’s relationship with her partner. At the start of a new relationship, a woman often inwardly feels herself to be a virgin; since she wants everything to start out anew, and to be herself a new woman, she once again raises the problem of proving her own fertility. A pregnancy amounts to a real no less than symbolic demonstration that the relationship can be fruitful, which is something the partners may secretly have doubted. The fact that such relationships often collapse as a result of an unwanted pregnancy shows the extent to which symbol and reality can grow confused: the desire was not for a child, but for self-renewal through the partner. There are also cases in which a woman’s search for proof of her own fertility can lead to a

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

28

constant sequel of pregnancies and children: but of children who as individuals were never desired. One might even see repeated abortions and the forced bearing of one child after another, which sometimes occurs, as constituting two aspects of a single problem. Both patterns of behaviour signal a difficulty in living out an essential part of a woman’s identity. After every abortion, as after every compulsory birth, what the woman was unconsciously seeking remains again unreached. And the reason for which she fails to achieve her goals is more than a question of a confusion of planes, where acting out supplants a process of consciousness; such a woman, indeed, is deeply afraid of a process of consciousness. She truly desires to become an adult and free herself from infantile illusions of omnipotence. But relinquishing such illusions would involve seeing and accepting her own limits: those of her body, her time, her power and her ability to love. For many women, the bearing of one child after another obliterates these limits: time and the woman’s sense of her own immortality stand magically still. The constant sense of renewal that comes in the wake of the repeated wonder of a new-born baby is a source of ceaselessly replenished vitality, fullness and power. But such a thoroughly inflated image of oneself as a never depletable fountain of life, as a goddess of creation, can only be held in place for as long as one is able to produce to more children; and when further production ceases to be possible, the image implodes, reverses itself and begins to wreak revenge: revenge on the woman herself no less than on her children, for whom there is insufficient space, both materially and spiritually. A colleague told me about a woman who always fell into profound depression when her children had to be weaned. She experienced pregnancy and the first stages of child care as a state of beatitude, satisfaction and completeness, of absolute and invincible well-being. As soon as this period came to an end, things invariably went so badly for her as to lead her immediately to plan a new pregnancy. Reasoned reflection allowed her to abandon this tactic after the birth of her third child. But when caring for this child reached the phase of demanding less energy and attention, she was none the less assailed by serious symptoms of anxiety. She entered analysis, and during the first two years of treatment repeatedly dreamed of being pregnant again. In these dreams she was always happy, at peace and in harmony with the world. She found it difficult to seek out the kind of happiness that derives from bringing psychic contents to light, rather than by way of giving birth to children. Lethargy and lack of self-confidence were a constant hindrance. Pregnancy and child-birth, on the other hand, were perfectly adapted to her regressive tendencies and could compensate for her lack of self-esteem. She could take advantage of the fact that pregnant women are allowed to be passive, and a future child was a perfect screen for the projection of wishes and fantasies. She would assure her child an open road towards everything which she herself would have wanted to do or to be.

THE EXPECTED CHANGE Let us take a step forward. We have seen an example of an unwanted pregnancy as the expression of an unconscious need to live through the very first moments—and only those—of a pregnancy. Another unconscious desire could be the wish to experience the positive aspects of motherhood as a state in its own right; motherhood, here, is defined

Unconsciusly desired

29

not by the fact of having a child, but by the changes we expect it to bring about within us. We expect maternity to transform us, and at the price of no great effort of our own. Such a hope finds its roots in the circumstance that maternity, once set in motion, proceeds by itself: it seems to be something of which every woman is capable. It is the one great initiatory event for all women in all cultures. It evokes a series of fantasies of empowerment that derive from a mythic, ‘matriarchal’ world in which the mother is the mistress of all life. Her vagina is the door to the transcendent. She gives and expunges life. She is the centre of the world. Modern western women, unsure of their roles, may not secretly desire to be venerated as the great mother. Our semi-conscious fantasies and the present-day form of this mythic universe find visualization in advertisements: the mother-to-be is placid, loving, smiling; she is free from all duties and has endless amounts of time. When she is not surveying baby clothes, she has her feet propped up on a chair and chats with her mother on the telephone. The right to veneration is wonderfully combined with regressive release from all possible problems. When reality then reveals itself to have nothing to do with such expectations—a reality where there is no such thing as veneration, and where motherhood is fraught with real problems—a woman’s disappointment can transform itself into anger towards everything and everyone around her. Yet one has been taken in not by any particular person, but mainly by a web of personal and collective fantasies. What makes these myths so false and unilateral lies partly in the lack of a moment of initiation that provides a profound introduction to the adult side of the reality of womanhood. Being a mother is only one facet of being a woman. The collective imagination establishes a fraudulent equivalence between the two, as though women never met with dramatic options in the course of creating their identities. Motherhood as the fulfilment of womanhood is blown up out of all proportion, and at the expense of all possible alternatives. These, for which there is no tradition of initiation, grow pale and lie in the background, since they do not involve the bodily changes that take place in a pregnancy, just as they do not revolve around the physical appearance of something new—the child; and these bodily, physical events are the facts that allow the illusion that maternity is a modification of the self, a ‘natural’ initiation. Looking at the lives of many women in analysis—women who have known the experience of pregnancy and motherhood, but on whom they have left no trace; women who continue in their fantasy lives to see themselves as little girls, and think of their children as extensions of themselves or as tender or inimical parental figures—one has every reason to wonder whether motherhood can truly be seen as an automatic source of something new and constructive; instead, it can seem like a violent repetition, with the roles inverted, of stories already experienced from the other side, in childhood. To entrust oneself to a fine maternal instinct is not enough; that may also have been damaged or perverted. That which traditional societies transmitted to adolescent women descended from the whole of the group, from a whole society; today, every individual mother transmits to her daughter a given body of ‘knowledge’ that derives entirely from her personal, limited experience. Our collective images are one-sided and fragmentary, often no more than simple splinters of feminine identity: the mother, the career woman, the lover, the partner, the feminist. The attempt to make all of these aspects coalesce, permitting them all to be

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

30

realized in one’s own life, seems to rank as the invention of a mode of psychology devoted to omnipotence. We desire self-transformation, partly owing to the unconscious need for the experience of initiation to which we have had no access, and partly owing to the natural inclination to change, which is part of the life of every human being. We unconsciously behave towards motherhood as though it were a certified route to a fundamental turning point: a woman can find herself pregnant not because she wants a child, but because she would like to be different, or better, stronger, more feminine, more complete; more accepted; more ‘herself’. Frequently, we are convinced that motherhood will effect some very deep change in us. At other times, there is no explicit conviction, but still we continue to expect such a change. These expectations may also play a role in mistakes in the use of birth control. There is a barely audible voice that whispers, ‘And if it happened?’ Of all the roles, frequently contrasting, which women today can assume, that of the mother is one of the few that bring no special feelings of guilt and enjoy universal approval. Even though nearly all of the world’s most pressing problems can be connected with the problem of overpopulation, a pregnant woman has few criticisms to fear from society. As a future mother, she continues—in some ways—to be sacred. The fact that she will then be abandoned to her child and her own devices is another story. Here again, a woman is duped by the collective imagination. Maternity holds the heat of thousands of lives already lived, and pregnancy returns us to a former epoch of civilization, when meaning derived from the constant repetition of the same gestures, and in accordance with a rhythm that kept monotony at bay. The absence of external stimuli during a day spent with a nursing baby can provoke the sensation of living a history-less present that remains still unacquainted with causes and effects: when night falls, you heat the milk, and when you heat the milk, night falls. The world is defined by the custody afforded to the nursing baby. This condition of almost ‘non-identity’ is extraordinarily pleasant for some women: they give up reading the papers, they sleep a lot, they turn their attention away from their friends or their partner, and all for the sake of other mothers whom they may not even know. Even seriously neurotic women frequently feel themselves free from all inner conflict during pregnancy and the first months of motherhood; afterwards they frequently remark that this was the finest period of their lives. Others find it frightening and bring it to a close as quickly as possible, returning to their normal lives and entrusting the baby to the care of others. A woman who has never been pregnant has no clear awareness of any of this, but she can none the less possess an inarticulate ‘knowledge’ of it. The more her life is charged with conflict, the greater her nostalgia for such a state will be. We know that difficult situations sometimes ‘lead’ to unwanted pregnancies, not only as requests for help, but also as expressions of a need for harmony, for clear identity, for union with the other, for self-renewal.

THE RETURN TO INFANCY The desire to have a child is frequently related to the desire to turn back into a child. Many women who want at all costs to have a baby, and who dawdle in front of window displays of cribs and scales and prams would finally go home if they could then settle

Unconsciusly desired

31

down themselves in such a brightly coloured nursery room. It is surely no accident that so many of the objects on which they lavish attention—the little embroidered gowns, the curtains for the cradle, the complicated pushchairs and all the impressive toys (like the large, cuddly animals with which no child would play before the age of 4 or 5)—would be superfluous to a new-born child, whereas they are not at all so to an adult’s regressive fantasies. Parents who as children were strictly brought up delight in the idea of finally being able to make up for lost opportunities; yet that seldom comes about, sadly enough, since their interiorized rigidity entangles itself in their relationship with their child and attempts, in lateral ways which they cannot see, to reaffirm itself. The so-called joys of pregnancy are made all the more enjoyable by the fact that the surrounding environment accepts them. ‘If they did not exist, we’d have to invent them’, a woman once remarked to me. But it is only for a very short while that we can behave in such a way, like little children—that we can delegate so many responsibilities to others. The regressions brought about by pregnancy and motherhood also play a role at the biological level: the maintenance of a state of symbiosis with the nursing child demands a certain abaissement du niveau mental. But being a mother—at one and the same time, or shortly afterwards—also demands self-consciousness, starting at least from the moment when the regressed mother sees that she is still overweight, that her sex life has disappeared, that her child’s behaviour is ever less similar to what she expected, and that she feels taken in. The child may even become a rival with whom she competes for the privilege of living in a state of infantility. The solution is sometimes—despite the apparent paradox—to have another child. When we haven’t understood an event’s real goals and purposes—just as in the case of abortions—we repeat it.

THE ABILITY TO CREATE Still other fantasies are connected with pregnancy. Something moves and grows within our body, without our active participation, and we feel ourselves charged with meaning, wisdom and order. We observe and listen to ourselves, in fascination; we follow the stepby-step development; we see ourselves as the site of a miracle in progress. Many women thus begin to admire and have confidence in their own bodies. Others are terrorized by their new physical shape and experience the change as oppressive. If confidence is the predominant feeling, the women experiences herself as standing at the centre of an incomparable event: she is creating a human being. Every other creative activity requires a higher degree of active intervention, more will power, and greater solidity of the Ego. One only has to think of all the discipline that has to be deployed to still the various disturbances that would otherwise disrupt a creative effort performed with our minds or our hands: telephone calls, housework, and so forth. External disturbances are quite reduced during a pregnancy; one will more probably be troubled by the distance at which one finds oneself from others; one is likely to doze off at the first sign of tiredness, even in the course of a conversation. Other people’s demands—which we normally find hard to reject, since they too have made a contribution to the ways in which we have learned to structure our personalities—grow less important. One finds one’s identity in the pregnancy itself and is less zealous about

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

32

trying to please. The body helps us to be ‘egoistic’, and to adhere to a principle of selfprotective self-limitation that formerly would have lain beyond our dreams: now you can say ‘no’, because you are pregnant. An analogous retreat in the name of writing or painting is incomparably more difficult. What one wants to create by writing or painting is far less concrete than a future child: it is only a question of ideas or desires. Women who find their identity in ‘being for the other’ find creative activity especially difficult. If they take an activity more seriously than they take the men for whom they customarily live, they grow subject to fears and feelings of guilt: fears of being abandoned, of remaining undefined, of ceasing to exist. Discovering an identity by means of constructing something with their own hands and minds is a new and difficult cultural process for them. The result of every other form of creativity depends on a process of tenacious elaboration. Things are much easier with a pregnancy, since the body does most of the work. So a pregnancy cannot in fact be compared to the other forms of creativity, but our fantasies superimpose them on one another. We can see this, for example, in the sense of personal failure that many women experience when faced with the thought of giving birth to a retarded child, or simply to a child of the ‘wrong’ sex. They are basically convinced that they themselves have put the baby together; and if something is wrong with the baby, it can only be their fault. Such fantasies might strictly be spoken of as examples of psychic inflation. But they can also be imagined as exerting considerable influence on a child, and their implicit omnipotence could give a child an additional level of vitality. One of the worst experiences a child can have is a parent who has no fantasies about him or her. If the need for creative self-expression conflicts with too many inner and external obstacles, the various levels of creativity—the physical and the metaphysical—are likely to grow confused with one another; and this confusion is facilitated by their symbolic relationship with one another. There is the case, for example, of the university student who, after years of study and sacrifice, suddenly finds herself pregnant on the eve of her last important examination; or of the woman who has at last decided to end her affair with a married man, and who then discovers that she is pregnant; or of the journalist to whom the same thing happens after finally receiving a much-sought assignment as a foreign correspondent. ‘I’m pregnant’, in cases like these, has the ring of ‘I’m free’. The woman is in flight from the role imposed by the new life that stands before her, from her own realization as a creative human being. The mode of personal renewal for which the woman was preparing herself is suddenly replaced by an entirely different form, to be effected by having a child. Cultural creativity is supplanted by biological creativity, which promises liberation from an inner conflict, in spite of all the attendant external ones. Such a situation can work out satisfactorily if having a child becomes a part of living a more responsible life, both inwardly and outwardly; but it is sure to go desperately wrong if motherhood leads mainly to a life of frustration, or to continuing to live ambiguously. Pregnancy is also connected with fantasies of power. Pregnant women are often seen as potent and menacing, in the sense that they represent a door to the great beyond. At the most mundane and banal level, this can mean that a woman is finally more important than her mother-in-law, sister, best friend or partner.

Unconsciusly desired

33

The ways in which men react to pregnancy are often ambivalent; fascination, aggressivity and the impulse to flight alternate with one another, often to the great disappointment of the woman involved, who more than anything else was hoping to be relieved lovingly of all sorts of problems. The environment reacts accordingly. The future father is given a friendly slap on the back and advised to look up and bolster his courage. The future mother, quite differently, receives no end of contented smiles. She has no need for any such advice; she is already an image of all the courage she could possibly need— or at least that is what the cliché would have us believe. She and the child are one and have the right to be adored and protected. For the future father—if he takes his situation seriously—this means the assumption, from the start, of new responsibilities. The father thinks of the child, even before its birth, as a ‘You’ and he asks himself, in the course of sleepless nights, whether and how he will manage to set up a relationship with the child. The mother, on the other hand, already sees herself with her child in her arms; there is no possible problem of establishing a relationship, since it has often already set itself up as symbiosis. The conscious effort that the father has to make from the start comes later for the mother, when a symbiotic relationship is no longer enough. Pregnancy can be used as a public demonstration of a woman’s power. Such power, in the past, was often overwhelming: remember those royal dynasties for whom the lack of an heir meant the loss of everything. The unconscious motivation for an unwanted pregnancy may sometimes lie in a desire for power, and in such cases the sense of failure and personal impotence which ensues if the pregnancy is not carried to term is particularly grave. And if the motivation is not then brought to consciousness, and if another way out of an inner sense of inferiority and impotence cannot be found, one can expect the event to repeat itself. Men too are known to obey an unconscious drive to force a woman into repeated pregnancies, as a way both of satisfying regressive desires and of affirming their sexual potency, but without at all desiring to have a child. A man can also give in to the unconscious desire to neutralize a woman who as a sexual object fills him with anxiety, and finally to make himself the son of the mother he thus creates.

FOOLPROOF CONTRACEPTION: MEANINGLESS SEXUALITY When we pay due attention to all of these largely unconscious attitudes to pregnancy and motherhood, it is easier to understand the enormous ambivalence with which women relate to birth control. ‘Perfect’ birth control effectively annihilates all these vague and ill-defined unconscious aspirations, excluding the short cuts and routes of escape that we always find attractive, even if they also cause us pain. Absolutely perfect birth control— 100 per cent safe—is a frightening thought: the possibilities of rational planning which it offers make us feel hemmed in. It marks the end of the mystery, the end of all risk, all subterfuge, all doubt. ‘Do you or do not you want a child?’ The alternatives grow just that brutally simple. Large numbers of women avoid such a question. Is an answer truly possible, in the light of all the fantasies which the question calls into play? Many women neither want nor are able to answer it, vaguely feeling that the terms of the choice are too rigid, and that such a question demands a plane of self-awareness far higher than the one on which they normally move. It often turns out that a woman cannot ‘tolerate’ the surest

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

34

means of birth control—the pill. But what, precisely, is such a woman unable to tolerate: the physiological alterations, or the knowledge of being sterile? Many women reject the hormonal stability that results from the use of the pill, insisting that it muffles their sensibilities and that they miss the oscillations of tone that come from the rhythms of the menstrual cycle, as well as the big changes in mental and physical conditions which it sometimes provokes. The pill often causes a shift in a woman’s sexual needs, in the workings of her body and her mind, in her fantasies, in her interest in relationships with others. The experience of being ‘variable’—but also of stability within this, of knowing that the cycle will repeat itself the following month, and that things laid aside can be returned to, at precisely the point where one left them—is an important aspect of the experience of being a woman. The sensation of having turned sterile as a result of the use of the pill is more than a simple fantasy, and is not concerned exclusively with the possibility of a pregnancy. It’s a question as well of the creative potential contained in the highs and lows of the changes induced by the menstrual cycle. There are women who are particularly efficient and productive during the second half of their cycle, thanks to its being typified by a considerable charge of aggressivity; when it then comes to an end with the start of menstruation, they become more passive and no longer understand the need to give themselves so much to do. Other methods, like the coil, have no effect on the hormone system. And the coil also has the ‘advantage’ of not being 100 per cent reliable. For some women, that is a good reason not to employ it; but for others—more ambivalent on the subject of whether or not to have a child—it is an equally good reason to prefer it. Its 5 per cent risk leaves room for the workings of destiny; if you end up pregnant in spite of the coil, that means it ‘had’ to happen. In general terms, there is no lack of reliable techniques of contraception which are also easy to use; there is a lack, instead, of clearer and more conscious attitudes that would free the practice of birth control from some of its ambiguities. Paradoxically, the methods which are easiest to use do not stimulate this kind of clarity; they do not promote a conscious relationship between a woman and her body.* The fundamental problem continues to lie in the simpleminded presumption that rational thought is by itself sufficient for directing birth control; we thus run the risk of overlooking the importance of more unconscious thoughts, which sooner or later will in any case make themselves felt. It would be wise, for example, to ask ourselves about the ways in which our feelings about sexuality and birth control intertwine with and condition one another; and in doing so, we should turn our attention not so much to actual sexual acts as to our sexual fantasies, to the psychic expression of sexuality. What relationship exists between birth control and sexuality in our imagination? That, after all, is the faculty which finally determines our actions. A.Guggenbühl (Guggenbühl-Craig 1976) asserts that sexuality is the most archaic of all areas of human activity, the one that most refuses to be tamed and civilized. Sexuality is rife with imaginary representations of fecundation, entirely independent of its actually taking place. Wherever sexuality is constrained to follow a set of rules, it attempts to find some other route of self-expression. If it behaves irrationally, the same should be expected of contraception, which of course is linked with it. Risk is a part of the excitation, and sexual excitation has unconscious and archaic connections with images of fecundating and being fecundated. At the level of symbol, this in any case expresses the

Unconsciusly desired

35

desire for the relationship itself to be fecund and give rise to spiritual life. In the moment of sexual excitation people are often guided—at one and the same time, and usually without being able to distinguish between the two levels—by a physiological impulse and by a psychic image of a generative union; and it is far from self-contradictory if such an image has finally nothing to do with a real hope of having a real child; it is simply that the real and symbolic planes always seem to intermingle. This contributes to the unconscious fascination of the union, which is generative at both these levels, and which reaffirms and sums itself up in the thought that ‘in any case, nothing wrong can come of it’. Fuelled by the power of symbol, our fantasies speak a secret, omnipotent language: ‘My [our] feelings are so profound, our tie so strong, that something as small and insignificant as birth control belongs in the distant background; nothing can happen to me [to us]; in our union we are divine.’ It’s not easy to imagine sexuality without this irrational component; it would no longer count as the great font of regeneration. Contraception, on the other hand, is rational and technical, and definitely not erotic. So it is not hard to understand why it often takes place after sex, rather than before—in extreme cases with abortion. For better or worse, that is the way things stand. A form of birth control that acted afterwards could perhaps be considered more rational, and it would certainly be more efficacious, since it would not be involved with the sexual act itself. It would respect the irrationality of sexuality, while also respecting, at a later moment, rational choice; first the feast, and then the cleaning up. But many people see the fecundated ovum as already, immediately, a human being; and their moral sensibility declares a retroactive method of birth control inadmissible. Is it possible to respect the irrationality of sex, and not to diminish its regenerative character, even while preventing fecundation? Does effective birth control always have to result in boring and programmed sex? Rationally, we can hold sexuality and the desire to have a child apart from one another. For our animal component—the part of us that turns to the other in search of the excitement that is a part of the period of fecundity, or of what instinct experiences as the period of ‘heat’—careful and certain contraception is a sign of meaningless relationships. At the instinctual and biological levels, sexuality serves the purpose of fecundation. It does not allow itself to be civilized. But the psyche can also be more cunning than instinct: even if the deepest part of sexual desire is concerned with the impulse to fecundate and be fecundated, the psyche has ways of skirting the conclusion that biological fecundation necessarily has to take place. Fecundation, for the psyche, can also be symbolic, allowing instinct to find satisfaction on a non-material plane. Guggenbühl sees the symbols in sexual fantasies as marking the stages of an individual’s development, and this thought can be understood as follows: a creative sexual relationship that produces new psychic life is one in which it is possible to attempt to realize one’s fantasies, and especially those which most contrast with ‘the rest’ of our personalities, and which we therefore experience as painful. It is not enough for a couple to repeat the roles and games they have set up together, or to find new sources of corporeal excitement; we have to call up interior images and fantasies that lie beyond wilful intention and that manage, much like dreams, to present consciousness with messages from an independent source—messages that grow clearer the more one takes them seriously. Since these images are connected with the symbolism of psychic growth—and thus with new responsibilities, even if they present themselves as facets of a game—they can at first excite anxiety and discomfort, and it requires a certain courage to

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

36

realize them with one’s partner. Whenever sexuality ceases to relate to our fantasies, it becomes repetitive and technical, and can only be kept alive by an ever higher level of physical excitation. If one manages, on the other hand, to employ sexuality as a way of creating psychic life, ambivalence about contraception certainly diminishes. Biological fecundation and renewal by means of a pregnancy and a child cease to be necessary, since psychic and symbolic renewal have already taken place. Instinct, which aimed for biological fecundation, has found expression and satisfaction in the psyche; the encounter itself has been fecund, body and soul are aware of it as a part of their rapture. To put it as simply as possible, an intense and stable sexual life can create the unconscious conditions for a correct use of birth control. A dissatisfying sexual life that brings no psychic life with it is likely instead to produce a need for tangible, biological fecundation, for pregnancy, for a child: and not, unfortunately, as a result of having evolved towards a readiness for new responsibilities. The need arises from the lack of such a course of evolution; since sexuality has proved incapable of generating something new at the level of symbol, it has to give expression to something concrete and exterior. The notion that the psychic lives of women are marked by a strong connection between sexuality and mental images of pregnancy and birth, and that indeed they reciprocally condition one another, finds a measure of confirmation in the work of Helene Deutsch, one of Freud’s most influential students and the author of the first psychoanalytic writings dealing with female sexuality. Her attempt to describe the differences between the male and female experience of sexuality has been criticized, but it remains a point of departure for the formulation of further questions. Deutsch’s theories centre on the notion that the sexual act as experienced by men concludes with ejaculation, and that the imaginative plane of male sexual experience dims in the wake of the sexual act at much the same speed as corporeal excitation subsides. For women, on the other hand, from a psychic point of view, the sexual act is nothing more than the first half of a two-part whole; the second half relates to pregnancy and birth: ‘I find confirmation in these facts for my theory that to the woman the act of parturition represents the conclusion of the sex that began in coitus… Thus we have here a process that is divided into two phases only by a time interval’ (Deutsch 1944:82, 81). Deutsch’s view would help to explain the fact that many women abruptly and completely lose interest in their partners as soon as they give birth to a child. Their libido directs itself to the child as a new love object and Ego ideal, as though the erotic relationship begun with the partner were now to be continued with the child. The function of the male partner has simply found its final fulfilment; and his unaltered sexual interest—his lack of comprehension for the new situation—becomes nearly an annoyance. A clear example can be found in the case of a couple who had had no sexual intercourse for two full years after the birth of their first child. When the husband finally decided to broach and discuss the subject, the woman replied, ‘I’d feel as though [the name of the child]—I’d feel as though I were betraying him’. It is important to understand that this is more than any simple question—as one sees it among animals—of the assertion of the supremacy of the maternal instinct with respect to the mating instinct. It also means that unconscious images of pregnancy and child-birth are intimately connected with women’s sexual desires and with their ability to experience orgasm. Unconscious or half-conscious images of pregnancy (the feeling of fulfilment is

Unconsciusly desired

37

tantamount to feeling oneself filled with something) and child-birth (the creation of something with a life of its own) determine a woman’s interest in sexuality and direct her interest in a man. And this would also imply that the degree of satisfaction which a woman experiences in the sexual act is in direct proportion to the degree in which the act of coitus contains and expresses a child-birth fantasy. It’s clear as well, at the corporeal level, that such fantasies find more complete expression in vaginal orgasm, than in any other kind. Helene Deutsch is here quite categorical: she sees mature sexuality and vaginal orgasm as synonymous with one another, and looks upon all other forms of sexual stimulation as belonging to puberty experiences. Such a point of view might indeed be criticized, and Deutsch refers only to heterosexual sexuality, but here there would be no point in a discussion of vaginal as opposed to clitoral orgasm, since it remains unimportant for our theme. Yet another of Deutsch’s ideas is crucial: the notion that satisfying vaginal sexuality is related to motherhood. Deutsch insists that ‘the assumption by the vagina of primacy in the sexual functions is associated with a maternal libidinal attitude of the woman’ (Deutsch 1944:67). She also describes the vagina as a potential ‘duplication’ of the female self: [The vagina] becomes a ‘second Ego’, a miniature of the Ego, just as the penis to the man. If the woman succeeds in establishing this maternal function of the vagina by renouncing the claim of the clitoris to be a penis surrogate, she has completed the development to womanhood…. This maternal attitude to the man in coitus assumes a completely successful sexual development. (Deutsch 1944:67) The least that Deutsch allows us to say is that vaginal sexuality plays an entirely special role in the way a woman perceives and feels about herself. Vaginal sexual fulfilment implies that a woman is psychically ready to open herself to ‘the other’, to the unknown: that she is ready to take it into herself and to make it a part of the fantasy of giving birth. The psychic challenge is greater here than in any of the forms of masturbatory sexual stimulation, since it also involves the risk of discovering a feeling of interior emptiness. Deutsch, moreover, sees the workings of a child-birth fantasy in the fact that women feel the need to prolong the sexual act by ‘staying together’ for a while. The ensuing moments of tender corporeal contact are tantamount to cuddling with the child that the woman’s unconscious fantasies tell her she has just conceived: Woman’s wish to retain the penis in her body in coitus includes not only penis envy but also the tendency to continue oneness with the child-man. Woman’s tender nestling after coitus corresponds psychologically to a state of pregnancy in which the woman—equating man with child— unconsciously believes herself to be, and in which she wishes to remain, while the man after the relief of tension tends rather to feel the need for sleep and to be alone. (Deutsch 1944:67)

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

38

The most interesting implication of this argument is that one of the conditions for satisfying feminine sexuality lies in the woman’s ability to experience her partner as her child: or in her ability to experience the penis her vagina embraces as something which she herself has created. No such experience can possibly take place unless the man is loved and accepted as a whole person, since otherwise he could not function as proxy for the woman’s child. This also helps to explain why women generally do not separate sexuality from love: vaginal sexuality involves a woman’s most intimate experience of herself, as expressed through her ideal image of the mother-child relationship. If it is true that satisfying vaginal sexual experience and a profound experience of the self are intimately connected with the fantasy of giving birth, the converse should also hold true: when vaginal sexuality remains incompletely awakened, a woman has less possibility of experiencing and giving expression to child-birth and mother-child fantasies. This thought, moreover, is confirmed by the fact that a woman’s need to remain cosily together with her partner is markedly less conspicuous after sexual activities which are mutually masturbatory. The woman’s excitement sinks more quickly, like the man’s, and her experience has more to do with a feeling of her own independence. Vaginal excitement, on the other hand, is connected with the need to embrace and surround what her body has taken into itself, holding it within her and allowing it to exercise an aftereffect, finally to the point of becoming a symbol of something which she herself has created. And this need finds possible satisfaction in vaginal orgasm. From a physiological point of view, the vaginal and uterine contractions that typify vaginal orgasm show a marked similarity to birth pangs and thus help a woman’s psyche to effect a fusion of coitus and child-birth. But what happens to a woman’s child-birth fantasies without vaginal sexuality? Are they simply absent, or are they repressed and therefore prone to seek some other path into consciousness? In the latter case, one would cease to see a simple coincidence in the fact that so many women who have found themselves with unwanted pregnancies offer no reports of satisfying sexuality. Such women found it impossible to experience an unconscious child-birth fantasy in the act of coitus, but the fantasy was none the less present and able to demand concrete expression. The conscious attitude of ‘I do not want a child’ was overwhelmed by the unconscious drive of ‘I want to create something’. These reflections offer roundabout confirmation of the supposition that satisfying sexuality and a good relationship between a woman and her partner present a certain protection against ‘mistakes’ and ‘failures’ in the use of contraceptives. Perhaps we are still too immature: still not ready, either sexually or psychologically, for an adult form of birth control. The premises for truly avoiding abortion would lie in the existence of conditions which foster full and healthy sexual lives, and in a far higher level of self-awareness, both of which seem Utopian aspirations. But the general problem remains: can and must abortion be prevented? And what would its prevention imply?

NOTE * In the context of alternative medicine, there is currently a proposal for a method of contraception based entirely on breathing exercises and calisthenics, to be performed after the eighteenth day of the cycle. These exercises—which mainly consist of abdominal contractions—provoke the menstrual flow, whether or not there has been a fecundation. This

Unconsciusly desired

39

method was discovered by Aviva Steiner and was registered with the United Nations in 1964. The results that the coil entrusts to a technical device are here obtained by the individual woman’s will power and self-awareness: they depend on her monthly decision not to be pregnant. No other method brings us so close to the perception of the female body as the door to life and death. The performance of these exercises depends on an act of the will and can be compared to an individually practised ritual.

8 INITIATION AND MATERNITY The use of the word ‘initiation’, and of its adjective ‘initiatory’, has spread so rapidly in psychological language as to make one wonder whether perhaps these terms are used to indicate too many things at the same time. On the other hand, this terminology has pulled various modes of behaviour which otherwise seem incomprehensible and irrational into a more general context and given them a meaningful origin. The attitudes of adolescents who seek out situations of grave danger, or, more specifically, experiences of death and regeneration through drugs, seem, for example, to suggest that they are unconsciously staging those initiatory proofs of courage which in traditional societies reinforced identity and turned them into adults. As others have already demonstrated (see Zoja 1985), attempts to achieve an initiatory experience through the use of drugs almost always fail, since they invert the course of the experience of initiation. They do not depart from a symbolic experience of death and then conclude with subsequent regeneration: it is quite the other way around. They first of all supply an illusory sense of regeneration that results from the effects of the drug, and then slowly approach a real danger of death. Anthropologists draw a distinction between general initiations (rites of passage from adolescence to adulthood) and specific ones (entry into a particular group, such as the shamans or the warriors). But this second class of initiations, finally, is not much different from the first, except in terms of more demanding and dramatic psychic and physical trials. Everything leads us to suppose the existence of a great, unsatisfied need for initiation in modern western society. The modern world has expunged all rites, and supports and promotes only those forms of rational behaviour which show immediate, visible efficacy. We now have nothing more than fragments and reminiscences of the rituals which in every traditional society were linked with the principal stages of human existence—birth, sexuality, marriage, death; and such meagre fragments no longer hold the power to facilitate spiritual passage from one phase of life to another. A 17-year-old girl, whose parents had always been extremely careful to respect her wishes and points of view and to encourage her, whenever possible, to reach her own decisions, once remarked to me, ‘The grown-ups continually ask me questions, they want to know what I think, they want to hear my opinions on things; but, as for me, I’d like to have someone who’d tell me stories about some of the things I’d like to hear about.’ This is more than simply a regressive wish for a granny who rocks in a chair while relating all sorts of fairy tale; this young girl’s statement also voices a need for direct and individual guidance in her encounter with reality. The puberty rites and orally transmitted myths of tribal societies were in many ways capable of satisfying such a need: there was no demand for anything new or individual, the rites were clear and previously determined,

Initiation and maternity

41

and every person’s task was to turn into an incarnation of its previously established givens. There was no expectation of self-realization; one strove to realize tradition. The longing of today’s modern western young people for something given and preestablished is now so great that some allow themselves to be mesmerized by nearly any set of codes and conventions. But since ritual guidance lies outside the world of consumer merchandise, many young people receive from society no more than a helterskelter accumulation of information which they do not know where to put or how to order. They group together and see nothing but their own reflections in their peers. Transmission of knowledge and experience from one generation to the next belongs to an irretrievable past. There is nothing that the old can be expected (or expect) to know, and the young remain trapped in insecurity. The only form of ‘guidance’ which is universally distributed, collective, ever present and self-consistent, with words and images that accompany us in constant repetition everywhere we go, is advertising. And its content, no matter the product it peddles, always hinges on a single and eternally powerful promise: this panacea (this toothpaste, this trip or this underwear) will make you different— younger, richer, more successful, more intelligent. Where today do we find the mature individuals who are ready to reply, ‘But I’m looking for a different difference’? Advertising directs its message to one of the human being’s most ancient spiritual needs: the need for change or self-transformation, the need to transcend one’s own existence. The more unconscious this remains, the more surely we react as though hypnotized by the promises of advertising, purchasing the objects it ceaselessly presents as indispensable for change. These promises are particularly potent for the young, since they experience the desire for self-transformation at a truly instinctual level, and its power as such is irresistible: young people want to and must become different from what they already are, and they do so, even at times at the cost of their lives—because something inside them delivers the message that a life untouched by initiation is worse than no life at all. Rituals cannot be created artificially; they have to develop gradually in a unified, selfconsistent system of life that explicitly attributes value to a code of symbols. In a world which has lost the sense of the sacred, this dimension of symbol has an archaeological quality, or that of scattered fragments of a by-gone culture whose meaning has been forgotten. An individual can sometimes rediscover it in certain special moments of personal experience, but it does not easily have the status of a collectively experienced event. Rites of passage are subject to the same rules as all rites: the mechanisms at work within them cannot be programmed intentionally. It follows, conversely, that spontaneous initiations which prove to be effective are never the result of premeditated, rational aims: their roots are in a general faith in symbolic values. Traditional initiations have ceased to exist in modern society. So the best we can do is to think of certain situations as somehow initiatory or ‘initiatic’. ‘Initiation’ itself, in the context of the modern world, has nothing to which to refer, if we hope to be clear and precise. Initiation, properly understood, has a number of basic and specific qualities: it is a sacred event, it involves an encounter with death, and it is no less irreversible than inevitable. Initiations mark transitions that permit no return, whereas in a modern society the decision to enter a group (even the priesthood) is never irrevocable. There are no such things as moments of transition for which there are no alternatives. Traditional initiation was something from

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

42

which one could not draw back; puberty rites were obligatory; the shaman, the medicine man, was forced by a vision to assume his role, asking himself no questions about the sort of career it might be best to follow, as we do today when we leave school. Freely made decisions are a part of our present-day, secular way of life. Less information is available about the initiations of women and the rituals involved. They are believed to have been less rigidly organized than the highly structured trials of courage to which male adolescents were subjected, since they in any case reflected the rhythm of physiological life: the appearance of menstruation, the first pregnancy, the birth of the first child. But surely they imparted a lesson on the specific kinds of strength that women have to possess, and their code is already inscribed in the natural course of things. Initiation also bore different consequences for women. After initiation, women remained within the world to which they had always belonged—that of women and children—whereas males forever abandoned it, and precisely by way of their rites of initiation. The initiations of men and women lay on two different planes. This difference is made quite clear in Gehrts’s report (Gehrts 1985:24) on the Papua of New Guinea: This rite makes use of a screen of leaves to divide the whole world— which is ‘the house of the world’ and the adjacent part of the forest—into two parts. The men—the initiated men and the boys who are about to be initiated—stand to one side of it, the women and the children on the other. The screen is traversed by two beams, which represent the tribe, or, better, its two halves or complementary poles. On the men’s side, the beams are held up by sticks, on the women’s side they rest on the ground…. The metaphysical and anthropological meaning of this grandiose scene leaves no room for doubt: existence on the men’s side is temporal and full of tension, as a result of belonging to the realm of initiation; the women’s side has nothing to do with initiation and belongs instead to a realm of eternity and endless calm. Male initiation demands qualities that involve self-awareness and solidity of the Ego: men have to act, enter into battle, make decisions. But there are also ways in which they have to be passive in the face of their vision of themselves: they have to be able to abandon themselves to the experience of death that initiation involves. Initiation is the experience of the transcendent, the acceptance of the obligation to remain in touch with it, and to submit to it. Rites of initiation into womanhood, as already stated, are less emphatic, since the lives of women are clearly marked by a series of essential biological events that automatically place them in contact with the sphere of the transcendent; one finds, indeed, that women are not infrequently venerated as its symbolic incarnation. The fact that a girl has reached adulthood finds its manifestation in physical changes: it counts as the work of nature. Things proceed more abstractly for men; the stages of their lives are determined by the reaching of particular ages, and by acts of volition and consciousness. If female initiation was mainly connected with the bodily changes that occur during pregnancy, and then with giving birth, we might imagine that women today find it easier than men to feel themselves to be ‘initiates’, or psychologically mature. Rites and rituals are historically and socially variable, whereas physiology is always and everywhere the

Initiation and maternity

43

same. So let us ask ourselves whether motherhood, as experienced today, can satisfy a few of the distinctive criteria of a rite of passage. Maternity in the traditional world did not represent a choice between possible alternatives. It was nothing less than the purpose to which a woman was destined as a female human being. Becoming an adult was synonymous with motherhood, and exceptions were a disgrace, unless they derived from a vocation as a priestess or shaman. This first criterion—the absence of alternatives—does not play a part in current western conceptions of motherhood: one can choose to have a child or not. A life without children is today a real possibility, is subject to no (explicit) social disapproval, surely not explicitly, and imposes no obligation to enter a convent. Another of the fundamental principles of initiation was the symbolic experience of death. To what extent today can medically assisted child-birth be considered an encounter with death, either as a concrete danger, or as the symbolic death of a woman’s previous childhood personality? Death in child-birth is now a remote possibility; and even pain, which can involve a death-like sense of laceration, is avoided as much as possible. After the birth of a child, there is still another choice which a modern woman can exercise: she can decide to nurse her baby—living out months of reciprocal dependency with her child, and turning her child into her principal occupation—or she can entrust the child to a nursery school and return to the life she lived before, virtually unchanged, or at least with few truly important modifications. The psychic transformation that maternity might bring about is thus reduced, if not almost wholly outflanked; motherhood involves no sacrifice—no symbolic putting to death—of the free young woman. One desires a transformation, but only as though it were a kind of consumer good, and one refuses to pay the price for it: the experience of mutual physical dependency in nursing (consider, for example, the astounding fact that the abundance of a mother’s milk grows in direct proportion to the quantity of milk her baby drinks); the repetitive activities involved in caring for and nursing an infant (activities which soon settle down into a non-reflexive, archaic rhythm which is far more conditioning than anything one might have planned); the abandonment of all the freedoms that previously found their aims in the outside world, and which now withdraw into an inner space. If one avoids the first steps of motherhood—the allowing oneself to be completely absorbed by a baby’s needs, creating the forms of a rite while likewise obeying an instinct—one also relinquishes the first phase of what might prove a deep self-transformation. One now has a child, but has not yet become a mother. Some women experience this initial period as nothing but work and endless chores, since instinct does not come to their aid. They do not begin to turn into mothers until a good deal later, when they can start to talk with the child and to undertake activities in which they are both involved. Another essential characteristic of an initiation was its irreversibility. This means, in a certain sense, that everything that formerly existed is dead; and it thus takes us back to what was said above. Physiological events are always of such a nature. The onset of menstruation is irreversible, as is the symbolic importance of the first pregnancy: that pregnancy can be interrupted, but the next one will no longer be the first, the first proof of fecundity. Maternity, obviously, is again irreversible: even the death of the child cannot change it. But any number of women are none the less afraid of this feeling that ‘things will never be the same again’. It seems to threaten to chisel itself on the tombstone of their previous personalities. They therefore try to make it clear that the

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

44

personalities they have always had are still alive and well, and unchanged: as stated before, they throw themselves back into their work, pretending that virtually nothing has changed. The feeling of being involved in something sacred was again of great importance in the experience of initiation, and one may wonder if any such feeling remains a part of the modern experience of motherhood. In Chapter 7 I spoke of the great unconscious expectations for initiatory change that are connected with maternity. Such expectations found a certain justification in the past, but they now have little to do with the lives of women who live out the roles presented by a highly complex and specialized civilization. Pregnancies that trigger a self-transformation are a fairly remote possibility, and depend on a number of factors. Such changes are not spontaneous, and do not take place overnight; like every other profound transformation, they result from a slow and gradual process. And maternity no less frequently supplies an apparent justification for an entirely different phenomenon: for an ever more radical and permanent exile into the world of infantility. In conclusion, maternity can offer initiatory access to an adult form of womanhood, a process of which a higher level of consciousness is an important element. But on the other hand, at odds with our unconscious expectations, this does not always or necessarily take place. The greatest probability of such an event will in fact be found when we do the least to foresee, program and calculate the changes to which it will lead. But in modern secular society—which guarantees free choice and looks askance at obligatory roles, rewarding competitive and aggressive careers and marginalizing individuals who give first place to a stable emotional life—no such transformation, in any case, is guaranteed.

9 INITIATION AND ABORTION Becoming an adult, in the sense of having been initiated into adulthood, means assuming the obligations of a conscious encounter with a vision that will orientate the rest of one’s life. Initiation by means of maternity, as we have already seen, is no longer automatic. And, if indeed it takes place, it realizes only one of the many ways of being a woman, and all of the other modes of femininity—its non-maternal modes—remain fallow. It might nearly be maintained that women need two initiations: one through which to achieve the ‘non-identity’ of being a mother, and of living in a state where the body and the instincts are dominant; and another that shores up a life as something more than simply a mother. Such further growth would free them from the obligation of remaining always faithful to an attitude of loving care which is finally rooted in instinct. In archaic times, this second initiation neither was necessary nor would have been desirable: being a woman and being a mother were one and the same thing. And there are parts of modern western society, and numerous corners of our inner lives, where this axiom still holds true: that maternity is the essence of womanhood and the greatest transformation that a woman can experience. It is an undeniable fact that babies are helpless and cannot take care of themselves, and the notion that motherhood is not so much a woman’s choice as indeed a true and proper destiny can seem to be hardly less questionable. The roots of such an attitude go very deep: so deep that society finds it acceptable for a woman to decide to have a child by artificial insemination from an anonymous donor. Would a man be allowed the same sort of thing? If we accept the need for motherhood on the part of a woman simply because she desires it and is biologically capable of carrying a pregnancy to term, why should it seem to be any less justifiable for a man to want to fecundate as many women as possible simply because he has the instinct and the physical capacity for doing so? Do we reject such a thought just because those children would not grow within his body? But is the fact of the foetus’s fairly long-term residence in its mother’s womb of sufficient importance to constitute the basis of a woman’s decision to bring a child into the world? For many women, maternity is far less a choice than the logical consequence of a series of events. Let us look at the opposite possibility: at the case of a woman who is involuntarily pregnant, and fears that the birth of a child will effect no fundamental change in her. She does not believe in initiation by means of motherhood. And her feelings may well be justified. Perhaps her attitude to the world around her is already too protective and maternal: to the point that her truest need would be to free herself from the inner drive to take care of others, since that already controls her life and determines her relationships. So she does not dare—either physically or psychologically—run the risk of taking on the role of a mother, and she feels that to do so would mark the loss for a great

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

46

deal of time of what little remains of her freedom to discover new kinds of relationship. She feels that the maternal instinct would take full and definitive control of her, and trap her forever in a one-sided situation. What she needs, indeed, is another kind of initiation: one that would foster greater self-awareness, removing her from the world of mothers and giving her a different identity: something of the order of the trials of courage and free choice to which young men were once subjected in the course of initiation. At the same time, she feels highly attracted to the thought of having a baby: her need to take care of others would finally find its proper object. Here is a woman’s description of how she felt on discovering herself to be pregnant: It’s difficult to explain the state in which I found myself. Of course I felt uneasy and insecure, but there was also a very strange sense of calm and self-assurance, I was somehow outside of time and space. I lived my daily life, but all the same it somehow seemed unreal. On the one hand, everything I did struck me as totally unimportant; on the other hand, every motion I made seemed nearly an act of its own celebration. All of my perceptions were incredibly more intense than they had ever been before. And another woman: I remember a trip I made by train, immediately after discovering that I was pregnant. I was in a compartment with a woman who had two small children. One of them kept looking at me, and I had the impression that he knew: I was a mother. For the first time in my whole life I had the feeling of belonging; for the first time in my life I was in my proper place. These descriptions come from women who subsequently decided to abort. The quotations sound like the harbingers of a passage into formerly unknown territory, as though a veil had lifted and permitted a confident glance into another world. As sometimes happens while looking at the painting of a landscape, one would like to enter it and remain there forever. But then what happened? Then the doubts and misgivings arose. And the veil fell silently back into place. Has an initiation been avoided? At the moment, every possible choice seems wrong. You’re caught in a trap. You feel that you’re alone with your own body in which something is growing which you do not want. Your shoulders bear a responsibility, and the weight of it is nearly overwhelming. What is your partner going to say? Your parents? Your best friend? What do you say to yourself in your own internal silence? You cannot think, and yet you think uninterruptedly. What are you going to do? Sooner or later you find the strength to make an appointment at the health centre. But that does not yet mean anything definite. It is just to play safe, you can call it off if you want to. But ever since you made that appointment, time has seemed to be split in two; there is before, and then there is after. Your partner does not talk about it; your parents do not know; your best friend is full of advice. You yourself feel virtually paralysed. The appointment is not far off, and soon you will have made your decision. An abortion leaves a deep and meaningful mark on the lives of many women. They speak of an abortion as marking a crisis that made them grow up and led them to shape new points of view, rethinking their personal relationships, their work, the whole of their

Initiation and abortion

47

existence. They remark that they started to take themselves more seriously: a semiconscious part of their identities came into the light. Many women who decide to abort feel their decision is at odds with many of their own desires. They would like to have a child, but they are aware of finding themselves in the wrong circumstances for doing so. They make a decision that rejects the immediate joy they may have felt on learning that they were pregnant: a decision that rejects their need to dedicate themselves to someone else. They decide in favour of something else: a better financial situation, their studies or their work, or in any case some kind of project that lies outside the world of motherhood. Their decision directs a ‘no’ towards a fantasy which they find unrealistic, a ‘no’ to the infantile desire to have a new doll. Often it counts as their first explicit and fully conscious ‘no’, and as such it puts an end to years of self-denial. It is more, in fact, than a simple rejection of a non-reflexive maternal attitude; it is also a rejection of the infantile expectations which keep them from growing up. Such a crisis often marks a turning point: the choice between being maternal and being oneself, or as C.Gilligan has put it, ‘between being a woman and being an adult’ (Gilligan 1982). Either one sacrifices oneself, or one sacrifices maternity, and the foetus along with it. This conflict may already have been under way for a number of years, and the unwanted pregnancy may have been ‘sought out’ as a way of placing oneself in a radical situation. The total identification of the world of women with the world of mothers did not give rise to too many conflicts for as long as the lives of women were exclusively a question of raising children. The human life span was shorter, births were more frequent. Motherhood, however, is now to be seen as only one part of the life of a woman, and in addition to discovering new tasks, women also have to discover new attitudes. Spontaneous and instinctual maternal behaviour—protecting and nourishing whatever is weak and in need of help—no longer meets the demands of the various situations in which women find themselves. It is out of place, for example, in the life of a couple, even when the man is still unconsciously dependent on a mother and therefore expects such behaviour from the woman he lives with. It is not at all unusual for a man to want the woman he lives with to be a mother who understands everything and who is always giving, like the mother of his childhood, whom perhaps he lost too abruptly. So, the companion of such a man may at first find it satisfying to adopt a maternal attitude. And the man, who inwardly contains a little boy crying out for attention, reinforces it, creating a vicious circle. The stubbornness with which some women defend a clearly destructive couple relationship is often amazing. An unconscious factor seems to lend ever new energy to such destructiveness. A woman has an alcoholic lover or husband who slouches from one crisis of remorse to the next, but she never encounters anything for which he should not be forgiven; she always drags him back into shape, and then it all starts over again. To call such behaviour pathological does not take us very far. What we have, instead, is a healthy mode of conduct, but in the wrong place. Whenever a child falls down, a mother can unflaggingly help the child get back up, saying that next time things will go better. Her actions are suitable to the situation. But for a woman to show the same kind of undemanding patience to an adult is to encourage a dangerous state of regression on the part of both. Even where children are concerned, a protective maternal attitude is suitable only until a certain age, and in any case it will not see a woman through all the social roles that

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

48

today she has to fill. This spontaneous willingness to sacrifice herself for anyone who asks her to could be an example of what aetiologists refer to as ‘blind alley’ behaviour, which does not further the evolution of a species, since it belongs to an earlier stage of development. And yet any number of women have not had a chance to learn new attitudes. This feminine dilemma finds expression in a number of mythic tales, as in that of Amor and Psyche. Psyche, as she follows her path, has to learn to say ‘no’: she must not help the ghost that asks for help; she must pass beyond the old man in pain; she is not allowed to give in to the tender feelings that naturally arise in her heart; she has to learn to distinguish and decide. She has to recognize the times and places in which it is right to offer succour, and the others in which she has to be pitiless. The inability to say ‘no’ to others is deeply connected with difficulty in bearing frustration; it goes hand in hand with a poor ability to say ‘no’ to oneself. It involves an identification of the person who is in need of help with the neglected child inside us, who cannot bear another rejection. Easy and spontaneous acquiescence to the expectations of the outside world corresponds, in terms of the inner life, to a progressive amputation of one’s own need to become oneself, and thus an individual. Such outside pressures can come from a woman’s partner or children, and just as well—though the facts lie within her—from a pregnancy and a foetus. Saying ‘no’ to the prospect of motherhood that lies within a pregnancy is for many women a first, frightening ‘no’ to the spirit of maternal sacrifice, a drastic rejection of all the values and certainties that constitute, since time immemorial, the feminine world. It is an unpardonable betrayal of all the mothers who have ever lived; and it can only be described—this is how it can strike a woman, at least at first—as assenting to a selfish, gratuitous attachment to something indefinite, a frivolity, such as finishing one’s studies or pursuing one’s career, that cannot be worth the sacrifice of a real, live child. It is a step that many women cannot describe in any other way, and which surely they cannot justify: they will have no more than a hint of a feeling, laden with guilt, that it might just harbour their very first ‘yes’ to themselves. Abortion is an act of violence that a woman directs against motherhood. The feelings of guilt aroused by mothers, the mourning and the anger of the wounded body, the silent or vociferous lack of comprehension on the part of men: all of it conspires to fill her with fear and trembling. In the same moment in which a woman so violently and wilfully abandons the road that her body and a millennia-long tradition are preparing for her, she forever gives up her place in the changeless and comforting world of motherhood. This world can continue to live within her, but she cannot live within it. She is capable now, when necessary, of acting in non-maternal ways; she can, when the situation calls for it, abandon a creature who is asking for aid. And she knows that she cannot expect others always and in any case to look after her in her moments of need. She will have to begin to look after herself. The nothingness into which she appeared to plummet on making her exit from the world of mothers is itself a new valence of existence. The abortion, therefore, was not only an act of destruction; it was also a victory over an omnipotent

Initiation and abortion

49

interior mother, a mother who was also a fountainhead of death, a mother who had forced her to remain a baby and to transform others into babies. The meaning of the abortion lay in the elimination not of a baby, but of her own regressive mode of maternal behaviour. The sacrifice of motherhood, and of the foetus, was the price she had to pay for that liberation, no less than the measure of the guilt that accompanied it.

10 BEYOND THE MOTHER: Artemis and Athena Where can one find protection from the wrath of the angry mother goddess? Leda, harrowed by Hera since her belly carried a child of Hera’s husband, Zeus, fled to a totally dark and secret place, untouched by even a single ray of sunlight and inhabited by wolves. She there gave birth to Diana/Artemis, the goddess of the moon, and then, with the help of Artemis, to her twin brother Apollo, the god of clear thought, and the image of the human being as a creature of culture and spirituality. Artemis, the virgin, is the only goddess who is never addressed as ‘mother’. She asked her father Zeus for permission to dress in a short tunic, rather than the long peplum worn by women. She wanted her movements to be less encumbered. Artemis lent protection to animals and was jealous of her isolation. She was capable of destroying anyone who tormented an animal, just as she inflicted death on those who secretly observed her. Artemis’ femininity had nothing to do with motherhood. She is a feminine force that does not live ‘in relationship with’ or by ‘taking care of’. She exists for herself alone. Her singular birth reveals that her energy springs from the dark and moves within the sphere of aggressivity that creates awareness: the wolf in GraecoRoman mythology is the devourer of heavenly bodies and the bringer of light: in Greek, the hours of morning and evening twilight are ‘the hour of the wolf’. We are not, however, to make the mistake of believing that any one mode of womanhood can once and for all substitute for another. In real life, maternal and nonmaternal (Artemidean) femininity reciprocally influence and alternate with one another. A study by Shuttle and Redgrave (1978) describes the alternation of two different energies in the course of a woman’s monthly cycle: they distinguish an ovarian cycle, which culminates in ovulation, from a uterine one, of which the climax is menstruation. The menstrual flow does not represent ‘the tears of a disappointed uterus’, and the socalled ‘pre-menstrual syndrome’ has nothing to do, as others have maintained, with disappointment over a fecundation that did not take place. In the second half of the cycle, in accord with the changes that have taken place in the balance of the hormones, women develop a creative potential that might be referred to as ‘the energy of Artemis’. If not used constructively, this energy finds expression as irritation, anger and touchiness, the characteristic features of the pre-menstrual syndrome. But if properly channelled, these pre-menstrual disturbances disappear, and the woman has the possibility of living a more active, autonomous and innovative form of femininity. In the days immediately preceding menstruation, many women feel somewhat distant from their husbands or children, and prefer to be alone: ‘At that time of the month, I can’t put up with the world of men.’ Maternal femininity, which finds its raison d’être in the lives of others, is replaced by a

Beyond the mother

51

virginal, self-centred, independent and more aggressive attitude. The Artemidean potential that reappears each month is often channelled into nothing more than cleaning the house and making unrealistic plans for the future. Artemis shows no resemblance at all to Kore, the daughter par excellence who remains forever attached to her mother Demeter. Instead, she represents a strong and independent mode of being a woman, which in its most extreme manifestations—the Amazons, or some types of feminism—wages an open battle with men. Artemis is acquainted with the use of weapons, makes tough decisions, and kills. The manner in which she kills shows little resemblance to that of the great mother, who with great indifference calls back into herself the life to which she formerly gave birth. Such life was never, essentially, anything other than herself: giving birth and taking life are only a single thing; nothing ever truly takes its distance from her; nothing ever lies outside the great mother. An abortion which finds its psychic context in a frame of mind controlled by the great mother causes no remorse and is not seen as a special event. It sets off no new process of awareness: the foetus has never been thought of as a being with an existence of its own, and therefore it cannot have been killed. The ways in which Artemis kills are equally distant from those of offended Medea, in whom revenge, guilt and punishment are intertwined. Artemidean femininity is highly imbued with a clear sense of identity, will power, freedom of decision, and action. Ginette Paris speaks of abortion as ‘a sacrificial offering to Artemis’ (Paris 1986). An abortion can constitute a woman’s first encounter with the energy of Artemis, which is at first experienced as savage, challenging, cruel and egoistic. But on further confronting it, one can begin to feel it emanating a sense of relief, and a formerly unknown sensation of freedom and power. What seemed in the world of mothers to exist as a general, sourceless presence—or a collective power—now transforms itself into personal power, of which one can freely dispose and make conscious use: one can turn it on and off, apply it in various ways, abandon it, make distinctions about it. One does not wait patiently to be transformed by the course of physiological events, but attempts to change on one’s own, by means of the power of one’s own decisions. This all seems quite normal, and has always seemed quite normal, for men; but it is something that some women discover with incredulity and a pounding heart. There are other places that cannot be reached by the maledictions of the wounded mother. Grey-eyed Athena sprang from the head of her father Zeus and came into the world with a war-cry, already dressed in armour. It is not that she had no mother. Metis, the goddess of wisdom, had, while pregnant, been swallowed by Zeus. A male principle had interiorized a female principle, and what resulted was the birth of Athena, ‘who does not know her mother’. She combines clear understanding, the faculty to think abstractly, and the detachment that knows how to ponder the things that exist in the light of the day; but she also has eyes that can penetrate the night and distinguish the things that live in it: the owl was her sacred animal. Athena vanquished the Gorgon, emblem of the irrational, with expedients based on reflection, on ratiocination. She instructed Perseus to avoid the direct gaze of the monstrous female figure, since that gaze had the power to petrify. He made his victorious approach by observing her indirectly, surveying her reflected image on the inner surface of his polished shield. Athena is the goddess of combat, action and decision. She also teaches the arts of weaving and ceramics. Above all, she is the goddess of the polis, of the

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

52

civic community, of the city and of public events. Hers are such different qualities from those of Artemis, who wanders alone in the woods! Athena is the source of words and the formulation of thoughts. With the aid of Peitus, in whom the Greeks personified persuasion, she transformed the monstrous Erinyes into benevolent forces: ‘I will never grow tired of persuading you to the good…if the authority of Peitus, who lives on my tongue, is sacred to you, you will remain’ (Aeschylus, Eumenides, 881–7). They cease to persecute Orestes, who had killed his mother. The power of the word is greater than that of spilled blood. The unstable, painful feminine images of guilt and revenge acquire a stable and sacred space, and as well a new name. The Erinyes—the Furies—become the Eumenides, the Gracious Goddesses. To look at an abortion through the terms Athena supplies means cooling the emotions, making room for a gaze that draws distinctions, and for a need for understanding. One weighs things and puts them in order; the event is no longer wholly private and incommunicable. What others might say becomes important. ‘Others’ are not necessarily our neighbours, parents or friends; they consist of all the other points of view, the nonsubjective and non-personal values, the things that society expects of the individual. ‘My body belongs to me’ is a phrase that still resounds with the savagery of Artemis. It is in the realm of Athena that the attempt to relate my own situation to the world of the others begins: the attempt to see things with detachment, to set my particular concerns against a more ample background. ‘I have to know what is right’. Values are compared and confronted: my own, my parents’, my partner’s. The moral question demands to be dealt with consistently. Athena’s grey eyes permit no half truths, no borrowed thoughts or thoughts that have not been pursued to their final consequences. She rejects the regression of the mother-child symbiosis; the precondition for realizing maternal fantasies is found in their appropriation (Zeus swallows Metis) and clarification by a paternal principle. It is here that we find the process of assessing their realism—is there time and space for a child?—their value for others and the group, their durability, their place in the construction of well-considered solutions. The intellectual and spiritual capacities activated by Athena, and the maintenance of consistency between what one does and the thoughts one has managed to formulate, are neither masculine nor feminine qualities. They belong to a sexless sage who controls, questions and indicates, or who incites us—as Athena does the passive young Telemachus at the start of the Odyssey—to set out in search of our father. Readiness for combat, commitment to solid facts, and independence from the maternal principle make Artemis and Athena resemble one another. Nurturing and taking care of others are of no importance: what matters is to be strong, adult and independent. A woman who aborts may perhaps feel the need—before motherhood rushes to the fore and conditions her life for years to come, if not forever—to give birth to herself, springing out from her own ‘head’. To ‘conceive’ her own way of being—including her way of being a mother—first of all by way of thought; to provide herself with a war-cry and a suit of armour, and thus to transform the feelings of guilt and revenge connected with primordial motherhood into personal authority and a sense of law. She may even feel the need to take possession of the arts of Athena, to learn to weave ideas together and turn them into a fabric that all can use, to shape solid containers for otherwise fugitive contents that threaten to flow away in rivulets; the need to create a cultural reality. The reason for having an abortion is often the desire to continue one’s studies, the need to

Beyond the mother

53

ready oneself for a professional activity. It is far too facile to reduce all of this to the notion of an egoistic pursuit of the satisfactions of a career: behind it may stand a goddess who is urging a woman towards the forms of life for which she stands. None of this is meant to imply that the qualities of Artemis and Athena are incompatible with motherhood. They can also find manifestation, and quite nicely so, in spite of it; motherhood, at times, may even awaken them. This is often the case with single mothers who have no one to whom to pass on their responsibilities. But still there are moments and situations in which a choice must be made, in which one thing excludes the other.

11 KILLING We started out with the question of what makes an abortion register as an important event in the life of a woman. We have seen that this is the only ‘secular’ attitude that lowers the likelihood of repeated abortions. What makes an abortion significant? When a first abortion has taken place, how does one keep abortion from mutely transforming itself into an ordinary event? Some clinics offer sessions of group or individual psychotherapy, but very few women make use of this opportunity. This can be seen, on the one hand, as a tendency towards repression, on the other as a form of instinctive reserve, as a need to contain something unsayable. Only a few women seem to benefit from such attempts to make the institutions for the interruption of pregnancy more personalized and welcoming. Many show interior resistance, as if to say, ‘I just wish you’d leave me alone.’ Isolation and anonymity might seem to be exactly what they are looking for. In addition to encouraging repression, such a context offers a certain protection from one’s own negative unconscious judgements of the event: the cold, bored nurses and the hurried doctor frequently allow us to take no notice of the negative attitudes that rise up within us; we can project them, and then condemn them as external enemies. But something else may also be at work, something that is not a question of repression, but indeed of its opposite: a solitary confrontation, without self-defence. The clinic’s coldness and anonymity are also the qualities of solitude and death. Things that correspond to the nature of a painful experience sometimes offer more help than things which contrast with it. No matter how much benefit may derive from the forms of psychological assistance offered to a woman who has had an abortion, they never have the power to transform it into a solemn event. Such an event is not profane or secular, whereas psychology, with all its explanations and its readiness to work through feelings of guilt, can hardly be anything else. ‘An abortion is something serious’, one reads at the top of a leaflet published by a Dutch clinic for the interruption of pregnancies. The phrase was intended to counteract the lightness with which numerous women undertook the operation. Some of the pamphlet’s observations were of course of a medical nature, and bound to prove oddly self-defeating: they could not bring home the idea of ‘something serious’, since they also had to make it clear that the medical procedure, as such, is extremely simple and absolutely safe. The self-contradiction was obvious. The leaflet also addressed the subject of how to avoid becoming pregnant, carefully refraining from the use of language that might excite feelings of guilt or suggest any possible consequences that might sound punitive. In short, one could see all the good intentions, but as well a sense of embarrassment: there was no voice that loudly and clearly announced why abortion is something serious. One heard nothing but concrete, scientific and rational voices.

Killing

55

A clear, direct voice would have talked about killing, quite simply. The great event would have loomed into view. But how could an institution and the personnel that works with it affirm a readiness to kill, simply as a way of presenting a serious point of view? The verb ‘to kill’ has become the property of the right-to-lifers. Abortion, they say, amounts to the killing of a human being and is therefore impermissible, without exception: even at the price of a less than human existence and a forced, no more than outward motherhood, untouched by intimate conviction or psychological commitment. Those who accept abortion reject the use of the words ‘to kill’. They argue that science can offer no definite proof that abortion is a question of killing a human being, and that therefore the words should be avoided, so as not to inflict further wounds on women who have already suffered enough; it is implicit that the appearance of any such proof would force them to reconsider their approval of abortion. Killing today lies outside of the performance of rites, or the notion of ‘making something sacred’ (sacri-ficium). Modern warfare has nothing to do with the man-to-man duels of antiquity, and is simply anonymous slaughter. Rather than a sacrifice, the victim is only a number, and the lack of rituals of expiation has been known to throw returning soldiers directly into psychic collapse. In Homo necans, W.Burkert describes killing and sacrifice as closely related in archaic cultures. The sacrificial animal had something divine and was chosen with a benevolent, respectful eye (Burkert 1972). Burkert’s arguments have been further examined by W.Giegerich, who deploys them in the service of a provocative thesis (Giegerich 1994). Giegerich maintains that our current forms of awareness and the so-called Ego, which supervises psychic life, arose out of sacrificial murder and could never have been possible without it. The psyche destroyed unconsciousness by way of sacrifice. Prehistoric people would have had no need to hunt big game, and could have survived quite easily on the flesh of smaller animals. The hunting of larger prey had less to do with nourishment than with venatory, sacrificial ritual. People encountered themselves in the gaze of the large-sized animal that fell beneath their weapons, and thus began to explore the faculties that today govern the human soul. Such a point of view is of particular interest here, since it lets us grasp the extent to which acts of violence, which today we regard as senseless, are a part of our very nature and spring up beside it from the same ancient roots. The consciousness of modern humanity—which rules the whole of the outside world, and the drives that lie in our interior—may perhaps have developed out of acts of intentional killing which survival itself did not demand. Consciousness is an island that rises from a sea of blood, no matter how peaceful we would like our outward appearance and behaviour to be. The ways in which the eastern religions attempt to suppress the Ego could be imagined as having something to do with precisely such an intuition of its true nature. Throughout the course of history, men have always done more killing than women; and not, perhaps, because women are in every way more peaceful than men, but because their Ego is less dominant. So, when it too seeks the road to self-assertion and greater strength, in the outward no less than the inner world, the female Ego might have no other choice than to rediscover the need for sacrificial killing. Infanticide was a form of killing which women once practised, sometimes encouraged and sometimes not by the demographic needs of the societies to which they belonged. Abortion too can be a form of killing—a non-heroic and technological form of killing

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

56

which knows no tactics of ritual self-defence, and no collective justification: the woman who aborts in solitude is not likely to hear herself told that she is doing what society expects of her. The lack of all ritual and external supports in which to contain the event makes us nearly incapable of bearing its terrible import. The notion of abortion as the taking of a life is often repressed by those who have or perform abortions (‘abortion is not really killing’) and voiced with all possible strength by its adversaries (‘abortion is murder’). More than any other form of killing, an abortion is simultaneously a question of being killed. There is no other case where agent and victim so thoroughly coalesce. If we are to speak of abortion as killing, this fact should make us do so with great respect. If we are always careful to avoid this word, we rob the event of something essential: of precisely what takes it beyond the ordinary. It remains caught up in the secular world of bureaucratic, medical, legal and psychological descriptions, none of which do justice to its meaning. If we decide, on the other hand, to use this word, we also have to recognize that it takes us to a plane which is not entirely concrete: our language is also symbolic. In a twilight zone, terms like ‘permissible’ and ‘forbidden’ are one-sided and simplistic. What this sort of territory truly requires is that we establish what was thought of in archaic times as a contact with the beyond; or in the impoverished terms of psychology, we have to establish a relationship with something unknown that lies within us. There can be no such thing as a final, conventional and collectively valid point of view, if only because not all women perceive an abortion as killing. Some women can decide with little conflict to interrupt a pregnancy, since their imaginations hold no figure of a child. The question of killing lies outside their frame of reference, and they put an end to nothing more than a personal physical condition, nearly as though treating an illness. Such women do not come to be afflicted by psychic disturbances, and images of children do not torment their dreams. From a psychological point of view, an abortion kills a woman’s interior image of the baby that might be born, and precisely such an image is missing in cases like these. So when and why and under what conditions does an image of a child take shape in a woman’s psyche? For some women, the image of the child they desire is already present before they get pregnant. For others, a child begins to exist when they first feel it move. Mental images today are also influenced by those that technology offers, like the large, detailed photographs that illustrate the stages of embryonic development. Many women feel deprived by the fact that such images were not in circulation at the time when they aborted, others find that fact to be a source of relief. The relationship with the foetus is an absolutely personal question. Some women constantly forget that they are pregnant, whereas others talk to the embryo inside their bodies as soon as they learn that it is there. The woman who decides to have an abortion tends to perceive that tadpole figure as proof that it was not yet a question of a human being; those who are happy to be pregnant will note that the feet already show separate toes. The movements of the foetus—which ultrasound images so generously, or so implacably, reveal—are particularly impressive. In fantasy, this creature assumes an infinite number of forms: a child who foresees its happy entrance into the world, a future genius, a potential saviour, a parasite, the fruit of the seed of an odious man, a clump of cells. These images are far from stable; they continually shift and change. Consigned as they are to all the most contradictory thoughts and feelings, some women with an

Killing

57

unwanted pregnancy can feel incapable of making a decision. With every moment that passes, the act of deciding evokes a different image, and therefore a different event. There are women whose imaginations hold a clear image of a baby, and who none the less decide to abort. They have a clear grasp of their reasons for doing so; the courage they have to muster in order to be able to abort is enormous. I also knew what I didn’t want. I didn’t want to act as though it were nothing special, simply because it’s legal and lots of women do it. I wanted to have a clear idea of what I was doing. For a couple of weeks (the time between the moment when I missed my period and the test that could makes things clear) I turned the library upside down in my search for books that described gestation. I wanted to see what the fetus looks like in its various phases of development, what organs it already had developed, how its metabolism functioned, and so on. I learned that the point of a pregnancy at which an abortion takes place makes no difference: it is always a question of killing something. This became quite clear to me, but it didn’t at all change my decision. And it did not make me feel insecure. I had the impression of having felt doubts and remorse because it’s good to have them, but not because they were mine. I was also astonished that the idea of killing didn’t strike me as intolerable, and I felt that for me this act could assume a number of very different forms. To find one’s way through this state of mind, without telling oneself that an abortion is nothing special, consciously accepting the idea of killing: such an attitude merits respect and a suspension of conventional judgements. Most of the women who are capable of holding such an attitude already feel that they cannot be touched by rigid and facile moral judgements; they are likely to remark that those who are ready to scream out ‘murder’ have no idea of what they are talking about. Abortion is a threshold situation, a borderline one. The categorical affirmation that it is not killing contains a refusal to take the measure of a real event, and even more so of a symbolic one. If we look at things too concretely, we easily slip into facile moral dogmatism; if we think in exclusively symbolic ways, we avoid the ethical problem. We do not know what an abortion kills; we only know that numerous people instinctively perceive it as a form of killing, and that almost everyone wants to feel that it is not an insignificant event. So let us start with the affirmation that abortion—concretely no less than symbolically—is a form of killing. That raises the question of whether there can possibly exist conditions in which this is justified; and of whether it makes sense in the light of something else which it safeguards or procures. That could be a question, in the most direct and simple cases, of the care of previous children; it could also be a much more complex question of the continuity of the psychic life of one or both of the parents. A pregnant woman who does not discover the image of a child within herself will also find it difficult to ‘conceive’ that image later, after the child has been born. Every form of killing has to come to terms with the images we already have of the victim. The human reluctance to kill can be imagined as resembling the inhibition that K.Lorenz describes in wolves (Lorenz 1974). The higher animals do not ordinarily kill a member of their own species: and what zoology sees as a member of my species is what

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

58

Christianity calls my neighbour. Whenever human beings consciously kill, they take the precaution of transforming the adversary into a form of life that belongs to some other species: rather than a neighbour, a human being will kill a slave, a subhuman, an enemy, an anonymous crowd. The human being thus circumvents the prohibitions of his or her ethical code, and the deep-seated fear of killing oneself in the other. To say that when human beings kill they seek the assistance of their capacities for imagination is of course to offer a description of a psychological process, and not a moral justification. We are well aware of the cruelties to which certain interior images of the enemy can lead. Nothing is more dangerous than blindly entrusting ourselves to any given interior image. We should be able to discover a range of images of any given thing. So, a conscious confrontation with the problem of abortion requires a dialogue with all the various images we can call up ourselves both of the embryo and of killing. Each of them has its own psychic validity, none of them frees us of from any of the others, and none of them can wholly supplant or replace the others. In traditional societies, every form of killing was accompanied by ritual. The victim never vanished into the void, but was introjected and transformed, and had something to offer in a ritual process of exchange. And this is precisely what happens with an abortion, even when it is not considered killing, as is often indeed the case. We should be careful to note that, in antiquity, neither killing nor abortion exhausted its effects with the transformation of the other; the person who committed such acts was likewise transformed. Killing—and being symbolically killed—were essential parts of the initiation of men. The initiation of women, which as stated before was mainly concerned with physiological events like the onset of menstruation and the birth of the first child, had nothing to do with voluntary acts of death. We have already raised the question of whether the initiation of women may not require two routes: one towards maternity, the other from it and towards a mode of existence which also shows masculine qualities. Understood as a form of killing that stands at the borderline between the concrete and the symbolic, an abortion might represent the act of initiation that leads a woman to an Artemidean mode of femininity lying beyond maternity. It can be imagined as a form of killing that has to be performed by certain women who find it particularly difficult to find an exit from a one-sided form of maternity, and as such it would put a definitive end to all temptation to regress to even more unconscious forms of femininity. Abortion would thus present itself as the initiatory event which combines the terror that lies on this threshold with the feelings of guilt that inhibit the acquisition of new forms of awareness. It is hard to imagine an event which might in any more direct and physical way place a woman before the meaning of stepping across this threshold: the blood which follows the abortion, the emptiness in her belly, the courage in her heart.

12 TWO CHOICES I will attempt to describe the situations of two women who became involuntarily pregnant during the period they were in analysis. One of them, in spite of great ambivalence, decided to carry the pregnancy to term. The other, after weeks of indecision, chose to abort. Naturally enough, the problem of the decision that had to be made dominated that period of these two women’s thoughts, and of their analysis. The analyst took no position—as should normally be the case when a patient stands before an option or decision—even though she had an interior opinion of her own. It is clear that an analyst’s unexpressed opinion has an indirect influence on a patient, but sufficient care and caution in the course of analysis should make it possible for the energy of both to be directed less towards the decision to be made than to the process of choosing and to its forms of expression, both conscious and unconscious. Since the analyst offers no support or assistance in the making of a decision, attempting instead to limit himself or herself to clarifying the patient’s experience, the patient tends to interrogate dreams or in other ways to ask the unconscious ‘how things stand’, and to press it into service as an alternative interlocutor. This waiting is like that of children expecting our parents or God to show us how to behave. One starts from the presupposition that a proper decision and a wrong one already and in any case exist. And yet precisely which decision one makes might not be essential. The result could depend less on the decision made than on the fact that one assumes the responsibilities which derive from it, and does not attempt to avoid its consequences. Either of the two choices could prove to be right or wrong, not as facts in themselves, or a priori, but in terms of the consistency with which one follows the paths that necessarily stem from them. It is a question of the attitude that Max Weber describes as an ‘ethics of responsibility’, as opposed to an ‘ethics of convictions’. Acting in terms of convictions implies the possibility of establishing from the start that something is right and something else is wrong, since they can be seen in the light of established norms. The ethics of responsibility implies, on the other hand, that the choice is more complex and personal, and that its moral status does not entirely depend on extant principles: it is only by bearing the weight of the consequences of an act that one can discover whether one has acted ethically or not. It was clear that both these patients would have been able either to accept or reject the possibility of becoming mothers. It was likewise clear that there was no way of foreseeing how they would face up to the situation; in other words, one could not say whether the decision would carry over their pre-existent weaknesses into a new experience, thus reinforcing what we normally call a neurosis, or instead would signal the start of a new tendency in which a profound and responsible adhesion to their choice, no matter which it might be, corrected a neurosis. For example, an already established

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

60

vicious circle would have been reinforced by an abortion in which guilt feelings which had not been worked through led to self-punishment and destructiveness. And the decision to give birth to a child could equally have rested on predominantly neurotic motivations that would have saddled the child with already formulated expectations which primarily concerned the parents’ needs, and which the child could not have satisfied. Since we will be discussing a number of dreams, I would like to make it clear that every reference which an interpretation posits between a dream and a real event is always arbitrary. We do not know the extent to which a dream has been determined by the daytime events to which it seems to connect, or which it seems to investigate. We cannot even say whether the events a dream explores belong to the same category as the event to which it apparently refers, as for example when it seems to refer to a pregnancy. If a woman dreams of giving birth to a child, is the unconscious image truly concerned with a child, or, instead, metaphorically, with the manifestation of a new beginning in the woman’s own life? The only good reason for presenting these dreams strikes me as the simple fact that they belong to the stories that the patients were trying to tell. The presentation of the case history of an analysis is not a scientific report, but a form of narration; and what finally makes it more or less convincing has less to do with its content of objective truth than with the degree to which it transmits profound and authentic emotions, and thus as well a part of the experiences which the patient lived in dream. So in presenting these examples, my purpose is not to make them lend support to the thesis that abortion can hold the possibility of a moment of initiation, or of a moment of passage towards a greater degree of consciousness. They are simply a part of the patients’ narratives; just as their interpretation is a part of the analyst’s narrative. While reviewing the dreams of these two patients whom I followed in the course of an unwanted pregnancy, I later noted a very clear difference between them. The woman who decided to abort (Agnes) recounted no dreams in which a child appeared, or which hinged on the theme of pregnancy or giving birth, either before or after her decision. The woman who decided to continue her pregnancy (Herta) constantly dreamt images, during the period in which she was reaching her decision, of ‘my baby’. This baby appeared in dangerous and difficult situations. The absence of the image of a child in Agnes’s case, and its presence in Herta’s case, helped these two women reach their decisions.

HERTA At about the age of 30, Herta discovered she was pregnant, and it had not been planned. She did not know what to do. For the previous eight years, her personal life had been unconventional. She had been living with a man whom she had finally married; but in another town she maintained a relationship with another man, with whom she also spent fairly regular periods of time. Each of the partners had always known of the other’s existence, but Herta had managed to keep both relationships alive. Her situation was dramatically ambivalent and full of acute problems which had to be solved, and which prevented her, in her life as well as her analysis, from confronting the facts that stood at the basis of this conflict: a profound

Two choices

61

depression, a weak Ego, and therefore a lack of self-esteem. For years she had thereby managed to live a life that was always improvised and temporary, and she conducted her analysis in much the same way. Her home, her friends, her interests: there were two sets of everything, with each set matched with one of the men, and she was never really attached or committed to anything. Most of her energies were spent on the task of losing neither of her two lives. If one of the two men threatened to put an end to his relationship with her, she entered a state of intolerable anxiety and did everything she could to reestablish the absurd equilibrium which struck her as the only situation in which she was able to live. In spite of the constant lies which she told to each of her partners, Herta did not hide the reality of her situation from herself: indeed she saw it quite clearly, but was incapable of changing it. Herta was now expecting a child by her lover. It was some time since sexual relations with her husband had ended. The novelty of the situation did not seem at all to help her reach a decision. But the already existing conflict was destined in any case to peak, since now, as in none of the preceding situations in which she had found herself, she had only a limited amount of time. Herta had a painful memory of another pregnancy which she had interrupted several years before. After the abortion, while she still lay on the hospital bed, a nurse had whispered into her ear: ‘murderer’. At the purely rational level, any number of elements spoke against her having a child. She risked endangering the only thing she had achieved on her own, independently of her two men: her job and her financial independence. She was also convinced that even a child would not help her make a final decision in favour of one of her two relationships. She imagined that she would swing back and forth with her child between the two men, and she thought it better not to put a child into such a situation. But apart from this dilemma, she also felt strengthened by her pregnancy, and much more sure of herself than she had been before. The feeling of being no longer alone in the world, by having a child, gave her a measure of serenity; she had the fantasy of no longer living with either of the two men. As far as the child was concerned, her feelings were entirely positive. Herta never imagined that the child would disturb or interfere with her life. She had no fear of failing to be a good mother. Her perplexities were all concerned with the absurd situation of her love relationships and with what she described as the intolerable fear of losing one of her two men. Her pregnancy allowed her to live the experience of a new physical and psychic identity. One could object that this took place at the expense of the child that was about to be born, and that the child was being forced into a nearly therapeutic role, but the fact remains that motherhood frequently marks the start of initiatory transformations, no matter whether the mother’s previous intentions were childish or responsible. Many women insist that motherhood brought about some permanent change within them, and that nothing else would have been able to do this. It is both paradoxical and fully comprehensible that this can be even more often the case when the child is not joyfully awaited, but imposed by the force of circumstance. And that was the case with Herta. She was happy to be expecting a child, but she was also convinced, at the same time, that she ought to have an abortion, since that was the only sensible thing to do, given her situation. She went through all the bureaucratic procedures that an abortion would require. For the blood tests, she went to a private clinic, run by Catholic nuns, since—she said—it was quite close to her home. The nun at

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

62

the counter read the medical prescription, laid the papers aside, and asked Herta to accompany her into an adjacent room. Here she asked her if she understood that she was about to commit a murder. While discussing this fact in analysis, I observed that in turning to a Catholic institution she must surely have expected to encounter discouragement. We asked ourselves whether in putting herself into such a paradoxical situation she had not been moved by unconscious intentions. These might have been masochistic, but might also, perhaps, have had more to do with an unconscious desire to set up an obstacle that blocked her path, and thus with a not clearly recognized need to open the road to having a child. In this particular period, Herta had any number of dreams that contained the image of a child exposed to grave dangers:

Dream (at the start of the pregnancy): I have given birth to a child. It looks like a robot. A number of steel springs have been detached, screws and various pieces of metal are missing. It shows all sorts of defects. I think that the poor little thing can’t possibly function, and it’s very painful to see it in such sad shape. What Herta had created was full of technical and mechanical imperfections. But she had tender feelings for this inanimate creature and recognized it as her own. In the course of her attempts to be the person whom her partner of the moment wanted her to be, she had often had the feeling of being somehow remotely controlled. She knew that she could not do it, and that the effort left her miserably exhausted. Referring the dream to her pregnancy allowed one to imagine as well that her desire for a child was mechanical and incomplete. The same would hold with reference to a symbolic child, to her desire to see the birth and growth of something new: here again, even more so, ‘pieces’ would be missing. Finally, one could also think that her conscious attitude—her desire to have a child, and her simultaneous conviction that she ought to interrupt her pregnancy—was an ‘automatism’ that was not very likely to function.

Dream: I experience my own birth. I am a very weak and feeble creature. They hang me naked from a nail in the wall, as though to show everyone that I won’t survive. Someone says that there’s something wrong with my lungs, and that this is why I find it nearly impossible to breathe. Here again, one is struck by the juxtaposition of a hopeless situation on the one hand, and the theme of birth on the other. The fact of being hung naked from a nail is reminiscent of the Sumerian myth of the voyage made by the goddess Isis into the underworld realm of Ereshkigal, the goddess of death. Isis is at one point hung from a nail and turns into a rotting piece of meat. The dream corresponds to the patient’s feeling—a dominant one she had known since childhood—of being suspended, defenceless and impotent, between the maternal and paternal principles, impersonally expressed as the sky and the earth.

Two choices

63

If one studies the dream for signs of potential development, one might find them in the theme of birth. This could symbolically combine with a new mode or level of awareness, if only of the patient’s own weakness. Such awareness is impersonally supplied by the disembodied voice. In pain, and so cruelly exposed to view, Herta might seem for the first time to have realized that she was alive. She existed, despite her desperate conditions of existence, and despite all forecast of ruin. One might imagine that her new situation, even perhaps her pregnancy itself, might help her confront her problems and no longer close her eyes to her own existence. Other dreams of similar content followed, in which her child appeared and she found herself incapable of taking sufficient care of either the child or herself:

Dream: I had my child in my arms. He was hungry, and luckily enough I had so much milk that it gushed out on its own. But the baby couldn’t drink it. The milk ran down along the corners of his mouth, and no matter how hard I tried to hold him in a position that would allow him to drink, I simply couldn’t manage it. This time the child is a human being, and in good health, but the nutritive relationship between mother and child is quite difficult. This also seems to allude to the patient’s general problem with establishing relationships. Herta had always found it extremely difficult to accept any form of symbolic nourishment. Her positive experiences in analysis and with friends and acquaintances, her abilities and even her talents were things that might have been said to run alongside her, without her being capable of transforming them into vital energies from which she herself might have benefited. Herta continued to ask herself what sort of mother she would be able to be, and what sorts of difficulty she would encounter with a child, but remained convinced that she had to have an abortion. Another dream placed the accent on herself and her identity, with respect to her child, which in this case was not defective: I have my baby in my arms and I see that my fingernails are extremely long. It’s clear that I haven’t been paying much attention to myself for quite some time. It’s as though I no longer had any time to spare for myself. I have felt suffocated ever since the birth of the baby. Something had developed within her in the course of the preceding few weeks. Herta now had a clear perception of the difficulties she faced. She saw them in her inability to define herself, to make a decision and to take care of herself, which led to an accumulation of aggressivity. These last two dreams were part of a series that referred to difficult mother-child relationships; for example, she could no longer find her child, the child disappeared into a body of water, she left the child in a car. Such dreams are quite frequent among women with still fragile identities—no matter whether they are mothers or not, or pregnant or not—when they are preparing for a new phase of their lives. These are situations in which the image of the child seems likely to have more to do with symbolic values than with any real child.

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

64

Another dream projected the theme of the baby into the future, revealing the sorts of symbiotic expectation which typified Herta’s relationships, and which constantly proved sources of disappointment: My son is already five or six years old. I’m very sad that the wonderful period of cuddling and fondling is already over. I never even realized it was happening. My baby can already talk and I’m frightened by his nearly adult way of doing things. The robot baby has turned into a healthy child of 5 or 6 years of age. The symbolic child has undergone a development to which Herta’s consciousness reacts with fear. The oneiric Ego cannot identify with this maturation, cannot keep up with it, and experiences it only as a disappointment. Herta could not see anything new in her real life, and felt nothing but desperation. She readied herself for an abortion. Herta then had the following dream, just a few days before the date of her appointment at the clinic: I see the operating table on which I’m supposed to lie down to have the abortion. The doctor and the nurse are there. There’s a bucket on the left, which I remember from the abortion I had before: the bucket for the foetus. I can’t stand the sight of it. I get up and run away. Herta found the thought of abortion intolerable, and yet she was convinced that it was the only thing for her to do. On the day for which the abortion was scheduled, she went to the clinic with her husband—who was fully aware of the whole situation—but when she reached the door she turned back. She phoned the clinic on the following day to arrange for a new appointment, which was set for the following week. This time she entered the clinic, presented herself at the desk, filled out the necessary forms and sat down to wait to be called. But when they called her, she announced that she had changed her mind. She recounts that afterwards she simply stayed home and waited for it to become too late to be able to have an abortion. She made no decision, and simply let time roll by. The child was born prematurely, by about two months. Herta had suffered a gestosis. But the dangers were overcome and the child grew well. Just as Herta had foreseen, the child, at first, lived always with her but had two fathers, spending a couple of months in the home of one of her men, and then in the home of the other. But as time went on, Herta’s relationship with the child’s biological father grew stronger. Two years later, he and Herta had another child, and she managed to decide to live only with him. From the beginning, the future child had been too powerful a presence for Herta, both consciously and unconsciously. In a certain sense, the image of the child refused to allow itself to be cancelled out. It had already established a place for itself in Herta’s psychic life. I had the feeling that Herta had found it psychologically impossible to follow the course on which she seemed to have decided consciously.

Two choices

65

AGNES Agnes was about 25 years old, and she had discovered she was pregnant by the man she lived with. She had told him not to worry, and to leave birth control up to her, but in fact she had been quite careless about it. She had fantasies about having a child, but both she and the man she lived with were still students, and in any case he had already told her that he did not want to have a child at that moment of his life. Agnes had the following dream before learning that she was pregnant: I had had sexual relations with a Doberman, and the pleasure had been very intense. Then I was filled with anxiety, when I realized what had happened, and I was afraid I had made myself unclean, or had contracted some disease. At the personal level, the image of the Doberman connected to problems with aggressivity, which the patient had little awareness of and experienced simply as a tendency to capitulate in the face of internal and external influences, thus allowing herself to be distracted from her goals. Such uneven behaviour increased an already conspicuous lack of confidence in her own abilities. A Dober-man is a man from the animal world, an instinctual impulse and as such a principle of action. The dreamer makes her lack of awareness and self-reliance—not only with respect to birth control—quite evident: she did not choose to have sex with the dog; it simply, suddenly happened; and not until later could she clearly realize what had happened. The black dog of classical mythology is Cerberus, the guardian of the nether world. In ancient Egypt, it was Anubis, the god of death. In retrospect, one can wonder whether this dog was an indication of the sphere which the dreamer was about to enter. In alchemy, the colour black symbolizes nigredo, depression and lack of awareness. The dog might represent the prima maleria, the starting point of a transformation (von Franz 1980). In antiquity, the dog belonged to the great mother, and the Greeks employed the word kùon (dog) in puns that referred to pregnancy: kùos is the Greek word for foetus, and the verb kùo means ‘I’m pregnant’. Becoming unclean or ill—the consequences the dreamer fears from copulation with the dog—might derive from such an unconscious fantasy of a relationship with the beyond, with death. The instinctual impulse represented by the Doberman—if we see it in relation to pregnancy—is a blind, animal desire for copulation and generation, and as such one that takes no account of human relationships: an act of aggression against Agnes herself, no less than against the man she was living with. Her extreme disregard for the promise she had made concerning birth control shows just how indirectly her aggressivity expressed itself. We will see how this extreme but involuntary gesture was followed by another that was equally extreme, but quite intentional. Her abortion constituted an attempt to free herself from the mode of existence to which the image of the Doberman alluded: passivity and the tendency to abandon herself to the impulses of the moment, without having understood how all of this opens a door to the darker aspects of the personality, to the drives which have been repressed because we find them incompatible with the morals we practise, and which form the so-called ‘shadow’.* In Agnes’s case, her aggressivity

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

66

was unconscious, and formed a part of her shadow; it might partly have been made conscious and integrated into her personality if she, as the agent of a violent act like abortion, had made conscious use of it and thereby assumed responsibility for it. But let us return to Agnes’s immediate situation, at the moment just before learning or even suspecting she was pregnant. Doubts first arose when she missed her period. She brought the subject up with the man she lived with, and he expressed his worries by suggesting that she ask her gynaecologist for an injection to provoke menstruation. At the time and in the place in which these facts occurred, such retroactive contraceptives in fact existed, but were difficult to find. Afterwards she had a dream: I was looking for a doctor who could give me this injection, but I couldn’t find one. Then I saw a series of images of the deformations that such an injection might provoke: for example, an image of two faces with a single mouth. Agnes’s refusal to recognize reality—her pregnancy?—led to a ‘univocal’ deformation: a single mouth. The divisions, conflicts and ambivalence of having to deal with two mouths, or two voices, was avoided. Such a unilateral solution appeared in the dream as a deformity. Agnes went to a gynaecologist. She told me that the doctor seemed to her to be extremely content when he discovered that she was pregnant, as though he himself were the future father. He said something about a white spot on the screen: everything in perfect order. On the basis of its size—two millimetres—she must have been five weeks pregnant. When he noticed Agnes’s perplexity, he told her about the things that might have gone wrong in her own particular case: for example about the danger of an extrauterine pregnancy. But this time around, everything was perfect, almost miraculously so. Agnes had not seen the spot on the screen and made an effort to ask whether by now it was not too late to do something to eliminate this pregnancy. There were no glances of reproof from the doctor, but he seemed somehow to have been personally wounded. He advised her not to rush to a quick decision, to take a bit of time, and to think things over calmly: this could be her one chance in a million, she might never again fall pregnant, who knows, she would do better to return in three or four weeks, and then it would be possible to observe and examine the new developments from all sides and points of view. ‘Developments’, she kept on repeating to herself as she left the doctor’s office, listening to the quiet music that was piped into the waiting room, where expectant mothers were leafing through magazine articles on the art and problems of raising children. The nurse kindly told her that there was no fee to pay. Why not? How could she show her thanks—maybe by sending some flowers to the doctor’s wife? Her coat fell to the floor, she felt clumsy and dirty in a place where everything was orderly and clean. Even the ring of the telephone was soft and discreet. As though wrapped in a mantle of guilt, she descended the stairs and went out into the elegant streets of the centre of the city, where the doctor’s office was situated. She said that she wanted to write this doctor a letter, thanking him and explaining her whole situation; he had shown the best of intentions, and perhaps, in a couple of years,

Two choices

67

when in fact she would want to have a child, she would like to go back to him, since surely he believed in natural child-birth. Shortly afterwards she had this dream: I found myself in this gynaecologist’s office, his face somehow or another was clouded, cold, and indifferent. I was happy that I wouldn’t have to see him again, the ways in which he behaved were quite surprising, I wouldn’t have expected him to be like that. Seen in the light of the real situation, such a dream is clearly compensatory. It gave Agnes a look at what she had not seen: the doctor’s one-sided, ‘pro-life’ enthusiasm— which also corresponded to a part of herself—and his refusal to talk about a possible abortion involved a cold lack of interest in the other and the other’s real problem, with all its suffering and pain, which can have nothing to do with simplistic, absolutist attitudes. In the following weeks, Agnes attempted to reach a decision. She wanted a child, but there were certain important goals she had to reach in the field in which she worked; she also had to finish her studies. And more than anything else, she did not want to endanger her relationship with the man on whom she would have imposed the decision to have a child. She recounted that even before being certain of being pregnant, she had attempted to imagine what might be happening in her belly: she had seen it as containing a bundle of subtle rays of light that expanded into the darkness of her uterus. She was frightened by the thought of destroying that luminous structure. This was the period of another dream: I saw three loaves of bread. Two of them had already been baked. I knew that they represented two children. The third loaf was still raw, and one couldn’t say if it would get cooked or not. This didn’t strike me as important. The important thing was for it to rise and leaven. And that depended entirely on me. I had to commit myself to it, to do anything and every-thing possible to make this happen. I woke up with the idea that rising is the most important thing of all. ‘To have a loaf of bread in the oven’, is a common expression indicating a pregnancy. The two already-baked loaves represent what the woman and her relationship had already attained: bread as fundamental nourishment, the vitality of the new situation. The third, her current spiritual condition, was not yet cooked; but what first of all mattered was for the loaf to rise. A process of fermentation was necessary: fermentation brings air into the dough, the material rises and ‘elevates’ (aufgehen, in German, means both elevation and the rising of bread, and also ‘to understand’). It is clear and open metaphor for the process that had to imbue the woman’s concrete, material problem in order to make it assume a psychic dimension: that was the task to which Agnes, in dream, had to commit herself. Brute material had to fill with consciousness. Whether the process of transformation was then to find fulfilment in the fire of an oven had not yet been decided; that did not lie within her power. Agnes decided to look for information about the ways in which abortions are performed. She went to the public health centre, where they explained all the bureaucratic procedures that had to be followed. They asked no particular questions, and did not

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

68

attempt to influence her decision. She felt accepted, and at the same time abandoned to her own ambivalence, with all her feelings of guilt, and in a state of mourning. But it was clear to her that she’d refuse to avail herself of any sort of counselling service that the institution might offer. She went to see the gynaecologist who the public health centre had suggested—one whose work consisted mainly of performing abortions. She wanted to have a clear idea of the procedures involved, and to meet the doctor who would perform them. She was afraid that the operation might go wrong, and wanted to understand the risks involved. She recounted that the doctor’s office was in a far less elegant area of the city than the first doctor’s, and that to reach it she had to descend a flight of stairs. She thought to herself, ‘So, he works in a basement.’ She was also struck by his curious office hours: from five to seven. She realized just how diffident she was. She noted that the nurse was a bleached blonde, and that no other women were sitting in the waiting room. Why did he have so few patients? There were no posters on the wall, showing embryos at this and then that particular week of development; there was nothing but a table with a pile of magazines that dealt with serious social questions. It was not a place that made one uneasy, but clearly, as offices go, it was second class. When she took a seat in front of the doctor’s desk, he immediately got down to business, ignoring the tragic expression on her face: what week had the pregnancy reached? what tests had she already had? She told him that she was afraid of the operation and wanted to know the risks involved. The answer—that a drive to the hospital in a car was statistically more dangerous—did her good. She remembered that the other doctor had muttered something or other about the irreversible consequences of an abortion. But at that point, she realized that she had asked both of these gynaecologists to give rational replies to an ‘irrational’ fear she had; or, more precisely, to a fear that centred on psychological rather than physical risks. She was told the doctor’s fee for the operation, and he offered her a lift back to the nearby town she had come from, but she turned it down. She left the office convinced that the doctor was trustworthy, from a medical point of view. But all the same, when the doctor, at the end of the interview, had said that he’d happily be of service to her on the occasion of a future, desired pregnancy, something within her had drawn back with indignation: she would not have trusted him, he mostly performed abortions: who knows if he had enough experience with child-birth, whether his surgery was clean enough, what sort of people came and went in it. She was shocked at having had such thoughts, but still she had had them. The hospital wards where births take place are often kept separate from those where abortions are performed. It seems that there is also a need to see these spaces as good and bad, clean and dirty, competent and shoddy. One wants an area of shadow where darkness mingles with darkness, sickness and evil; and another filled with light, where the positive, the healthy and the good coalesce into a wholly positive vision of life—as though life were always and only desirable, and death inevitably cruel. It is not society alone that exiles abortions to hospital basements. Women are often unwilling, even women who abort, to see child-birth and abortion inscribed in the figure of a single doctor who is expert at both. When faced with a conflict of overweening proportions, we set up interior separations. If birth and death lived within us in contiguous spaces, a single corner of the soul would hold the whole of the sense of life. But any such concentration is usually intolerable, and we prefer to simplify and distance

Two choices

69

the central images of our vision of the world. The place of abortions remains a non-place, to be avoided and forgotten as quickly as possible, along with the persons, the feelings and the thoughts with which we came into contact there. We therefore create inhuman spaces in which the silence derives not from the magnificent and terrifying presence of the extraordinary event, but only from emptiness and suffering. And the only exit is forms to fill out, and feelings of guilt. All of Agnes’s energies were concentrated on her condition. Only the man she lived with knew about it. She no longer asked herself what she ought to do. She had taken all the bureaucratic steps that had to be taken. She talked to the foetus: We’ve only got five more days. Then you will have to go. It’s going to be horrible and I’m the one who has made that decision. For now, we’re still together, we’ve still got a little time. I’ll be with you, up until the end. Agnes decided to go to the hospital alone, even though the man she lived with had declared his willingness to accompany her. But she felt that all the decisions and responsibilities were hers alone. In their discussions as to whether or not she should have an abortion, the man had justified his position primarily by saying he had not wanted to have a child and did not feel ready to do so. But he also remarked that if Agnes truly wanted a child, he would accept it. He left the decision up to her, and she made it. At five in the afternoon, she left for the nearby city. She slept in a hotel, and watched TV until one o’clock in the morning. During the night she had a dream: It was the morning of the abortion; I knew that I had to go to the hospital. My partner and two little boys had given me gifts, it seemed like my birthday. My younger sister was also there; there was a family atmosphere. Everybody was ready to accompany me. This festive atmosphere surprised and comforted me. It made it easy to enter the hospital. The positive feelings of the dream did not disappear when Agnes woke up. She felt accompanied, accepted and—most surprising of all—as though a whole interior family were giving a party for her; she entered the hospital in a strong and festive spirit. She managed to take no notice of a comment from the taxi driver to whom she had given the clinic’s address. This dream can be seen as a compensation. The dreamer was aware of her state of mourning, but would never have expected that the sad event before her might be celebrated like the occasion of a birth. But we have seen that this attitude prevails among many peoples, over long periods of time. The dream is a celebration of the memory of her own birth; she will not be destroyed by her identification with the foetus; instead she is to be reborn, and recalls the beginning of her life. The person who accompanies her is the youngest of her sisters—reinforcing the impression of a new feminine identity—rather than her mother, or any other maternal figure. The maternal role is entirely her own, despite the fact that she is about to provoke a violent interruption of an incipient maternity.

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

70

This dream makes no reference to violence, death or loss; it appears that all Agnes’s psychic energy was focused positively on what was about to take place. Her family—as a symbol of a willingness to have and to nurture emotional relationships—helps her to travel the road she has chosen. This dream made it clear to her why she had wanted and found it so easy to go to the hospital alone. Contrary to what she had thought at more difficult moments, she had resources of her own, and was able to rely on them. A reductive interpretation of the dream could see it as presenting a difficult relationship between Agnes and her mother, who at such a moment was absent. Agnes’s life history might confirm such a hypothesis. But if we see the dream as concerned with future prospects, we can go beyond such a view and see this moment of her life as holding a new beginning, a possibility of a more mature form of psychic life, which comes into view when the ethical, physiological and spiritual tension of the conflict—and the weight of the decision and its consequences—are perceived and dealt with, not repressed. The family that accompanies her is a new nexus of internal forces or figures that sustain the Ego. These unconscious forces come to her aid in her attempt to understand, to direct her will and to act. Agnes reported that she spent the rest of the time before the operation in the company of other women, and that she was particularly attentive to details. She noted that the plastic chairs and stools on which they sat were black, that one woman who arrived with her husband and two small children continued to smile; she found it incredible that she was there for the same reason as the others. She observed the other women with an almost journalistic curiosity: the pale young girl beside her anxious mother; the woman who was alone, dressed in leather and with downcast eyes; all of them had made their decisions. Only the mother who had come with her family spoke to her later, when they were already in the cubicles at the entrance to the operating room, and asked if she was afraid. She responded that before she had been afraid, but that now she had made her decision. All the women waited and followed the nurse’s instructions; all were dressed in enormous white smocks. Agnes later remembered having been afraid of the anaesthesia. And then had come the moment in which the doctor had performed an ultrasound screening, rapidly, as though to keep her from throwing a glance at the monitor. It flashed through her mind that now it was not a question of checking to see whether the white spot was the right size and in the right position. It was now a question not of the child, but of her. Then everything went quite quickly, with no thoughts about the child, as though it had already ceased to exist. Her only memory of the anaesthesia was of having struggled to protect herself against something that was infinitely heavy and tenacious. The image remained in her mind of the doctors and nurses in their green smocks, and of the light over the operating table. When she woke up in a compartment behind a screen, she felt only a familiar and comforting tension in her belly, like that which precedes menstruation. The enormous pad of absorbent cotton was full of blood. While she was still half asleep, the doctor came to her side and told her that for now she should think about something else. While writing out a prescription, he told her that he would be away for the next couple of weeks. She felt a strong need to think only of herself. The almost maternal attentions of the nurses made her feel better; there was no attitude of pity in the way they took care of her; she enjoyed the feeling of still being weak.

Two choices

71

She rested for a couple of hours. The other women left the building in the company of their companions, as one by one they came to pick them up. She heard the voice of another older woman, two compartments down from her own; she was talking about birth control, and was saying to the nurse that she was tired of abortions. In answer to the nurse, who had asked whether someone was coming to pick her up, Agnes replied, not without a touch of pride, that she was alone and would call a taxi. They had brought her a magazine. Even though doing so struck her as absurd, she leafed through it, and read the recipes. One of them seemed interesting: crème Charlotte, with apples. More than interesting, it seemed extremely important, and she asked for a pen and wrote it down. She had the feeling that it might become one of her classic dishes. But she never tried her hand at it. In the taxi that took her to the train station, she continued to feel heroic, and also in need of help. The man she lives with remembers that she was somewhat pale. She remembers that the silence between them made her feel better. She remembers the following days as a slow, sad convalescence. Her activities centred on cooking and eating. Seven months later, at precisely the time when Agnes’s pregnancy would have come to term, she had the following, long dream: I was in the bathroom at the home of my parents. I was sitting on the toilet, and I thought that I was having my period. I realized that a tiny baby had fallen out into the water, where it was moving about like a sea horse. I saw that it was alive, but the front of its head seemed squashed, as though it had no brain. It was a spontaneous miscarriage. I felt very sorry for it. I knew that this child couldn’t survive: it would die as soon as I lifted it out of the water. I took it out of the water and held it in my hand. I didn’t want to let it die alone. There were people around me, and I found them disturbing; I looked for a place in which to be alone, and found the room I had had as a little girl. Then Maria entered, an aunt of whom I was very fond. Finally alone and quiet, I saw that the child in the meanwhile had died in the palm of my hand. I knew that I was supposed to burn the body. Now it looked like a sheet of paper, and I set fire to one of its corners. It burned and burned, but didn’t turn to ashes; it took on a series of very bright colors, like the colors of a figure in enamel. It had turned into a Christ child, and was alive and smiling. To relate this dream to Agnes’s abortion—as we remarked at the start—is entirely arbitrary, and demonstrates nothing; all we can say is that it had a certain effect on the dreamer in relation to that abortion. The archetypal images in this dream recount a transformation by means of death. Something has transformed itself within the dreamer, since the death of a creature that could not live has been accepted and lived with. Nine months after the encounter with the Doberman—the herald both of pleasure and of illness—Agnes gave birth to a child: in her parents’ home, the central locus of her personal problems; in the bathroom, where we clean our bodies and free them of waste. Distinctions, here, grow very subtle: a momentary lack of attention is enough to allow us to throw away something which, if

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

72

looked at closely and lovingly cared for, can reveal itself to be sacred and alive. Whether it is seen as a waste product, or as the baby Jesus, depends only on the dreamer’s attitude; or in more technical terms, it depends on the measure of respect and attention that the Ego pays to the symbols that move in these private, interior places. We should remember the position of traditional societies on abortion: it was a form of communication with an other-worldly reality. The foetus was not thought of as a little human being, just as it was not thought of as a clump of cells. It was magical and sacred, and it could bring about transformations. It could not be physically killed, since it was a metaphysical entity. In this dream, a tiny, unfortunately miscarried foetus becomes a metaphysical being; psychology, however, can do no better than to call it a symbol, which as a term, once again, is both technical and limiting. The dream can be related to the dreamer’s personality, even if we do not insist on referring it to her abortion: her regressive tendency to vegetate, to allow herself to act without reflection (the tiny, brainless creature in the water), her difficulty in defining her own limits and contours (the people who disturb her), and therefore the risk of missing the essential (the confrontation with death). She finds assistance in her ability to relate to others (she does not want the baby to die alone), in her intuition (she knows that she has to burn the dead child), in the strength not to flee from emotions (the fire). She thus sets out on a road where one encounters a sacred force and a firm individuality (the Christ child). But this dream also reminded Agnes of the abortion she had actually had. She feels reconciled to it, and she sees the dream as offering reconfirmation of the decision she made. If related to the abortion, the dream would seem to refer to the thoughtlessness and lack of consciousness (the baby has no brain) with which she placed herself in a situation from which the only route of exit was to accept the inevitability of death. Death, however, results not from a cruel act of violence, but from an advance in awareness (the act of lifting the child from the dirty water and establishing contact with it). She knew that it would die if it were taken out of the water. But that water was dirty, not sacred, not maternal like amniotic fluid. It could have been thoughtlessly eliminated as one eliminates excrement. To lift it from the water is consciously to consign it to death. She does not, moreover, allow it to die alone. She remains in its company even if mechanisms of disturbance—people—attempt to distract her. Death is not segregated, but surrounded by feelings. The tiny miscarriage is a product of blind and unconscious nature, which creates life without asking itself about what kind of life it will be. The dream Ego, on the other hand, behaves in a human and maternal way. Everything that is endowed with life wants to be witnessed, wants to be accompanied along its path, no matter how brief that path may be. We all have the right to be born and to die with someone else beside us. One might surmise that an abortion in which mourning and death played no part—because the woman who aborted felt that the foetus could not yet be referred to as life—would find a different sort of expression in such a dream: perhaps the foetus would go unnoticed, and the toilet would be flushed. There would be no hard and painful confrontation with death, no series of transformations. The events that take place in this dream depend entirely on the attitude of the dream Ego: the acceptance of the inevitable, unadorned; the act of conscious realization; the feeling of relating to the other.

Two choices

73

The Maria who appears in the dream is a childless aunt who was always ready, when Agnes was a girl, to lend a helping hand in moments of need. Agnes also associates Maria with the mother of God. The dream figure thus combines a willingness to be of help with a spirituality that transcends the biological. The perception that the corpse has to be burned refers back to the dream of the loaves of bread, one of which was still to be cooked. The time is now ripe for a real fire, the flames of emotion and suffering envelop everything, and something new is born from them: the tiny, brainless miscarriage becomes the baby saviour; and a state of miserable, unconscious, instinctual vegetation gives way, through the confrontation with death, to a mode of existence that reconciles opposites, that brings about freedom from feelings of guilt (the Christ child smiles), and that also has the friendly power to relieve the situation of its drama. We could say of the abortion itself that a ‘brainless’, unconscious desire for a child for which the time was not yet ripe developed instead—by way of relinquishing the child and accepting a confrontation with death—into the possibility of a new way of living. Much as we find among traditional peoples, the magical power of the foetus was activated.

NOTE * ‘By shadow I mean the “negative” side of the personality, the sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide, together with the insufficiently developed functions and contents of the personal unconscious’ (Jung 1917/26/43: note to para. 103).

13 A SACRIFICE An external observer may find it difficult to see that the violent act of abortion is often directed, psychologically, not against the foetus, but against a destructive maternal aspect of the personality. It is difficult, because such negative maternal drives may hide behind a self-deceiving and highly idealized inclination to take care of others. Self-sacrifice for others is a lofty ideal. But when a woman’s personality is imprisoned in identification with the mother, it constitutes no sacrifice at all: one is all too happy to relinquish the burden of individuality—a burden, since it remains to be developed—and to follow the course prescribed by the group in which one lives. This false sacrifice offers immediate rewards, but, in the longer run, creates interior conflicts. When, on the other hand, a woman dares to challenge the sovereign power of the maternal ideal and is willing to pay the price for doing so, giving up her foetus—and with it her own maternity—in exchange for individual development, this is indeed a sacrifice. She rejects the community of mothers and affirms her own individual existence, and is therefore condemned by the mothers. To speak of an abortion as a sacrifice leads easily to misunderstandings if such words are taken only literally, and not symbolically. Indeed, one thinks too often of abortion as a kind of human sacrifice, like those of antiquity, and thus charged with a rituality of such cruelty as to make one hope that the further evolution of ethical behaviour will lead to its final disappearance. But the analogy it shows to human sacrifice is weak. The elimination of an embryo never represents a consciously chosen and actuated sacrifice, since it is hardly a question of intentionally provoking a pregnancy for the single purpose of aborting. At most, one could hypothesize that abortion expresses an indirect and unconscious need for sacrifice on the part of society as a whole: on the one hand, the attitudes which principally shape our lives ever more thoroughly recede from the forms of consciousness in which human sacrifice played a role; on the other, they may unconsciously produce occasions for sacrifice as a way of compensating for the emptiness of a society ever more deprived of consciously experienced rituals and rites of passage. Even in ancient times, abortion did not constitute a sacrifice in the true sense of the term (as stated above, sacri-ficium: an act that makes something sacred), because there was no possible notion, as we have seen already, of making a foetus divine: a foetus belonged from the start to the world beyond, and thus was already sacred. So, if we speak of sacrifice in relation to abortion, we should not think automatically of the sacrifice of the embryo, but instead of the sacrifice of something psychological and subjective, of part of the self, for example of the original innocence from which this violent act forever removes us.

A Sacrifice

75

Here (unrelated to any real pregnancy or abortion of the dreamer’s) is a dream on this theme: I thought there was something wrong with my liver, so I went to see a homoeopathic doctor, a woman. She told me that I suffered from an hereditary illness, something concerned with what she called the ‘tritend’ chromosomes. The only cure was to get pregnant and then to have an abortion. I refused to have anything to do with that. The doctor added that it was a question of a sacrifice, and that there were women who would prefer to give birth to a child afflicted with Down’s syndrome rather than to have an abortion. The dreamer associated ‘tritend’ with tritons and sirens, and with the world of illusion. Her illness was to be transmitted from one generation to the next (so it was more than simply a personal concern of her own) and was connected with the core of her personality (her chromosomes). It was more, as well, than simply a fatal illness that would put an end to her life. (It was a liver disease, and the liver, in addition to being a vital organ, is also connected with destiny, as one sees, for example, in the mantic arts of the Greeks.) The disease was a question of living in an illusory world, like the sirens, which are the unconscious forms of a mode of femininity that finds its only raison d’être in seducing men and leading them astray. The cure for this interior propensity to be unable to live a truly autonomous life was to become pregnant and then to abort: it demanded a homoeopathic dose of maternity, no more than a couple of weeks, and then a violent, voluntary renunciation of it. The woman had to do something totally absurd: become pregnant so as then to be able to abort. The purpose of the pregnancy lay entirely in this abortion, and in nothing else. And this abortion contained a symbolic form of achieving health. Abortion, here, is not to be taken at all literally; it is the metaphor of an act of destruction which the woman has to direct, again metaphorically, against her own regressive behaviour, her dependence, her infantile expectation that others will solve her problems, and that all she has to do is follow the paths others have laid down before her. She needed to take possession of the energies typical of Artemis: to learn to be active, and to exercise a faculty for separating, cutting and abandoning things; to acquire an attitude free of infantile needs. The dreamer’s Ego rejects such a course, and the woman doctor—the embodiment of a feminine voice which in turn repudiates the voice of a maternal archetype that dismisses the assumption of personal responsibility—speaks even more drastically: she remarks that there are women who prefer a definitive crippling of the soul (a child afflicted with Down’s syndrome is a symbolic representation of a world of complex feelings but of negligible autonomy, and thus of a life that requires the protraction of maternal protection) to abandoning the age-old path of the mother. Here again, we are not primarily to think of literal motherhood, but of the attitude of ‘sacrifice for’ and of ‘living in function of’, or ‘for the sake of’. The voice of the dream accepts no compromises and insists of a solution which is both radical and homoeopathic: the interminable cycle of generation and of taking care of others is to be treated with a minimum dose of maternity. It does not aim to offer immunity from motherhood. Health lies in knowing that motherhood is one of the possible conditions in which a woman can

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

76

choose to live, rather than a previously given condition in which women are always and automatically immersed. As a dream symbol, voluntary abortion can represent a sacrifice effecting a transformation which allows a woman to progress beyond a precedent phase of feminine development. The birth of a handicapped child, on the other hand, would seem to refer to what the woman’s own life would become if she remained incapable of making choices and conscious sacrifices: a life of passivity, a renun-ciation of living the experience of what we can be, a paralysis of consciousness. I have underlined the symbolic aspect of abortion: yet the surfacing of abortion as a psychic symbol could also occur at the chronological moment of a real involuntary pregnancy, and of the possibility of a real voluntary abortion. And it has to be clear, in any such case, that true resolution of the conflict, and actual entry into a new phase of life, can be entirely independent of the woman’s decision whether or not to have the child. What counts is what the woman’s psyche is able to generate from her decision: with or without an abortion, with or without a child. An abortion—like the withstanding of any other extreme experience—may indicate that a woman has effected passage into a new phase of life, but does not necessarily do so. An actual abortion may also generate nothing new in the life of the psyche, and instead lead only to further and even deeper repression, to the reinforcement of previously existing masochism, and to the even more radical implantation of a destructive maternal complex. But when the decision for or against an abortion excites strong conflict, one can at least descry the conditions in which change and interior transformation might possibly take place: and their likelihood grows in direct proportion to the conflict’s vital intensity, to the degree to which a woman feels paralysed by the choices that confront her. The enormous intensity which such a conflict can reach also derives from the way it involves the body, causing it to suffer as in no other kind of crisis, with the possible exception of a grave illness; the moral presuppositions of the individual are likewise called into play as under few other circumstances; and all the persons who surround the woman are drawn into her pain, each in terms of his or her own values. Here is the dream of a patient who had never had an abortion or a pregnancy, but whose experience of a new situation of independence allowed her to begin to abandon her more infantile expectations: I remember a voice, probably female, which spoke to me like this: ‘Now that you’ve had an abortion, you will be able to have a baby.’ Here one notes a strong similarity to the convictions of many traditional peoples: an abortion is seen as a necessary prelude that frees the channel which later will allow the passage of a real child into the world. From the psychological point of view, one is not ready for maternity until the moment of acquiring the anti-maternal capacity to relinquish the possibilities of desired but unrealizable children. When having a child is felt to represent the possible onset of a new mode of existence, an abortion is experienced as the most painful act of will: it is the act of relinquishing a state of renewal which is ardently desired, but which cannot be pursued under the circumstances currently presented by reality. Not all the faculties of the life of the psyche can be experienced at a given time by a given individual, just as not all talents

A Sacrifice

77

can be nurtured and asked to bear fruit. Abortion, seen metaphorically, means cutting oneself off from a possibility. In other words, it means saying ‘no’ to fantasies, desires and reveries, and even to relationships that we would happily preserve but which in fact do nothing more than exhaust our energies, since they do not represent a means for actively confronting ourselves; it is a question of saying ‘no’ to things that we simply allow, in all passivity, to trail along with us as we follow our paths. Such things are illusions which we do not have the courage to throw away. The desire to preserve and develop within us every kind of life, every new idea, every fantasy constitutes a form of the arrogance to which the ancients referred as hubris. In this sense, having an abortion can signal or reflect an acceptance of the fact that as human beings we have limitations: limits on time and energy, and in our personalities. To be able to generate and offer development to life—no less physically than psychically—is more a gift than a right. Abortion, seen metaphorically, can also be a question of refusing to accept the regressive attractions of the dependent and primordial state of life of a still embryonic being which demands and condones the single activity of placing one’s hopes in future developments. There are adults who for decades tell themselves that tomorrow they will start a brand new life. Abortion, for a woman of that sort, would symbolize the destruction of such passive hopes, so as then to be able to exercise choice, and to opt for things which it lies within her power to achieve. For some, the violent disruption of embryonic dreams that trust in ever new possibilities—and thus as well the acquisition of the ability to turn to concrete things which can be realized immediately—would constitute a victory over neurosis. Such a victory, however, would have to go hand in hand with an awareness of the things to which our faculty of choice has definitively closed off the future, and with the acceptance of the guilt which derives from having exercised that choice.

14 THE GUILT OF BECOMING AN ADULT ‘I was certain it would never happen to me’ is often given as the explanation for careless or absent birth control. A form of magical thinking seems to utter, ‘I am immune to certain events.’ ‘I’m different’ is a notion that belongs to a fantasy of purity, of an innocence that cannot encounter misfortune. Since all intentions are good, nothing awful can happen. This attitude has no place in life and belongs instead to an unrealistic, infantile dream that refuses all cognizance of adversity. It is when adversity in any case appears that one finally starts to grow aware of not being truly so different from everybody else. The trauma that can accompany an abortion destroys such a pretence of untouchability and sets off a first experience of guilt. Every increase of awareness brings guilt with it; and even though this does not have to coincide with the assumption of personal responsibilities—since it can also find its origins in events that were wholly inevitable and that result from good intentions, as in the case of Greek tragedy—it always has to run its course. In this case, it would be justified to invert the assumption: it is as a result of having remained too long entrapped in an illusion of innocence that one rushes headlong, or unconsciously wills oneself, into an involuntary pregnancy, and thus as well into a moral conflict that demands a new degree and direction of awareness. The conflict’s resolution will in any case bring guilt, either about the foetus, or guilt about the part of the self which might have been able to grow and develop if one had decided not to have a child. This latter situation does not imply that a child is an obstacle to a woman’s interior development, and frequently it is quite the contrary; but there are spaces of the soul, such as that of creativity, which are diffi-cult to reconcile with the space of maternity, since they resemble it too highly. If seriously pursued, a creative activity demands just as much attention, energy and passion as a child. To realize both at the same time is extremely difficult, precisely because of the similarity of the commitment involved. So there is a sphere of personal development that finds itself particularly cramped by the first years of motherhood, the sphere that lies beneath the sign of Artemis, for whom independence is more important than relationships with others. We can ask ourselves whether the moral conflict provoked by an unwanted pregnancy has a special meaning for women, and whether men react differently to analogous situations. C.Gilligan’s study (Gilligan 1982) of the development of moral awareness in male and female adolescents is again interesting here. It shows that they deal with such conflicts in different ways: boys place more emphasis on the observance of general moral norms, whereas girls are more ready to overlook them in the light of an individual’s

The guilt of becoming and adult

79

particular situation. A part of Gilligan’s work is explicitly concerned with attitudes to abortion: she did a series of interviews with women who had remained involuntarily pregnant (interviews made in three different moments: while the women were deciding whether or not to abort, shortly after the decision, and then a year later), and she notes that their ethical attitudes altered quite considerably in this fairly brief span of time. She points out three typical phases of this shift in attitudes. In the first phase, the accent falls on purely personal survival. The recurrent phrases are of the order of ‘I have to think of myself’ or ‘I only thought about the fact that I did not want it.’ And why? ‘I was not ready.’ ‘I still have another year of school before receiving my degree.’ Was it a question of looking for the best solution? ‘No, there was only one thing to do. I did not want it.’ In the second phase, the point of view is reversed: self-sacrifice seems more important, and personal needs are held in check. The previously held attitude is now considered egoistic. If the state of interior conflict continues, one finally reaches a third phase in which the woman attempts to reconcile the two preceding positions. This is the phase in which the notion of ‘responsibility’ makes its first appearance. Responsible decisions are those which rest on thinking both of oneself and of others at the same time. Here is an example: What I want to do is to have the baby, but what I feel I should do, which is what I need to do, is have an abortion right now, because sometimes what you want isn’t right. Sometimes what is necessary comes before what you want, because it might not always lead to the right thing. (Gilligan 1982:77) The conflict between desire and necessity is quite clear. Instead of saying ‘I do not want’, one here affirms, ‘It is not right.’ Whereas the second phase gives voice to a subjective maternal ethic, reinforced by archaic instinct (among female mammals the instinct of self-preservation is largely shifted from the self to the offspring), the third phase places the conflict in a wider context and moves dialectically between the pros and cons of the possible options: both hold opportunities which have something right and something wrong about them; instinct spoke at first with a single voice, but now shows fissures and facets; responsibility is a question of choosing one’s replies—of choosing one’s responses. And every response will stand, both inwardly and socially, on a base more fragile than the notion of maternal sacrifice, which convention and instinct both take for granted. Conscious choice, decision, responsibility and guilt do not belong to the field of the archetype of maternity. They mark the start of a territory which tradition reserves to masculine forms of awareness. Guilt makes its inevitable appearance when questions of ethics and morality arise, and the individual has to wrestle with conflicting possibilities. Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, in Crime and Punishment, has to encounter guilt in order to become truly human. At the beginning of the novel, he behaves ‘almost mechanically’, like a sleepwalker, ‘just barely aware of himself’. Everything that follows is more than simply the gradual discovery of the murder. It is also, as for Sophocles’ Oedipus, a slow and personal discovery of guilt, and of a guilt that resides not exclusively in Raskolnikov’s act, but indeed in the whole of

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

80

his existence, and perhaps, as again with Oedipus, in the fact of existence itself. The act is like a symptom through which the whole of the world of interior chaos presses forward into the light. It is in much the same way that an unwanted pregnancy and the painful decision to abort can put an end to a guilt-free life and a state of protracted innocence. Guilt is the price that has to be paid for stepping beyond it. And this, while Raskolnikov is still far from the end of his story, but close to expiation, is what finally makes him human. Women who live an interior life that seems to lie beyond good and evil may thus be guided to an unwanted pregnancy, and then to an abortion, by an unconscious need to experience a powerful conflict that promotes the development of a deeper moral consciousness. These further statements reported in the Gilligan study are indeed quite revealing: I am looking at myself differently in the way that I have had a really heavy decision put upon me, and I have never really had too many hard decisions in my life, and I have made it. It has taken some responsibility to do this. I have changed in that way, that I have made a hard decision. And that has been good. Because before, I would not have looked at it realistically, in my opinion. I would have gone by what I wanted to do, and I wanted it, even if it wasn’t right. So I see myself as becoming more mature in ways of making decisions and taking care of myself, doing something for myself. I think it is going to help me in other ways, if I have other decisions to make put upon me, which would take some responsibility. And I would know that I could make them. (Gilligan 1982:77) These are the words of another woman. I am really happy with where my life is going now. Compared with last year, it has changed so much and is so much better. I feel better about what I am doing. I get up in the morning and I go to school. I was just sitting around for a year-and-a-half doing nothing. I wasn’t going anywhere in life. I didn’t know what I was doing, and now I feel I have a direction in a way, I know what I am interested in. (Gilligan 1982:115) Maturity has emerged from a confrontation with conflict, and we feel that we can view this achievement as the unconscious goal which set the conflict off. I have seen that the pain of an abortion frequently persists. Time does not heal it. I repeat: the pain, not the sense of guilt. I think that the ability to continue to feel a pain which is neither remorse nor a sense of guilt is a sign of the achievement of a transformation: of the fact, specifically, that a woman has succeeded in making room for other modes of feminine identity that outflank and lie beyond motherhood. When I speak of motherhood, I refer to a figure that protects, consoles and instinctively endeavours to hold pain at a distance; it ceaselessly attempts to construct a reassuring world in which everything is recognizable, familiar, similar to something else, and close at hand. It sees

The guilt of becoming and adult

81

everything ‘different’ and incomprehensible, every cause of loneliness that sets us apart from the world, as distant and alien, as lying outside the circle of these arms that embrace and contain and serve to establish limits. To become an adult means suddenly to wake up in a world which before was ‘the world out there’, and which now is quite simply the world: the only world. It is a fabric of oppositions, and also contains solitude. It’s a place where we have to make decisions, and where we encounter death without the comfort of perceiving rebirth. A persistent sense of guilt is something different: the abortion to which it seems to refer is not necessarily its cause, and it would not necessarily have been avoided by avoiding the abortion. Perhaps it would have shifted and attached itself to other psychic contents. The specific referent for a feeling of guilt often conceals something else, which can also, for example, be a general dissatisfaction with life. If such a sense of guilt, which concerns the conflicts experienced by the whole personality, becomes bonded to the memory of an abortion, all chance for new development is blocked. The woman finds herself in a blind alley. The abortion cannot be remedied, and since the woman’s sense of guilt obsessively revolves around it, there is no possibility of discovering her other, more underlying conflicts, for which remedies might indeed be found. Such a woman has discovered the simplest possible explanation for her general state of existential emptiness; and at the same time, unconsciously, she has also created the impossibility of opening a new chapter of her life. Abortion serves as a hook to which to attach one’s feelings of guilt not only by virtue of its possibly being socially condemned, but also because of the image it contains. As the image of the suppression of a new life, it gives perfect symbolic expression to the subjectively experienced dynamic of every form of neurosis: a renewal begun but called to a halt, a process of growth that did not take place. One sometimes discovers that there is consciously a wholly negative view of an abortion, seen only as an act of destruction. But on lending closer attention to the unconscious contents, as revealed for example in the dreams they produce, one discovers with surprise and relief that the image of an abortion also shows a paradoxically positive valence. There are times at which it indicates, as explained above, that this act of violence has constituted the straits that had to be negotiated in order to exit from the state of regression in which a woman is eternally a daughter or a mother, but never a person. An abortion at times takes on the character of something (a birth, a non-birth?) that happened in the dark. The woman goes home with nothing in her arms and a heart that is heavy with guilt, but she is returning to a place in which perhaps to encounter herself.

15 AN ULTERIOR THRESHOLD Many women are gripped by fear when the word ‘menopause’ has for the first time something to do with themselves. Up until ever so shortly before, it seems, it referred exclusively to ‘older women’, or to a category of women from whom they were still quite widely removed. And now? Is the feeling of being at ease—achieved not really so long ago—in the monthly rhythm of the cycle, its reassuring return, the fullness, the wetness, the sense of its advance, is all of that now to come to an end? Dryness, closure, stasis, shrinkage, decline: such images lame all thought. There is an age at which everything erotic and sexual begins to run the risk of seeming ridiculous. And positive images—for example, of older women who are cheerful, vital and creative—stand no chance against the chilling conviction, ‘you are now no longer what you used to be’. Many women in this period of their lives experience a highly intense and unexpected desire to have another child. They find themselves virtually afloat among images that centre on pregnancy and motherhood, and the streets they walk, like the houses they enter, seem to be populated exclusively by beatific mothers and their lovely babies. The partner reacts with a mixture of fear and amazement. He too may have passed the middle of his life and may know he is confronting a similar crisis, but he would never have dreamed of attempting to overcome it by fathering a child. It would not strike him as logical. He would have the feeling, quite to the contrary, of plummeting back into the past, and all the things that he may perhaps for years have been postponing for his period of retirement would recede to frightening distances. Many women, on the other hand, discover the thought of a new pregnancy calms their fears about growing older. The idea of a child brings a vision of sudden rejuvenation. One can start all over again. The important things lie once again before us, and one imagines this child as accompanying a transformation of everything else in one’s life. One plots a tiny victory over time and the approaching change of life. The experience of a woman in her mid-forties, as reported below, offers a good example.

THE CHILD AS A ‘MOTOR’ OF SELFRENEWAL The woman recounted that the last few years of her life had been marked by the constantly returning desire to have a second child. But she had never made up her mind to do so, partly because her husband, in his fifties, was opposed to the idea. They had a

An ulterior threshold

83

12-year-old son. She described her relationship with her husband as friendly. She also had an extramarital relationship, which her husband had accepted. Every now and then, the relationship between the woman and her husband grew more intense, and that was the situation when she once simply did not bother about birth control. A passionate sexual encounter had taken place between them, and she remembered her husband’s having remarked that this time something would remain from it. His words had made her very happy. When she discovered she was pregnant, both of them suffered a shock, and they cried, as she said, for days. The man was embarrassed at the thought of having a child at his age, the woman felt that she would not be up to the task. She was frightened by her own lack of vigour, both physical and psychic; she thought it unjust for a child to be born to such elderly parents; she feared the reactions of her colleagues, her mother and her aunt, and the jealousy of her son. Exaggerated fears and objective reflections mingled with one another. She attempted to remember the positive images that had formerly brightened her thoughts of having a child, but it was as though they had been swept away. Her guilt feelings about her possible choices were unbearable, both about the thought of an abortion and about that of a child with parents of such an age. In this obviously depressed condition, she went to a counselling service, and the psychologist advised her to terminate the pregnancy. In spite of the weight of her doubts, she finally decided that this was the course to take. The abortion was followed by months of severe depression, and this was the point at which she came to see me. She was now convinced that she had made the wrong decision, and she partly blamed the psychologist. She no longer found happiness in anything, since she saw everything positive that was now a part of her life, such as having more time and economic security—but also her garden and the fine spring weather and the good meals she cooked—as having been denied to the child she had not had. All of these benefits were things that a child too ought to have been allowed to enjoy. I too, at first, found it difficult to see beyond the immediate situation, and I thought that perhaps she truly had made the wrong decision. This attitude allowed me to share her sorrow, while at the very same time I experienced a powerful defence against sorrow in the form of the thought that came to my mind, ‘Luckily, she can still have a child, and I can too.’ I asked her to give me a clear description of the positive images which had run through her mind at the time when she had still desired to have a child, and which now arose when she thought of a child. In the course of this description she grew quite lively. Her imagination of having a child ran as follows. She and her husband enjoyed an economic situation that would allow them to hire a fulltime nurse and she would be able partly to pass on the work of taking care of a child. She saw herself as returning to the kinds of social and political commitment in which she had been involved twenty years before. Her extramarital relationship would likewise—somehow—take on new vigour as a result of her having a child, and at the same time, she imagined, her relationship with her husband would also deepen. She would pay more attention to her friendships than she had grown accustomed to do, she would take up sports activities, and even her professional life—she was a teacher—would take a turn for the better. She would approach her teenage students with new enthusiasm, and thus put an end to the sense of routine which had marked her teaching in the course of the past few years. Having

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

84

reached this point of her description, she herself nearly had to laugh at her fantasies: everything she wanted to achieve seemed to be something that a child, as though magically, would render possible. And not so much as a mention of nappies, prams or feeding schedules. None of the facets of her somewhat omnipotent image of herself as a woman who lived with great intensity had anything at all to do, interestingly enough, with the subject of motherhood. Her fantasies found their source of energy, as it were, in the child, or used the child as a motor that enabled her to pursue and realize other goals. Rather than circle around the image of a child, her fantasies foresaw the creation of a more profound relationship between herself and her environment. The child as a creature in its own right, and with needs and demands of its own, was actually a secondary consideration; and a real child might easily have felt superfluous in such a situation. It was clear that these daydreams were less concerned with a child than with the fulfilment of aspirations that accorded with the life she already lived. For years, in fact, she had felt the need to make a different and more significant use of her time, and as the years progressed she had ever more clearly realized that her situation was ‘now or never’. But her aspirations demanded effort and constancy; she had to free herself from her sense of insecurity, her passivity, and her tendency to depression. Her ‘child’ fantasy resembled a Fata Morgana, or a will-o’-the-wisp that always told her how easy it could be to make everything new. All she needed was a child, and everything else would fall into place. Here we see the way, quite clearly, in which the levels of reality and symbol can grow confused with one another. ‘A child’, as a symbol, represents new life, new beginnings, renewal. But when renewal stands before us and demands that we make a tiring effort, the easiest solution is to fantasize a form of renewal that takes place automatically, and with guaranteed success. The two levels are not kept separate, and the one invades the other. The degree to which a woman’s life as a individual has remained unrealized is often directly proportionate to the vigour with which she fantasizes that she would like to have a child. If in such a situation a pregnancy actually occurs, the woman may suddenly find herself in a whole new frame of mind, as though scales had fallen from her eyes. Her imagination may now make a gruesome show of all the things, and of only those things, which before had been absent from the scene. Is that what she really wanted? The belly, the exhaustion, the months and months with never a full night’s sleep, the evenings always spent at home, the all-consuming feeding schedules, the tiresomeness, the boredom of conversations with countless young mothers, and then comes nursery school, and kindergarten, primary school, all of that all over again? The achievement of such an insight brought the woman some relief, but other fears began to surface. It slowly became clear that the fact that she would not now have a child, as a result of her own decision, was not the only reason for her sorrow; the serious problem lay in the thought, ‘I’ll never again have a child.’ This door had definitively closed behind her. She was horrified. She felt old and useless. Precisely those goals which her current position might indeed enable her to reach—professional proficiency, social commitment, further cultural development—now struck her as empty and meaningless. What was missing was the source of energy, which had lain in the image of a child. Lacking that, everything else had lost all power and magnetism. And it was important for her to realize the full destructiveness of such a mechanism. It was as though someone had told her, ‘Here’s the solution to all your problems, and this is what you

An ulterior threshold

85

really want, from the very bottom of your heart, and you have to try to reach it.’ And then, when in fact she had reached it, ‘But what you really want is something else, and now you’ve got it all wrong.’ And then again, when the situation again had been reversed, ‘But no, the first solution was the right one, and now it is too late: you have ruined things once and for all.’ Her truly crucial problem, however, was to reach the clear understanding that this treacherous, nay-saying voice was nothing new, and had been at work inside her earlier. Her previous life had been marked by a lack of self-confidence and perseverance which had left her unable to realize plans and aspirations. She felt that her day-to-day role as a mother and her relationship with her son were the only things that remained untouched by this negative attitude. It thoroughly contaminated all the other reaches of her life. Now the abortion was her first and foremost excuse for depression: having decided that she did not want to have a child, she had totally relinquished all right to be happy. The fact that the image of a child was such an intense and destructive force in her psychic life indicates what this woman truly had to confront: her own infantile behaviour patterns, dependency and gullibility. An interior child demands attention and finds violent ways of obtaining it and of forcing itself into consciousness. The interior child, paradoxically enough, is one of the fundamental themes of menopause. When menopause is understood as a moment of ‘passage’ or transition, and when our conscious understanding of this further step towards maturity is unilaterally dominated by the archetype of the senex—age, decrepitude, shrivelling, stasis and renunciation—its opposite then asserts itself in the unconscious and dominates all our fantasies. The interior child wants to participate in the transformation, and if it is not allowed to do so, the fantasies of which it is the centre press forward to concrete realization. The underlying tone of depression that characterized this woman was an indication of a kind of unlived life, from which she constantly, but always ineffectively, attempted to escape. She had never confronted her relationship with her husband, and the illusory solution of an extramarital relationship concealed this fact. If she now became able to recognize the undertow of regression and potential self-destructiveness that lay beneath the surface of her mother-child fantasy, this last pregnancy and abortion would reveal themselves to have been helpful. It was clear to her that continuing the pregnancy would, psychologically, have been the easier road for her to follow: motherhood was a territory with which she was already acquainted, and she had been successful at it and found it fulfiling. Now she faced the more difficult path, one she had never trod before. Now she had chosen the new. And the new implied that she had to leave her own childhood behind her, accepting her limits, and preparing herself for the next new beginning, which at first glance looked like the end: menopause. This theme was still at a distance from her consciously, but none the less found expression in various anxieties. She found comfort in the fact that her most recent menstruation, as she reported, had been bright red and abundant. (Such an exact description of the menstrual flow—its quantity, colour and consistency—is something I have often remarked as a woman’s first reaction to the discussion of menopause. It is as though the description were a magical way of holding on to something.) So there was still time. But she was frightened by the thought that this life-dispensing flow of blood would

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

86

one day cease to return. The undesired pregnancy, the abortion and her state of depression all indicated the tumult which was already under way in the unconscious. At this moment of transition, a woman needs a new image of herself. That is the only thing that can help her to cross this threshold where the further possibility of motherhood—in the physical sense of the bearing of a child—comes to an end. If the psyche does not focus creative attention on this bodily event, and if the woman who feels abandoned and thrust outside of her accustomed biological cycle does not find herself greeted at the threshold by a new and different figure through which to understand herself, her capacity for self-transformation will be overwhelmed by the fear of her coming encounter with the unknown. Menopause is far from synonymous with old age, but it none the less arouses intense fantasies of old age. Yet this is not the case for everyone. There are women for whom menopause represents no problem at all, and who, quite to the contrary, long for it. Such women have found menstruation a condition of slavery to the body, and always saw it standing in the way of being able to behave exactly like men. They see menopause as finally freeing them. But as they free themselves from menstruation, they run the risk of freeing themselves as well from the whole of their femininity, which they have felt to be a burden, and thus, again, from their ability for self-transformation. Women face a special situation at the so-called ‘mid-life crisis’. As at puberty, the changes involved are physiologically significant, and menopause overtakes a woman, as Simone de Beauvoir (de Beauvoir 1970) has remarked, quite brutally and at a relatively early age. Precisely the fact that women are not yet old at the time they enter menopause means that their chance of an active reaction is quite large. The period of menopause shows a repetition of attitudes and behaviour patterns previously employed, successfully or not, at puberty. Women once again start to keep diaries and search out pleasant ways to ‘while away the time’. They rediscover play. A dream of a woman in her mid-forties seems to develop an analogous theme. She dreamed that her vagina had been sewn up, and after various unsuccessful attempts to do something about it, a friend of hers decided to cut the threads. She afterwards felt liberated and as though new-born. The woman associated these threads with housework, family responsibilities and being tied down. The friend who appeared in her dream was in reality a highly creative and independent woman who lived alone, and who seemed in the eyes of the dreamer to be true to herself and to pursue her own road. She functioned as a guiding example, and her task was to free new channels of energy. Many of the plans and psychic contents that were left behind at puberty, or slightly later, suddenly revive and present themselves anew. Today, moreover, a 50-year-old woman often stands in the middle of her career. Or she finds herself with more time for herself and her own plans and ambitions because her responsibilities for her children have grown less impelling. And if such a woman has no plans and ambitions, having never developed the ability to trust her own ideas and feelings, the changes taking place in her body will be experienced as decline and as condemnation to solitude. Inhibitions that remained unresolved at puberty now fully reassert themselves, and empty interior spaces often become the seat of an urgent need to exercise power. If this too proves impossible, these changes are likely to seek expression in constant complaining. Menopause, like every other moment of transition, is marked by feelings of insecurity, and established modes of identity may now begin to dissolve, which also brings the

An ulterior threshold

87

danger of falling victim to a single archetype: to Aphrodite and a powerful reawakening of erotic desire; to Hestia, in endless care for the house; to Demeter and the need to cling to a daughter; to Hecate and thoughts of death; to Hera and the exercise of power. In the midst of so much disorientation, the simplest, oldest, already tried and tested identity is that of the mother; and if motherhood cannot find expression at symbolic levels, the woman will experience an unconscious urge or a conscious longing to have a child. These phenomena reach their extreme in the cases where a 60-year-old woman wants to become a mother at any and all cost. The child of such a woman will one day have to face the spectre which she herself is unable to confront: that specter of her advancing age.

THE SEARCH FOR A ‘NOT-MOTHER’ ME A woman raised the question of a search for a ‘“not-mother” me’, asking herself if any such person existed, at the end of a letter which attempted to explain the meaning of an abortion at a very precise moment of her life. She had reached a time for a change in her attitudes: her past had been no failure, but could no longer be repeated: I am forty-six years old, my daughters are sixteen and eighteen, I have been separated for more than ten years, and I decided last month to have an abortion. On the one hand, I didn’t want to tie myself to my current partner, even though we have already been together for five years. On the other hand, it seemed to me that at my age it was no longer right to bring up a child alone, as I had done with my two daughters. The decision to have an abortion was difficult and very painful, since I also became aware of just how empty my relationship with this man is. In addition, I had to destroy the myth of motherhood on which I had constructed my whole life. It was clear to me that now, this time, I had to exit from the stage, and that I had to give up the child: this child would have needed something more than the kind of heroic mother I had already been, when I raised my two daughters alone, and which now I would have to have been again, as a single mother at forty-six years of age. I was quite attracted to the thought of becoming a mother again, and it still attracts me. But something else is also clear to me. At the age I’ve reached, the right to have and to raise a child can only belong to a strong and united couple who as parents can give it both love and material support. These are the only conditions in which the meaning of becoming a mother at almost fifty years of age can be anything more than an act of self-celebration. These ideas weren’t immediately clear to me. They began to take shape while I found myself in the ‘throes’ of the process of deciding to have an abortion; at first they took the form of an intuition, and only later turned into thoughts. Now I’m looking for a ‘not-mother’ me, and I wonder if she exists.

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

88

Where must such a search begin? To defeat the idealizations that accompany the image of the mother, it is useful to remember one’s own ambivalence to the role one has known as a mother: to remember the moments in which one longed to be far away from the family and alone, or those, as Rozsika Parker describes it, when one might have been tempted ‘to smash the untouched plate of food in a toddler’s face’ (Parker 1995:4). Who could you have been, at a moment like that? You were also yourself. The paradox, moreover, is that it is actually the daughter side of the personality that feels the fascination of the image of the ideal mother and that decks it with nothing but the best possible qualities. One would like to be as radiant, generous and at peace with the world as the happy mothers in the books; and, basically, one would like to have had such a mother. But neither is possible, since the only women who actually exist are real ones, with real defects and contradictions. And every child has also experienced its mother as a source of suffering, no matter what her intentions. The compelling desire for motherhood—the idée fixe that ‘I have to become a mother, under any circumstances, since otherwise my life is empty and meaningless’—is a subterfuge that allows the concealment of personality disturbances, depression or neurosis. But more than anything else, it rings with the message that ‘life is impossible without [myself as] a mother’. This is how a child cries out for its mother; and since no grown woman can voice such a cry, it assumes the disguise of the socially acceptable desire for motherhood, or of a woman’s right to have a child. This is a powerful desire, and can also be an instrument of blackmail. The people who know least scruple in their readiness to help a woman of any age and in any sorts of circumstance to become a mother often turn out to be men (in their roles, for example, as doctors or lawyers). Aside from financial considerations, which surely play a principal role, such readiness seems to be accompanied by diffuse feelings of guilt, mixed with a certain disinterest. Rationalization presents it as a question of assuring a woman’s exercise of a right that is grounded in instinct, but the underlying goal is simply to be left in peace by the woman and all her demands. ‘It’s up to her, and she must know what she wants. So who am I to refuse to help her, and let us get on with it.’ This attitude in men— which shows no more than a superficial resemblance to tolerant comprehension, and which is also met among doctors who perform abortions—is basically a way of fleeing irrationality. It is similar to the way in which a boy responds to his mother’s demands for an action which he finds senseless and incomprehensible: obeying her whim is the simplest way to put an end to her bickering. But doing so is an act of self-betrayal through which he learns to relinquish reliance on his own instincts, and he will find it ever more difficult to distinguish the thoughts he can call his own from the things he does simply out of affection for his mother. He will learn to hate his mother, and to hate women in general, even while making no attempt to alter his pattern of behaviour. And everything comes full circle when he finds himself in the role of the husband of a woman who wants a child ‘at any price’. Such a woman is herself on an unconscious search for a mother and mistakes her own infantility for the desire to be a mother. When such parents bring a child into the world—forcing it into existence ‘at any and all cost’—the child will grow up in the atmosphere of ‘motherlessness’ that marks the lives of those parents. All the things which these parents have not confronted, and which they continually experience as a source of suffering, are placed in the child’s cradle: a birthright of neurosis as the child’s lifelong task.

An ulterior threshold

89

The search for a ‘not-mother me’ takes place along a trail that passes through a woman’s personal memory of her own mother, through her own childhood, and through a confrontation with herself as a daughter. This meeting with herself as the eternally dependent, conforming and obedient daughter will also have to constitute the moment for a conscious renunciation of the advantages that derive from such modes of behaviour. This likewise implies the conscious renunciation of all participation in the contrasting corollary to daughterly dependency, and thus to the power that motherhood confers. The degree to which a woman makes use of her children as a way of proving herself important and influential reveals the level of fragility that in other situations marks her sense of self-esteem and ability for self-reliance. The woman’s letter quoted above gives a clear and accurate description of the route to a place that lies beyond motherhood. She remarks that the decision to bear another child would have counted as only another celebration of herself. Abortion, which demanded considerable renunciation at any number of levels, knows no celebration and, indeed, is usually concealed. But a woman who in such circumstances succeeds in defining the nature of her sacrifice can be said to have taken a step forward towards self-awareness, and towards her ability to love.

16 ABORTION AND THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT Today’s laws on abortion in all western countries could never have come about without the women’s movement; and the same can be said of the attitude which the western public at large now generally shows to abortion. For a long time, the women’s movement and the debate on abortion were closely connected with one another, and in certain situations they fuelled one another. The experience of ‘the women of Gennevilliers’, for example, made it clear that emancipation and political consciousness—one spoke simply of ‘consciousness raising’ in the 1970s—began for many women with an abortion. In France, the struggle for the legalization of abortion reached a turning point when the Nouvel Observateur, on 5 April 1971, published a ‘Manifeste des femmes’ in which 343 women publicly declared, ‘I have had an abortion.’ In many parts of France and Italy, women also opened centres where illegal abortions were performed. One was in Gennevilliers: At the back of a field which was overrun by weeds, in a street which at night was almost deserted, and facing a factory: a far from inviting place. The association’s name-plate was affixed to the door, and with the word ‘abortion’ clearly in view and written in large-size letters, it surely had not been calculated to reassure women who up until then had been accustomed to remain in hiding…. Women at the corner of the street waited in hesitation for someone to muster the nerve to enter the place. It was enough for a single women, slightly more courageous, to come ahead, and suddenly they arrived in droves. (Manceaux 1974:23) The only thing these women wanted was to abort as quickly and secretly as possible, and thus to avoid expensive trips to Holland or England. They found gynaecologists and nurses who performed the intervention reliably, safely and nearly free of charge. But ordinary working-class women were also confronted with something new and unusual, and they were frightened even while it aroused their curiosity: this was a place where people talked. One was even forced to talk and to explain one’s situation to whole groups of people. One was expected/allowed to share one’s personal and most private problems with others. For many, this was a liberation: ‘I’ve discovered a real need to talk, even to the point of becoming a nuisance; I keep on interrupting the others, and I talk continually’ (Manceaux 1974:32). Others, however, found the whole experience a shock. Charlotte, a

Abortion and the women's movement

91

nurse who worked at the centre, reports that one of the women whom she personally helped to abort never afterwards spoke to her again. Many women found these groups offered a kind and intensity of solidarity which they had never before experienced. They were accustomed to being exploited and ‘kept in their place’, and could hardly believe in so much willingness to offer them help; and later they were ready to offer help to others. But still there was something that many of them found disturbing: everything was subordinated—interpersonal relationships as well as the political slant—to an ideology of the ‘collective’. The significance of such an attitude can be seen in the following story (Manceaux 1974:58), as reported by Charlotte, the nurse mentioned above: [T]his other woman seems to have discovered that it is possible for another human being to take an interest in her, that it’s possible for other people to be aware of her problems and to help her to solve them, that there is nothing infamous about having an abortion, that doctors don’t tower above common mortals, and she just can’t figure things out. She gave me an azalea, and I said to her, ‘I did this for you, but I also would have done it for any other women in your circumstances. It’s a battle we fight for all the women who are forced to have an abortion. For all of them, not for you in particular. And shortly after: I think there’s something she hasn’t yet grasped; she continues to insist, ‘You’ve taken a risk for me.’ And she brought me another gift, a bottle of port, as a gift from her husband. I tried to talk to her again, but she lives in isolation and I think she’ll need a good deal of time before she’ll be able to understand the meaning of a collective movement. For the moment, it’s as though the shock were still settling in, and she’s starting to think things over. So it was only a question of time, and all non-political feelings, like personal gratitude, would fully disappear. The unenlightened were a species which would soon be extinct. The phrase, ‘For all of them, not for you in particular’ is alienating and psychologically wrong. ‘I suppose she doesn’t see me’, the woman must have thought, ‘as an individual, but as a part of the masses.’ And yet this particular woman—perhaps because she had the ability to perceive real human feeling behind the ideological declarations—did not allow herself to be side-tracked. She refused to break faith with her own psychological truth: respectful accompaniment to an abortion is an individual and ritual act—the personal significance of every ritual is indeed underlined by the presence of the overpersonal—and sacrificial offerings and personal gifts like wine and flowers were therefore the things which were most precisely called for. I would not want these words to seem in any way to diminish the human, political and psychological efforts made in this period by the women’s movement. I only want to describe—with respect to the experience of having an abortion—the things that fell by the wayside during this period of violent, collective struggle.

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

92

Women have repeatedly and forcefully insisted that abortion should not be thought of as the lesser of two evils, and that the right to abort is a positive acquisition. Here, for example, are the words of Rosalind Pollack Petchesky in Abortion and Woman’s Choice (Petchesky 1984:391): [A]bortion conducted under safe, affordable, and stigma-free conditions is neither a necessary evil nor a matter of private choice. Rather it is a positive benefit that society has an obligation to provide to all who seek it, just as it provides education and health benefits. Put another way, abortion is not simply an ‘individual right’ (civil liberty) or even a ‘welfare right’ (for those ‘in need’) but a ‘social right’. This insistence on abortion as a ‘social’ and ‘collective’ question was in many ways necessary, but none the less left certain lacunae in the psychological experience of the individual women who aborted during this period. And today, some twenty or thirty years later, there are women who feel the need to come to terms with these empty spaces in their memories. A woman now 50 years old, who describes herself as a thoroughly committed feminist, wanted to talk with me about the abortion she had had some twenty years before. She said that today one can barely imagine what it meant to have an abortion in the midst of the climate of militant feminism. Since abortions were forbidden, their performance was against something: against society, against capitalism, against the patriarchy, often against the woman’s partner, who had not been informed of the pregnancy. The atmosphere was charged with triumph and a tone of group initiation: ‘Now I am one of you. I too have had an abortion.’ The woman remarked that feelings like ambivalence, mourning and remorse were not only concealed, but simply not allowed. They would have counted as signs of weakness and enslavement to the patriarchy. So the women felt only relief and pride. Today, this strikes her as almost unbelievable, virtually ‘crazy’, and likewise brutal. While knowing, she says, that her decision to abort was the right one, and while never having regretted the fact itself, she has often thought back to ‘how’ it was done. The feelings which then she had had to put on ice had returned some twenty years later. She felt that she had been able to work her way through them, and to live out her faculty for motherhood in any number of ways and fields. She is sorry today that she never had a child, but this has nothing to do with the abortion she had back then. She says that she leads a satisfying life. The following account is drawn from the diary of a 20-year-old woman, reported verbatim. The experience it describes is both personal and collective. I received this diary from a woman who is now in her forties, and who asked me to help her to reach an understanding of the experiences she had lived through in the past. She saw them as a ‘tangle’ of which the threads had continued into any number of her later decisions and actions. I myself, on the other hand, see the events it recounts as one of the ways in which she expressed the conflicts that then continued to condition her life, and I would not suggest that not having worked her way through them was the cause of the difficulties she later encountered. The notebooks reveal, after all, that to a certain extent she did work through them. We are faced, above all, with a typical way in which women at a particular time, and in a particular political context, found it possible to experience and work

Abortion and the women's movement

93

through an abortion. The women’s centres had no room for psychology, no time to deal with abortion as a moment that required the expression of an attitude of mourning. Other problems were much more urgent and had to be solved—such as the risks of illegality and those of health care that the women might have to face—and lines of threatened, blackmailed, battered women stood before the door. Today, after the effort and fatigue of achieving a law which may still be inadequately applied, as it is, for example, in Italy, we begin to allow ourselves the luxury of psychological observations and ‘attempts to work things through’. But are we working today through something that truly belongs to the past, or are we working through things that belong to the present, and which only seem to reside in the past?

January 2, 1978 In spite of the news, I am very happy! Really happy. According to the ‘Predictor’ test I’m pregnant. Tomorrow morning I’ll go to the laboratory for further tests, and then I’ll know for sure. It could turn out either way. Then I’ll have them run the tests on my liver. About the fact of being pregnant, I am very happy. It fills me with delight to be able to make my own decisions about my own body, completely and freely, the possibility of having a child, after thinking I was sterile. These are very important things for me. Today I talked with Renato. I told him about thinking myself to be pregnant, perhaps in a bit of a rush. But looking back to it now, I think I wanted to show him the kind of self-sufficiency that we women can have, even in spite of the history we’ve lived for thousands and thousands of years. I felt strong. I’d like to have him here with me, close to me, but maybe afterwards, after the operation. I’ll see him tomorrow evening. I hope we’ll be able to have a good time together. I need that, because I really like him. I talked to Manuele. He’s a little depressed and pessimistic. Maria on the other hand was very understanding, very close…. More about this later. The girl’s description of her joy at finding she was pregnant is so sincere and convincing as to leave us unprepared for the first appearance of the word ‘operation’. It presents itself almost in passing and comes as a shock. So the decision was clear from the very start and apparently had nothing to do with the girl’s pride and contentment at finding she was pregnant.

January 4, 1978 The pregnancy test has turned out positive. Last night I saw Renato, but the evening together was sort of strange. It goes without saying that I felt very good, there’s no point in trying to describe it because… [Here the text grows illegible]… and then he said he felt left out, and used, that I’ve gone too far too fast. So it’s the same old story of our moving at different paces. Then we sort of broke down and cried, both of us, and practically speaking we stopped playing games with each other…. [The next few

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

94

phrases are concerned with friends, and with the girl’s desire to find a new job.] Tomorrow afternoon I’ll be going to the abortion center. I get a bit scared when I think about it. I feel so full at the thought of having a child inside me. The idea of creating something with my own body. Being in touch with a ‘you’ can drive you crazy with happiness. At least that’s what it does to me.

January 12, 1978 Maybe it sounds strange, but I’m happy. It’s Thursday night, and tomorrow morning I’ll have the abortion. I’m not frightened, I’ll be seeing Renato and we’ll spend the day together. I’ve just talked it over with Angela, and we’ve decided that it is better for him to be the one who comes along with me. I’ll give her a phone call. For the moment, I haven’t had calls from anybody, but I don’t think it’s out of disinterest. It’s rather that they’re all convinced of my self-sufficiency. I’d say that this is something that makes me very happy, and at the very same time it puts all sorts of things—big things, little things—into perspective. I’ve solved all the problems and the hang-ups fairly simply. The nausea pills have also worked, and I’ve been able to go to work all week long. For the time being, I’m calm and relaxed. Soon I’ll be able to say how things have actually worked out. Here the role of the man becomes clear. The girl and her friend have decided that he is the person who ought to accompany her.

January 14, 1978 Eleven o’clock a.m. I feel okay. In fact a lot better than just okay. I had the abortion yesterday afternoon at about two o’clock. And from four o’clock on, up until eleven o’clock at night, I was together with Renato. It would have been twins, and that was a shock, especially because the first suction was only relatively painful, but the second was awful. It was all really great, the women, the attendants at the center, but not so much the gynecologist. There’d be a couple of details to discuss with the women from the Radical Party who run the center, and in any case with the other women in general. I want very much to get in touch with Flora, to let her know that everything went okay. To let her know that I could feel she was close to me. But her number right now is always busy.

Abortion and the women's movement

95

Four o’clock p.m. I’ve talked with Irene. A lot of chatty generalizations and no political commitment. I want to spend my time and be friends with women like Flora. Big ideas and grand projects. I should give Renato a call. I don’t know what to say to him, maybe as well because my parents are at home. I eat a lot: which is a good sign. My body is reacting and recovering strength. I’m also very thirsty. I’m fine. No fever. This is the first occasion on which the diary records two entries at different times on the same day: the events which have taken place are important. When thinking back to what she here describes as ‘great’, the woman remarks that today she would call it horrifying. She says that she is still quite angry about the attitude of some of the members of Italy’s Radical Party, which was the group that organized these clandestine abortions. The abortions they performed were perfectly safe, from a medical point of view, and were also free of charge, but there was no such thing as even a minimum of psychological support. This is what she had in mind when remarking, ‘There’d be a couple of details to discuss.’ After her abortion, she also made a proposal to the Radical Party, suggesting the organization of discussion groups for women who had aborted or were about to abort: groups perhaps to be led by women who already had aborted, or perhaps by psychologists. She suggested the possibility of other forms of psychological support as well. But none of her ideas was accepted. ‘We’re simply in no position to do a thing like that’, was the reply she received from the Radical Party, and she felt incapable of organizing such a programme on her own. In the course of the next six months, the diary entries are all concerned with the facts of daily living, with a quick reference to the ending of the relationship with Renato, without specifying any reason. The names of various men are mentioned, and the girl repeatedly attempts to reach a conclusion as to which of them she really loves. The following passage appears on:

May 5, 1978 I’m really in the middle of a whole sea of doubts. Today I phoned Roberto, Franco, Vincenzo, Antonio, and kept on thinking about Walter, Ambrogio, Renato, and I just can’t make any sense of it; I need to understand who I really want, even if maybe it’s true that I’m not in love any more with anybody. The best of all these relationships, finally, in spite of everything, is probably the one with Roberto. I’ve got him really inside of me, and I know that I’m inside of him. I’d like to have a baby. I’d like to have a baby but I’m afraid to have it with him. The next entry in the diary is on:

September 19, 1978 I’ve met Marco. He’s from Florence. We’ve been together for a month. We went to Rome together and then Marco came to Milan for a couple of days. He left this morning after a thousand different hang-ups and just as

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

96

much crazy joy. I’m pregnant, already the fifth week, and thanks to the new abortion law I’ll try to have the operation at the hospital. I’m very scared and physically tired. Marco’s very close to me, whereas I myself might just as well be on the moon. I kept on refusing to believe it right until the very last moment, and even now there are times when I find myself thinking that it just can’t be true, and there must have been an error with the test. I’m twenty-one years old, and I know that I have to make my life take a great big change for the better. But it’s so hard! I know I’m in love with Marco, and my dream is to be able to live together and to have a baby with him. But there are also all sorts of things that make me angry with him and I hope we’ll work them out with time. I often get the feeling that we’ve made a mess of things. I also need to get to know myself a little bit better, to have a better relationship with myself, in order to be able to judge things objectively. This period feels like the trial by fire. I’m very sad but I hope sometime soon to know why. A single sentence informs us of both pregnancy and the planned abortion. The brief aside on the new law is immediately followed by fear and a feeling of exhaustion. This time around, her ambivalence does not remain concealed.

September 23, 1978 I’ve understood what makes me feel so sad. I really need Marco, and I’m really in love with him, and I’d take off right away for Florence. I also really want to have a baby. That’s clear to me now, and having this abortion is a hard thing to do. It’s not what I want, because I’d really like to have this baby, maybe these babies [twins]. Marco too has given it a lot of thought, but it’s all too complicated for everybody. Tomorrow I’ll go to the hospital with Angela, to make an appointment, and to check out the possibilities for doing it. I have to get hold of myself, and try to be strong, because I’m very depressed. Nothing interests me, there is nothing I feel like doing. I wish Marco were here, so we could talk about it all. I hope it’s all over quickly. I feel as though I’ve known Marco all my life, but the first time we met was only a month ago. When I think about it all, it’s all such a mess: the university, my parents, job possibilities, my independence. Physically, I’m not in good shape; I shiver with cold and then with hot flushes.

baby boy—baby girl that comes from inside me maybe you’re not the most beautiful

Abortion and the women's movement

97

but for me you’re wonderful I love you, I’ll let you be free I’ll make you free. You know, this morning I was at the hospital, and I felt awful. I was with a girl friend and I kept on telling her over and over again that I wanted to have this child. I wanted it with all my heart. I’m so terribly sad, and I just want to be with you, to be close to you. I love you ever so much, this feeling took shape a little at a time, bit by bit, but it is very deep and it keeps me in tears and laughter There is no full stop at the end of the sentence, as though to reflect the openness and vulnerability of the girl’s feelings: her feelings about the man in her life and the second abortion. In retrospect, she remembers all of this as extremely painful. It was probably close to unbearable.

Milan, October 25, 1978 A month has passed but all sorts of exterior things have changed. I’ve put an end to all my affairs, with Marco, Roberto and so many others, and I don’t know how or why they wanted or want me. On the other hand, there’s the fact that I’ve found myself again, my strength, my personality, the desire to exist for myself alone. I’m happy. An entry dated 25 November 1978 reports the start of a new relationship.

Milan, January 10, 1979 In two days time, I’ll be having the third operation in the space of a year. I feel okay, and I’m calm. I want local anesthesia, the way it was the first time, and on Friday, again like the first time around. It’s like closing a chapter in my life: the chapter of the pregnancies, and with no involvements with men, because for the time being there’s not a single one of them with whom I honestly desire to have a child. It’s an old saying, but you can fill it with new meaning: ‘A New Year, A New Life.’ That’s what’s happening to me. I feel strong as a woman—as a person—for the first time in my life. I don’t have relationships that make me subordinate to anybody. I have a life of my own, hopes of my own, nobody can touch them. At this point, I think that it’s a very great freedom to keep on living at home with my parents—while waiting to get a place of my own. I know that I’m an individualist, but it’s too hard to accept compromises with friends just to allow these relationships to survive.

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

98

have lots of love relationships, relationships of affection, solidarity, but I don’t want to completely belong to anyone. I’m very happy. These last three words bring the diary to a close, and they stand courageously alone. They sound as though a girl who had suddenly grown up were attempting to gather the whole of her strength so as to be able to advance beyond years which had been too chaotic, and pains which had been too intense. She is even able to distance herself from ideology: ‘I know that I’m an individualist.’ The word ‘individualist’ was a dire accusation in the leftwing circles of the time. The next few years brought success in her work, a serious involvement with the unions, serious friendships, a marriage with a man who radiated security. They related to one another primarily as friends, and their divorce, ten years later, took place without fights or complications. Feelings of emptiness then began to occur frequently, and she felt an ever more impelling need to come to terms with the past, in which her three abortions presented themselves as insurmountable obstacles. Aside from more personal contents, she seems to me to have told the story of a first, unconscious surrender to sexuality, bonding, relationships and the social environment in three dramatic stages, each of which was marked by an abortion: awakening, the shock of self-awareness, and self-protection.

17 THE NON-FATHER Discussing abortion with men is even more difficult than with women. Men are more likely to talk about principles, and less inclined to refer to personal experience. One rarely hears them say, ‘We had an abortion’, as they say, ‘We have a child.’ The decision as to whether or not to abort is often left entirely to the woman; the man has either been quick to abandon the scene, or closes up in passive silence. Anxieties and feelings of guilt are more rapidly repressed, but may possibly be more intense. The child that does not make it into the world represents different values for a man. First of all, the embryo is not a part of him, as it is of the mother. From the start, the embryo is an ‘other’ for a man: a different and separate being. So, the inhibition about killing that being is clearer. Men usually have few doubts that to abort is to kill. The symbiotic fusion with the life that is developing inside her often gives a woman a subjective feeling of having a right to do with it what she likes: ‘My body belongs to me.’ In modern western society, the father has no rights over the embryo. Public opinion in Italy was recently apprised of this fact by the newspaper stories on a young man who wanted to prevent his girlfriend from aborting and who charged with a pistol in his hand into the hospital operating room. But the lack of rights does not imply a lack of duties. All this is in striking contrast with the attitudes of traditional societies. In ancient Greece, abortion was possible only with paternal consent, and otherwise counted as murder. It was a question not of the foetus having a right to life, but of the father’s right to acquire descendants (Glotz 1931). Generally, men are acquainted with violence and killing in much more open and historically verifiable ways than women. The more or less ritualized expression of aggressive impulses is traditionally a part of a man’s identity. One can presume as well that men are subject to more deep-seated and highly articulated mechanisms of inhibition. Whereas a man under certain conditions can or must kill, he usually finds it intolerable to imagine a woman doing so. Any such image triggers a nexus of irrational anxieties in him. The idea that a mother can kill questions his very own existence and makes him feel totally at her mercy. It is not simply that he fears such a thing: he has no concept of it, no cultural presuppositions in which to contain it. Unlike men, women have never been able to count on a culturally accepted form of killing. Mythology gives the impression that women, since the beginning of time, have always killed for personal reasons, in furious rapture like Medea, or through a carefully planned conspiracy like Clytemnestra. With abortion, men step down from their roles as heroes to whom killing is entrusted as an honourable necessity—for example, in defence of the group—and who then are allowed, by way of rituals of purification, to return into the company of women and children. Abortion reduces men to the status of passive accomplices or spectators: here it is the

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

100

women who kill, assuming a role which men can only see as upside-down, dangerous and immoral. The associations that actively battle abortion seem to give expression to a masculine frame of mind. This is not, however, to say that their membership contains a majority of men; we are dealing here with groups of men and women who find their interior guide in a set of masculine values. Designations like ‘the Pro-Life Movement’ reveal a need for absolute abstractions. Who, after all, is not ‘for life’? The problem, rather—and it is one of feminine awareness, which distances itself from notions of principle so as to consider the lives of single individuals better—is a question of the kind of life that is intended. Is it the life of a woman, of a family, of a foetus, or of the happy or abandoned and listless child which a foetus might become? To what degree are we certain that the life of a foetus is a human life, and an innocent one? Masculine and feminine modes of awareness also have different ways of dealing with death and the experience of loss. Feminine consciousness is prone to experience life as a cycle in which birth and death ceaselessly give way to, and flow into, one another; masculine consciousness is marked by a linear concept of time as having a beginning and an end, and death as something definitive. This also exerts a certain influence on the fantasy images that men and women have of themselves. A woman feels herself to be a fount of new and future pregnancies: the maternal archetype that inspires her is a perpetual dispenser of life. Men are plagued by unconscious terrors of castration, and they fear that what once has been lost has been lost forever. The emotional withdrawal of the man who finds himself confronted with the dilemma of an unwanted pregnancy thus grows more comprehensible; and for a man to say, ‘It’s your decision, I’ll accept both solutions’, is not necessarily an expression of lack of interest. It can also represent his withdrawal of his own point of view in the face of something mysterious, whose nature and acceptability can only be revealed by its consequences. We can presume that the process of mourning and of working through the event psychologically follows a different course for men. We can also imagine that the fathers would relate more maturely to abortion if more respect were shown for the ways in which they experience it, and if they were not expected to function as a source of nothing but solace, support and essentially maternal protection. If it is true that men feel the embryo to be not part of themselves but rather a being in its own right, their feelings after an abortion can be expected to show greater resemblance to traditional attitudes of mourning; one also discovers a clearer psychological basis for their ambivalent stance to the woman who has had the abortion.

18 THE ESCORTS ‘Between infanticide and the Karman method of provoking a flow of menstrual blood, each of us will find a personal threshold of tolerance.’ These are the words of a gynaecologist on the phenomenon of conscientious objection, which in Italy limits the exercise of the right to interrupt a pregnancy. The law authorizes abortion for social, economic, family or therapeutic reasons up until the ninetieth day of a pregnancy; but hospital personnel, both doctors and nurses, can refuse for reasons of conscience to take part in such operations. The woman who decides to have an abortion has little difficulty in finding authorization, but it may be hard to find a hospital. The number of conscientious objectors has begun to increase, but more from concrete considerations than from any widespread shift in moral convictions: doctors and nurses who initially declared their willingness to perform abortions grow tired of being sucked into a vortex that rotates entirely around this single operation. ‘No births, no breast operations, not even a cyst. And as well no hopes for specialization and career opportunities: nothing but abortions, three hours a day, five days a week’ (quoted in La Repubblica, 29 January 1989). As well, those who perform abortions face the disapproval of the conscientious objectors (60–80 per cent of gynaecologists, and 80 per cent of hospital department heads). Doctors and nurses who lend assistance to women who abort are likely to meet the same discriminations to which the women themselves are exposed. To counter the decrease in the number of non-objecting doctors, the hospitals turn to younger doctors who are just out of medical school and on the search for their first job. The interruption of pregnancies is relegated to the lowest level of hospital activities, and deprived of the halo of nobility which has always surrounded the medical profession. A doctor who practises abortions is overwhelmed with tasks. Every doctor is death’s enemy. The struggle against death is indeed a doctor’s principal task. The woman who aborts asks the doctor to turn into ‘a very special judge who only pronounces absolutions’ (Kellerhals and Pasini 1977:310). The doctor who seeks to establish an empathetic relationship with a woman who aborts has to understand that no abortion resembles any other, and that every woman lives through the experience in a different way. For one woman, it is a cure for a disease; for another, it is a question of a death and a sense of loss. On the one hand, the doctor has to remain rigorously neutral and free of all ideological points of view. On the other hand, he or she is asked to give a positive response to requests for protection and reassurance, and to recognize the cases in which an abortion is the only possibility; and to do so with all necessary detachment. The doctor is trained as a gynaecologist; but he or she is also expected to behave like a trained, highly accomplished psychoanalyst. The result is that doctors often feel adrift in a sea of conflicts and ambiguities. If a woman sheds tears after the operation, the doctor may mistake mourning for remorse; the woman may seem to the

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

102

doctor to regret the operation and to want to make the doctor feel guilty too. He or she may try to resolve such dilemmas by demanding that there be no crying in the ward. Aside from all problems of moral judgement, it is important for doctors to understand that they count for some women as the first persons to whom they turn for help in doing something hard, which is of capital importance only for themselves. If it is true that an abortion assumes true meaning only when women experience it as a grave and extraordinary event, the first person to be apprised of such a fact should be the doctor who performs the abortion. But how can a doctor live up to this ritual task, if he or she has seldom exchanged as much as a few words with his or her patients, and often has never even looked them in the face? But even this is not essential. It is important for the doctor to be able to see the act—which here conflicts with the curative mission of medicine—in terms of its psychological significance. Otherwise, how can he or she reconcile professional ethics with a practice that does not work in favour of physical life? The doctor should be able to think of life in psychological terms and to imagine a symbolic embryo—of a kind that can never appear on an ultrasound scanner—which represents those possibilities of growth a woman cannot reconcile with a real child. To accomplish such a thing, the doctor has to begin to reconsider his or her role as the absolute enemy of death. Aesculapius, the divine healer, was condemned to death by the gods for having sought to reawaken the dead, or for his non-acceptance of death when death demanded manifestation. We may find it easier to understand the importance of those who accompany a woman who is about to abort if we imagine an abortion provoked by the simple swallowing of a pill. Research into pharmaceutical products to be used after conception is already quite advanced. In theory, women will be able to terminate a pregnancy at home, as soon as it has begun. Would there be fewer inhibitions about aborting in the absence of bureaucratic obstacles, doctors, operations and post-operative medication? The solitude that surrounds the act would become extreme. The woman would no longer be alone among other women; she would be truly alone. No one would bear witness to the event, not even an anonymous nurse; no one outside her own four walls. Would a couple relationship survive such solitude? Contemplating such an eventuality leaves one feeling something close to appreciation for the structured assistance of indifferent hospital personnel, for the doctors and psychologists who fill out the detestable forms. They too, after all, are ritual escorts. One can imagine that such a pill might promote a more rapid repression of the experience among those women who in any case are only able to repress and not to work through it. But one also wonders if such women might not become even more prone than they already are to neglect birth control. And for women who are more conscious of interior conflict, such solitude might constitute their greatest fear. On the one hand, it would make them more careful to avoid unwanted and superficially caused pregnancies; and on the other hand, if such pregnancies should in any case occur, it would lead them all the same to look for an escort who could offer friendship or play a therapeutic role. The physical or technical problem would be far more simple, but the psychological problem would be more consciously experienced and would thus grow more complex. The distance between the two possible attitudes—‘it’s only an abortion’ and the feeling of being involved in a highly significant event—would greatly increase.

The escorts

103

These reflections are based on the premise that such a pill could be readily available on the open market, but in reality this is nowhere the case. In the countries in which its use is allowed—as in France since 1992, and as soon will be the case in Switzerland (on the basis of the positive decision of the Cantonal Conference in 1996)—it can only be distributed by way of the hospitals, and its prescription and administration are precisely regulated. This too is a guarantee of a certain ‘ritual accompaniment’. The use of this medicament is limited to pregnancies which have progressed no further than the seventh week. The woman goes to the doctor, takes a pill (600 milligrams of RU 486, a hormone that blocks the production of progesterone) and goes back home. Three days later, she takes a second pill (400 milligrams of misoprostol) under a doctor’s supervision and remains under observation for four hours. Approximately 60 per cent of the women who receive such treatment begin to experience contractions—usually no stronger than menstrual pains—after a quarter of an hour and the foetus is expelled. With the remaining 40 per cent, contractions and the expulsion of the foetus do not take place until the following day or days, at home. After ten to twelve days, the woman returns to hospital for an ultrasound examination, to make certain that there are no remaining scraps of placental tissue. It is undeniably clear that this method of abortion shows great advantages, primarily in terms of practical considerations, but psychologically as well. Anaesthesia and surgical intervention are no longer necessary, which means a lighter job for the doctor, as well as a loss of power. The greater simplicity of the medical procedures could also mean, in theory, that more attention could be turned to the psychological and symbolic aspects of the experience of an abortion. There is also the plain fact that the treatment—the taking of a pill—is effected by the woman herself, and that, without anaesthesia, she remains fully conscious; there is a sense in which this stresses that the responsibility is hers alone. Nothing is done with her or to her; she does everything by herself. She sees the material that issues from her body: blood, clumps of tissue, and no rosy foetus afloat in a transparent balloon. The picture that remains in her mind is likely to have more to do with an image of menstruation than with an image of ‘a child’. But this will not condition the psychological process of working her way through the decision she has made, since the violence of an abortion is symbolic rather than physical. In Italy, abortions take place at about double the rate in the countries of central and northern Europe, even if the people of such countries often hold a commonplace notion of Italy as a land of baby lovers. An ancient and collective feeling of precisely such a nature is in fact quite alive in Italy, but it conspicuously clashes with the fact that the number of public playgrounds, like the age at which children are entrusted to nursery schools, or even the amount of time which parents spend with their children, is markedly lower than one finds in other European countries. It is quite likely that millennia of dominance by the Roman Catholic church have induced in Italy—where the image of the Virgin Mary is a constant presence—a series of extreme expectations about maternity. Even if Italy is in every other way an absolutely modern society in which the sensible decrease in the birth rate may even have been overly radical, the expectation that motherhood should count as the maximum realization for a woman has by no means disappeared, even while becoming less conscious. So the frustration is all the greater when Italian women find that maternity has been conducive not to their own rebirth, but mainly to a multiplication of the work they have to do. The

Abortion: Loss and renewal in the search for identity

104

ancient cultural expectations which demand that a woman aspire to maternity as the highest good make it difficult to supersede their more regressive aspects and to discover the experience of other, non-maternal forms of femininity. The high frequency of voluntarily interrupted pregnancies in Italy should be examined from this point of view as well. The deeply rooted dominion of the maternal model over Italian women has been quite extreme; and those who combat it tend to use methods which are equally extreme, like abortion. In other words, there are many Italian women who feel an impelling need to distance themselves from an ancient, devouring, allpowerful maternal archetype, and who thus indirectly seek the extreme initiation that lies in killing, which is to say in abortion. When a woman takes such a step without hiding from herself, or indeed from others, and if she refuses to treat it as a simple question of choosing the lesser of two evils, but rather—and as consciously as possible—as a great and difficult event, it may possibly reveal an initiatory quality. In the ‘no’ to a child, one may also hear a ‘yes’ to oneself. Recently, in Milan, I accompanied a young woman to have an abortion. Early in the morning we took a bus, and it left the centre of the city behind it, crossing through the fog and the darkness which had not yet dispersed. The entrance to the hospital was still empty, like the elevator that carried us to one of its upper floors. It was only on entering the waiting room that we encountered other people: five women, who were likewise to have an abortion, and all of whom had escorts: a sister, a husband, a woman friend, a male friend. The atmosphere was taut, with lots of words and perhaps too many smiles. Behind the banal remarks stood the facts that no one named. The air of the nurses was attentive and sensitive. They seemed to be aware of what was expected of them, and they made their presence felt when necessary. The emptiness of the corridor and the feeling of a day which had not yet fully begun helped one to feel protected. Looking out of the windows and down to the streets, we watched passers-by on their way to work. The morning was starting, life was resuming its rhythm, while here at the top of this building a number of tiny possibilities, or possible lives, which had barely begun were to come to a halt. I had the feeling that this was a hospital which did everything it could for women who abort: they were protected, respected and, above all—owing precisely to the fact that it was not a private clinic in the midst of green lawns—one did not feel unreal or monstrous. The fact that the operation was paid for by the national health service and that it took place in the same building in which births and deaths take place every day gave the women a sense of belonging: it made them feel that they did not stand outside the universal cycle of birth and of death. The escorts had to wait and were not allowed to talk with the patients until a few hours after the operation, when the patients, moreover, were asked whether they wanted to see them. The nurses said ‘Don’t cry’, in a tone that held no reproof. After passing half the day in this ward—the waiting room and the corridors had meanwhile filled back up and were charged with all their usual chaos—we were told that we could go home. I had the feeling that something was missing. ‘We’re just supposed to go home?’, I asked myself. I wondered for a moment why no one had thought to set up a space in which the women and their escorts could be together after the abortion: a neutral space that could function as a bridge between this highly charged, emotional event and daily life, and between the sick-bed and the fact that abortion is not a sickness. But it grew clear that the

The escorts

105

girl did not want to talk with me or remain in the others’ company. The space she needed was most probably an interior one in which she would not immediately have to concentrate on the tasks of her everyday life. At the girl’s home, I prepared the evening meal and served it to her in bed, which was the only little rite I was able to perform without feeling artificial. I had wanted to give her a gift, but nothing struck me as right. All the other important events regarding the basic facts of life and death are still surrounded by rites and ceremonies, or at least by traces of them. They may strike us as vain and empty, but at least we know how to behave at a wedding or a funeral. You know your role, which is clear and pre-established, and you either choose or refuse to play it. But none of this is true with an abortion. Are you supposed to offer condolences or express felicitations? Do you take a vacation after an abortion, or is that too frivolous? Where is the unborn child? I know a women whose eyes linger on the name of the place in which she had an abortion, every time the train passes through that station. That sign is the place in which she remembers it. I do not think it would make much sense to set up specific memorial places for unborn children. Such a thing would amount to a new profanation of the event, and it would hold off the women for whom it had not been at all profane. In archaic times, abortion was a ritual event and subject to taboo. Taboo was then transmuted into prohibition, and abortion lost its quality as an important, transcendent event. Where the prohibition slackens, abortion threatens to slip into an affective void and to turn into nothing more than a medical procedure. But the need for ritual has not disappeared but only been repressed; it finds expression in the laws that regulate abortion, and in the emotional intensity of the debates that surround it. Rituals cannot be invented, just as they cannot be supplanted by ideologies. But the woman who has had an abortion—the woman and her partner—can none the less vanquish the silence and absence of ritual with which society surrounds the event; they have to discover an interior voice which is able to address it, and to fix it in place as a moment of passage that indelibly belongs to their lives. A diminution of the number of abortions in a given country, as seems to have happened in Italy in recent years, can be related to less repressive laws; but it derives above all from the widespread work of individuals—without whom no law would be meaningful—whose daily work in anonymous institutions, in spite of external hostilities and inner ambivalence, has shown respect for a rite and revived unconscious residues of an ancient ceremony.

APPENDIX I The following text (excerpted from Francescato et al. 1983:26–30) offers an overview of the most important studies (since 1960) of psychological effects of an abortion: Kummer insisted in 1963 that the notion that abortion is frequently followed by psychiatric disturbances is mainly a myth, and as such finds its basis in case studies of a former era and not on empirical data…. A study conducted in Sweden in 1965 in fact led Ekbland to conclude that only one percent of the women who undergo an abortion require subsequent psychiatric treatment or suffer an interruption in their work. In a study conducted by Friedman et al. in 1974, the number of women who experienced post-abortion psychiatric complications was lower than ten percent. Peck and Marcus, in 1966, and Niswander and Patterson, in 1967, reported on a number of cases in which the psychological condition of a number of women was even seen to improve as the result of an abortion. Other authors (Moore Cavar, 1974; Sorvis and Rodmann, 1973) concluded that the psychological effects of abortion are similar to those that come in the wake of other specialized medical interventions, such as hysterectomy and mastectomy. The recent literature offers reports on psychiatric disturbances only among women in special circumstances: Pare and Raven (1970), for example, point out a difference between women who abort voluntarily and others who are forced to abort. Psychiatric disturbances are to be found among the latter. Robbins (1979) studied the psychological effects of abortion on a group of young, unmarried black women (fifteen to twenty-three years old). He discovered subjective feelings of remorse, but no abnormal psychological conditions. Olson (1980) studied adolescent women who had chosen to abort and others who had chosen to carry their pregnancy to term; he discovered that the girls who had chosen to have a child showed a higher incidence of psychological disturbances than the others. Protheroe’s study (1978) of the English literature indicates that voluntary abortion, unlike spontaneous or therapeutic abortion, presents few psychiatric risks. He underlines, moreover, that previous to the legalization of abortion in 1968, many psychiatrists reported cases of patients who were in need of treatment before or after an abortion, whereas the period that followed the passage of the new law was marked by a lower number of cases of women who turned to a psychiatrist for problems connected with an abortion. Protheroe’s findings were confirmed by a study by Brewer [1978], again in England, on women who aborted when their pregnancies were further advanced—between the twentieth and twenty-fourth week—and who already had felt the movements of the foetus. In the three

Appendix I

107

months following the abortion, only twenty percent of this special high-risk group of women reported feelings of depression; none of them asked for psychiatric help; and no more than four percent abandoned their schooling or jobs. These findings have been further confirmed by Handy (1982), who re-examined all the studies concerning the psycho-social aspects of abortion and concluded that a small minority of women experience negative psychological effects after an abortion whereas most women do not. On the other hand, women whose request for an abortion had been refused showed negative psychological consequences, as well as ambivalent attitudes to their children. The data that emerges from recent studies (Moseley et al., 1981) seems to indicate that the women who suffer negative consequences are those who live in a deficient social context and who lack psychological support from persons who play a significant role in their lives. Niswander and Patterson (1967) and Friedman et al. (1974) studied median-term reactions (three to six months) and discovered that negative reactions tended to diminish with the passage of time, thus confirming the findings of Peck and Marcus (1966). Lask (1975) interviewed forty-four women throughout the six-month period that followed the intervention and found that immediate reactions were favorable for sixty-eight percent of the women and negative for thirty-two percent. At the end of the six-month period, negative reactions persisted for only ten percent of the women. Payne et al. (1976) studied sixty-one unmarried women and forty-one married women and found that effects such as anxiety, depression, anguish, guilt and shame were significantly lower after six months. Both Lask (1975) and Payne [et al.] (1976) discovered that the most vulnerable women were those who were unmarried and without children, those with emotional problems, those with conflictual relationships with their partners or their mothers and those with ambivalent attitudes to abortion, as a result of religious or cultural factors. A study conducted in Canada confirms that the most negative consequences are to be found among women with previous psychiatric disturbances. Greenglass (1976) interviewed one hundred and eighty-eight women who had requested an interruption of their pregnancy, of whom thirty percent had a history of psychiatric treatment. Three months after their abortions, eighty-eight percent of the women had not experienced or requested psychiatric treatment. The twelve percent of the women who needed or received such treatment came largely from the group of women with a previous history of psychiatric disturbances. A study by Muhr (1979) attempts to ascertain the most common psychological attitudes in the first three months following the interruption of a pregnancy, and compares three different groups of women; fourteen white women and twelve black women, all of whom were interviewed three months after an abortion, and thirteen women who were interviewed at from one to ten years after an abortion. Muhr defined four styles of adaptation, as characterized by models of cognitive strategy; status quo, maturation, vitalism, and persecutory victimism. The author suggests that all four of these styles of adaptation are organized around the notion of abortion as a moral problem. He also concluded that the women with a problematic attitude after an abortion were those who showed a greater investment in the role of the woman as mother. After examining the above-mentioned studies, Francescato et al. reached the following conclusions:

Appendix I

108

Most of the cases of post-abortion psychological complications occur within the first three months and belong to the sphere of minor psychopathology (anxiety, depression, guilt feelings, sexual malfunctions) and such disturbances only rarely persist for longer periods of time. The most vulnerable women are those with previous emotional problems, or those who find themselves in difficult socio-affective situations (unmarried women, or women with bad relationships with their partners or mothers). Among women whose abortions are followed by more serious disturbances, to the point of requiring long-term psychiatric treatment, the problems they experienced seemed likewise to attenuate with the passage of time. This tendency has also been confirmed by a study on the part of two British researchers (Schmidt and Priest, 1981) who followed the cases of fifty-seven women. Only thirty-five of these women needed true psychotherapeutic treatment, twenty-four of them were unmarried, sixteen had a psychiatric history, and twenty had been separated from one or both of their parents. Psychometric and personality tests showed improvements after periods varying from a month to a year and a half of treatment, and follow-up studies showed ‘recovery’ (understood as the attainment of scores that lie within the norm) at three to six years’ distance from the time of the abortion.

APPENDIX II The following text (again excerpted from Francescato et al. 1983:107–8) offers a summary of the findings of a number of studies on the motivations for abortion: Sutter (1950) and Shaw et al. (1979) both conclude that women abort to limit the size of their families, for health problems that stand in the way of still another pregnancy, for the economic impossibility of supporting another child and thus for the purpose of maintaining or improving their standard of living. Additionally, in the absence of truly safe and harmless contraceptives, abortion is sometimes used as a means for the control and spacing of births, especially among the poorer strata of the population (Figà 1972). The above-mentioned reasons are also associated with unconscious motivations that impede an efficacious and constant control of fertility; such motivations are related to a faulty or uncertain identification of the feminine role (Bourgeois and Labrousse 1975) as well as to the woman’s relationship with the role of maternity (Gloor 1973), with her mother (Abernethy 1973), with her partner (Downs and Clayson 1972), and with the emotional and relational situations in which she finds herself in the period prior to conception (Arcidiacono 1982). The woman succumbs to the unconscious desire to bear a child, and at the same time plans an abortion. Menne and Moersch (1980) describe this kind of conflict in one hundred and twenty women who participated in counseling sessions prior to an abortion while at the same time receiving analytic supervision. The authors’ interpretation of the problem that rose to the fore was based on the analytic theories of drives and the Ego, and they discovered typical unconscious psychic conflicts as well as interpersonal conflicts. They reveal, moreover, that the counseling services offered to women who undertake the legal interruption of a pregnancy generally pay little attention to unconscious conflicts. This is to say that the women reach their decision as to whether or not to abort without the benefit of any knowledge of their own interior ambivalence; and they receive no form of counselling that facilitates the reaching of a decision. The woman may have desired a child in order to demonstrate her femininity (Pasini 1979), to find confirmation of her fertility, or to prolong or revive an already deteriorating relationship with her partner; but she may likewise have felt no desire to raise a child she otherwise might have wanted.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adler, N., David, H., Major, N., Roth, S., Russo, N. and Wyatt, G. (1992) ‘Psychological factors in abortion’, a review in Am. Psycholog., 47(10), 1194–204. Allanson, S. and Astbury, J. (1995) ‘The abortion decision: reasons and ambivalence’, in J. Psychosom. Obstet. Gynaecol., 16(3), 123–36. Baudrillard, J. (1976) L’échange symbolique de la mort, Paris: Gallimard. Baudrillard, J. (1995) Le crime parfait, Paris: Editions Galilee. de Beauvoir, S. (1970) La Viellesse, Paris: Gallimard. Burkert, W. (1972) Homo necans, Berlin: de Gruyter. Cancelino, J.A., Hart, B., Herman, J., Rashbaum, W. and Stein, J. (1992) ‘Psychodynamic aspects of delayed abortion decisions’, in Br. J. Med. Psychol., 65(Pt. 4), 333–45. Congleton, G. and Calhoun, L. (1993) ‘Post-abortion perceptions: a comparison of self-identified distressed and non-distressed populations’, in Int. J. Soc. Psychiatry, 39(4), 255–65. Deutsch, H. (1944) Psychoanalysis of the Sexual Functions of Woman, London: Karnac Books. Devereux, G. (1976) A Study of Abortion in Primitive Societies, New York: International Universities Press. Di Pierri, D. (1994) ‘RU 486, mifepristone: a review of a controversial drug’, in Nurse Pract., 19(6), 59–61. Duden, B. (1991) Der Frauenleib als öffentlicher Ort. Vom Mißbrauch des Begriffs Leben, Hamburg: Luchterhand. Francescato, D., Arcidiacono, C. and Picarelli, A. (1983) ‘Rapporto tra condizioni socioculturali e relazionali in cui le donne vivono l’aborto e vissuti psicologici del post aborto’, in D.Francescato, C.Arcidiacono and A.Picarelli, Personalità e questione femminile, rapporto tecnico no. 2, Roma: Casa del Libro. Francescato, D., Arcidiacono, A., Picarelli, A. and Prezza, M. (1979) ‘Aspetti psicosociali dell’aborto’, in D.Francescato and M.Prezza, Le condizioni della sessualità femminile, Bari: De Donato. von Franz, M.L. (1980) Träume, Einsiedeln: Daimon Verlag. Gehrts, H. (1985) ‘Initiation’, in Gorgo, Zeitschrift für archetypische Psychologie und bildhaftes Denken, 8(4), 1–62. Giegerich, W. (1994) Tötungen, Gewalt aus der Seele, Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Gilligan, C. (1982) In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Woman’s Development, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Glotz, G. (1931) Histoire Grecque, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Guggenbühl-Craig, A. (1976) Die Ehe ist tot, es lebe die Ehe, Zurich: C.G.Jung Institut. Henshaw, S. and Van Voet, J. (1994) ‘Abortion services in the United States’, in Fam. Plann. Perspect., 26(3), 100–6. Heriot, M.J. (1996) ‘Fetal rights versus the female body: contested domains’, in Med. Anthropol. Q., 10(2), 176–94. Hillmann, J. (1964) Suicide and Soul, New York: Harper & Row. Holmgren, K. (1992) ‘Womens’ evaluation of three early abortion methods’, in Acta. Obstet. Gynecol. Scand., 71(8), 616–23. Holmgren, K. (1994) ‘Abortion ethics: womens’ post-abortion assessments’, in Acta. Obstet. Gynecol. Scand., 73(6), 492–6.

Bibliography

111

Houghton, A. (1994) ‘Women who have abortions—are they different?’, in J. Public Health Med., 16(3), 296–304. Ingelhammar, E., Moller, A., Svanberg, B., Tornbom, M., Lilja, H. and Hamberger, L. (1994) ‘The use of contraceptive methods among woman seeking a legal abortion’, in Contraception, 50(2), 143–52. Jung, C.G. (1917/26/43) The Psychology of the Unconscious (originally, Über die Psychologie des Unbewussten), in Collected Works, VII, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Kellerhals, J. and Pasini, W. (eds) (1977) Perchè l’aborto?, Milan: Mondadori. Lamarck, J.-B. (1802) Recherches sur l’organisation des corps vivans. Lincoln, B. (1980) Emerging from the Chrysalis: Studies in Rituals of Woman’s Initiation, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lorenz, K. (1974) Das sogenannte Böse, Munich: dtv Verlag. Lunneborg, P. (1992) Abortion—A Positive Decision, Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey. Manceaux, M. (1974) Les femmes de Gennevilliers, Paris: Mercure de France. Marsiglio, W. and Shehan, C. (1993) ‘Adolescent males’ abortion attitudes: data from a national survey’, in Fam. Plann. Perspect., 25(4), 162–9. Merz, M. (1985) Schwangerschaftsabbruch bei Jugendlichen, Olten: Walter Verlag. Miller, W. (1994) ‘The relationship between childbearing motivations and attitudes toward abortion among married men and woman’, in Fam. Plann. Perspect., 26(4), 165–8. Oetker, K. and Nohke, A. (1982) in ‘Der Schwangerschaftsabbruch, Gründe, Legitimationen, Alternativen’, Schriftenreihe des Bundesministeriums für Jugend, Familie und Gesundheit, Band 123, Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, as reported in M.Häusler, C.Helfferich, G.Walterspiel and A.Wetterer (eds) (1983) Bauchlandungen, Abtreibung, Sexualität, Kinderwunsch, Munich: Weissman Verlag, Frauenbuchverlag. Osler, M., Morgall, J.M., Jensen, B. (1992) ‘Repeat abortion in Denmark’, in Dan. Med. Bull., 39(1), 89–91. Paris, G. (1986) The Sacrament of Abortion, Dallas, TX: Spring. Parker, R. (1995) Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence, London: Virago. Pearson, V., Owen, M., Phillips, D., Gray, D. and Marshall, M. (1995) ‘Teenage pregnancy: a comparative study of teenagers choosing termination of pregnancy or antenatal care’, in J. R. Soc. Med., 88(7), 384–8. Petchesky, R.P. (1984) Abortion and Woman’s Choice: The State, Sexuality, and Reproductive Freedom, Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. Sardi, F.S. (1977) ‘Appunti per un antropologia dell’aborto’, in J.Kellerhals and W.Pasini (eds), Perchè l’aborto?, Milan: Mondadori, 333–52. Shuttle, P. and Redgrave, P. (1978) The Wise Wound: Menstruation and Every-woman, London: Victor Gollancz. Steffen, L. (1996) Abortion, Cleveland, Ohio: Pilgrim Press. Tentoni, S. (1995) ‘A therapeutic approach to reduce post-abortion grief in university women’, in J. Am. Coll. Health., 44(1), 35–7. Timpson, J. (1996) ‘Abortion: the antithesis of womanhood?’, in J. Adv. Nurs., 23(4), 776–85. Tornbom, M., Ingelhammar, E., Lilja, H., Moller, A. and Svanberg, B. (1994) ‘Evaluation of stated motives for legal abortion’, in J. Psychosom. Obstet. Gynaecol., 15(1), 27–33. Westfall, J. and Kallail, K. (1995) ‘Repeat abortion and use of primary care health services’, in Fam. Plann. Perspect., 27(4), 162–5. Zoja, L. (1985) Nascere non basta, Cortina: Milan.

Francescato, Arcidiacono and Picarelli (1983) offer the following bibliographical entries for the works cited in Appendix I and Appendix II: Abernethy, V. (1973) ‘The Abortion Constellation: Early History and Present Relationship’, Archives of General Psychiatry (September), 345–50.

Bibliography

112

Arcidiacono, C. (1982) ‘Contraccezione, sessualità, identità femminile, maternità’, Sapere, 849(September), 345–50. Bougeois, M. and Labrousse, D. (1975) ‘Avortements provoqués et avortements spontanés: Aspects psychopathologiques à propos d’un premier echantillon de 411 demandes d’interruption di grossess’, Annales médico-psychologiques, 2(2), 339–66. Brewer, C. (1978) ‘Induced Abortion after Feeling Fetal Movements: Its Causes and Emotional Consequences’, Journal of Biosocial Science (April), 10(2), 203–8. Downs, L. and Clayson D. (1972) ‘Unwanted Pregnancy: A Clinical Syndrome Defined by the Similarities of Preceding Stressful Events in the Lives of Women with Particular Personality Characteristics’, paper presented at the annual meeting of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Chicago. Ekbland, M. (1955) ‘Induced Abortion on Psychiatric Grounds: A Follow-up Study of 479 Women’, Acta psychiatrica Scandinavica, supp. 99. Figà, I. (1972) ‘Social and Psychological Factors in the Practice of Induced Abortion as a Means of Fertility Control in an Italian Population’, doctoral dissertation to the School of Public Health of the University of California at Berkeley. Friedman, C.M., Greenspan, R. and Mittleman, F. (1974) ‘The Decision-making Process and the Outcome of Therapeutic Abortion’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 131(12), 1332–7. Gloor, P.A. (1975) ‘Aborto, interruzione di gravidanza’, in Introduzione alla sessuollgia medica, Feltrinelli: Milan, 228–42. Greenglass, E.R. (1976) ‘Therapeutic Abortion and Psychiatric Disturbance in Canadian Women’, Canadian Psychiatric Association Journal, (November), 21(7), 453–60. Handy, J.A. (1982) ‘Psychological and Social Aspects of Induced Abortion’, British Journal of Clincal Psychology (February), 21(1), 29–41. Kummer, J.N. (1963) ‘Post Abortion Psychiatric Illness a Myth’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 119, 980–3. Lask, B. (1975) ‘Short-term Psychiatric Sequelae to Therapeutic Abortion Termination of Pregnancy’, British Journal of Psychiatry, 126, 173–7. Menne, K. and Moersch, E. (1980) ‘Psychoanalytic Experience Gained from the Supervision of Abortion Counselling’, Psyche: Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse und ihre Anwendungen, 34(2), 121–51. Moore Cavar, E. (1974) International Inventory of Information on Induced Abortion, Columbia University Press: New York. Moseley, D.T., Follingstad, D.R., Harley, H. and Heckel, R.V. (1981) ‘Psychological Factors that Predict Reaction to Abortion’, Journal of Clinical Psychology, (April), 37(2), 276–9. Muhr, J.R. (1979) ‘Psychological Adjustment to First Trimester Abortion’, Dissertation Abstracts International (February), 39, (8–13), 4045–6. Niswander, K.R. and Patterson, R.J. (1967) ‘Psychological Reactions to Therapeutic Abortion’, Obstetrics and Gynecology, 29, 702–34. Olson, L. (1980) ‘Social and Psychological Correlates of Pregnancy Resolution among Adolescent Women: A Review’, American Journal of Ortho-psychiatry, (July), 50(3), 432–44. Pare, C. and Raven, H. (1970) ‘Psychiatric Sequelae to Therapeutic Abortion’, Lancet, 1, 635–7. Pasini, W. (1979) ‘Il bambino immaginario’, Contraccezione, Fertilità, Sessualità, 6(1), 77–88. Payne, E.C. et al. (1976) ‘Outcome Following Therapeutic Abortion’, Archives of General Psychiatry, 33, 725–33. Peck, A. and Marcus, H. (1966) ‘Psychiatric Sequelae of Therapeutic Abortion’, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 14, 417–27. Protheroe, C. (1978) ‘Psychiatric Problems Presented at Abortion’, Confrontations Psychiatriques, 16, 125–48. Robbins, J.M. (1979) ‘Objective versus Subjective Responses to Abortion’, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, (October), 47(5), 994–5.

Bibliography

113

Schmidt, R. and Priest, R. (1981) ‘The Effects of Termination of Pregnancy: A Follow-up Study of Psychiatric Referrals’, British Journal of Medical Psychology, (September), 54(3), 267–76. Shaw, P.C., Funderburk, C. and Franklin, B.J. (1979) ‘An Investigation of the Abortion Decision Process’, Psychology: A Quarterly Journal of Human Behaviour, 16(2), 11–19. Sorvis, B. and Rodmann, H. (1973) ‘Some Psychiatric Aspects of Abortion’, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 151, 42–50. Sutter, J. (1950) ‘Resultats d’une enquête sur l’avortement dans la region parisienne’, Population (January–March), 25–30.

SUBJECT INDEX abortion: anti 1, 7, 20, 21; attitudes to 12; as cry for help 24; duty of 11; and feminism 121–31; goals of 1, 11, 13, 27–30; meaning of 3, 11, 12, 21, 30, 60, 117; as metaphor 100, 102; modern position 15–21; negative view of 108, 143, 144; positive view of 108; power and 66; as preparation for motherhood 13, 101, 102; prevention 25; pro 1, 7, 20, 21; psychological effects of 5, 123, 124, 142–5; reasons for 12–14, 146–7; as rejection of motherhood 62–8, 98, 117–20 (see also identity); and secrecy 5, 69, 121; and sexuality 46, 50; shock of 122, 123; significance of 25, 26, 70, 136–9, 141; simplicity of 70, 137, 138; in solitude 69, 71, 137; symbolism of 13, 73, 75, 100, 101, 138; as synthesis 14; talking about 122; techniques of 12, 137, 138; tolerance of 135; transcendence of 141; unconscious desire for 11, 29, 108, 109; understanding 6, 67; voluntary 1, 2, 27, 100; see also repeated abortion acceptance 104; of limitations 102 action, goddess of see Athena adaptation, methods of 144 adulthood see maturity advertising 52, 53

Subject index

115

Africa 12, 13 age, and abortion 13; see also development; maturity aggression, ritual 132 aggressivity 64, 83, 85, 86; see also Artemis ambivalence 7, 20, 62, 77, 79, 83, 87, 89, 96, 124, 129, 141, 147; and contraception 43, 44; male 134; to motherhood 118; see also conflict analysis see psychoanalysis anànke 3 anger 65; see also emotions anguish 144; see also emotions anonymity 69; see also secrecy anthropological studies 11, 12–14 anti-abortion 1, 7, 20, 21 anxiety 7, 36, 80, 144; male 132 assertiveness 61–3; self 71 Ashanti people 11 Australia 14 awareness see consciousness; self-awareness behaviour, infantile see regression birth control 1, 9, 85, 86, 93; abortion as 15, 146; alternative 50; and ambivalence 43, 44; after conception 137; failure of 9–11, 50; ignorance of 9; incorrect use of 9, 38, 46, 50, 104, 137; information on 22, 23; and irrationality 10, 28, 45; lack of 9, 10; and psychology 10; reliable 9, 23; and risk 45; and sexuality 44, 46, 50; and spontaneity, diminishment of 10; symbolism of 10; and transcendence 10; unconscious rejection of 10

Subject index

116

birth: dreams 81, 82, 83, 94–6; fantasy 47, 48, 49, 50; pain 55; and sexuality 47–50; symbolism of 78, 82, 95; see also renewal Borneo 13 bread, symbolism of 89, 90, 96 career, and motherhood 55–7 castration, fears 134 Catholicism see Christianity celebration: of abortion 92; of menstruation 31–2; of self, through pregnancy 118, 120 ceremony, respect for 141 challenge, seeking 28 change see development child: fantasy 112, 113; interior 19, 72, 73, 75, 91, 114; as symbol 112, 113, 117; unwanted 143; see also motherhood choice 77–97, 101; exercising 60, 92, 93, 102, 103, 106, 107, 111, 112, 123, 139, 147; and guilt 111; and initiation 52, 53, 57; and maternity 55, 68, 100, 118, 119; paralysing 101; see also conflict Christ 94, 95 Christianity x, 3, 11, 15, 16, 94, 95; catholic x, 24, 25, 139; protestant x, 24 chronic abortion see repeated abortion coil 9; see also birth control coitus interruptus 9, 10; see also birth control collective: abortion 14; ideology 122, 123 combat, goddess of 66, 68 commitment 79 compulsion, repetition 30 conception, contraception after 137; see also pregnancy condom 9;

Subject index unacceptability of 10; see also birth control confidence: lack of 85, 114; self see self-esteem conflict 7, 25, 62, 90; abortion as 29, 92, 101, 105, 106, 137, 146, 147; deliberate search for 28, 104, 107; expression of 124; and maturity 107; of medical staff 136; moral 101, 105–7; resolution of 101, 104, 105; unconscious 146, 147; see also ambivalence; choice conscientious objection 135 consciousness: higher 57, 79, 89, 96, 104, 107; integration of 86; and killing 20, 71; moral 107; paralysis of 101; raising 121; see also development; psyche; self-awareness contraception see birth control conviction, ethics of 78 counselling 89, 111, 112, 147; see also psychotherapy creativity, and maternity 40–3, 104–5 Dahomey people 13 Dayk people 13 death: acceptance of 137; confrontation with 94–6; fantasy of 87; god of 86; goddess of 82; and initiation 53–5; repression of 16; transcendence of 96; see also killing; sacrifice decision, goddess of 66; see also ambivalence; choice defence, psychological 112 deformity, foetal 81, 82, 87

117

Subject index

118

demon, foetus as 13 dependence 100, 114, 119, 120; see also passivity depression 6, 35, 79, 86, 111, 112, 114, 115, 118, 143, 144 depth psychology 13 destiny, necessary 3 destructiveness, maternal complex 98, 100, 101, 115 development, psychic 57, 58, 79, 89, 96, 98, 104, 107; and abortion 2, 6, 11, 13, 28, 94–6, 100, 101, 107, 142; arrested 104, 108; and maternity 55–8, 80, 81, 86, 89, 104, 111; maturity 28, 35, 51, 58, 92, 107, 114; and menopause 115, 116; need for 36–9, 53; and sexuality 46; see also regression; self-awareness diaphragm 9; see also birth control diary entries 125–31 dilemma, female see ambivalence; conflict discrimination, against medics 135 disturbance, psychiatric see neurosis divine see sacred dreams: of abortion 84, 91, 99, 100, 101; of birth 81, 82, 83, 94–6; compensatory 91, 92; of menopause 116; of motherhood 83, 84; sexual 85; and unconscious 72, 77, 78, 79, 81, 88, 89 drives see instinct economics, and abortion 14 ego: ideal 47; origins of 71; solidity 40, 54; suppression of 71; sustaining 92; weak 79, 83, 84; see also psyche egoism 105 embryo see foetus emotions: and abortion 6, 12, 14, 95; fleeing from 95; male 132–4; maternal 61, 62;

Subject index of pregnancy 39, 59, 60, 125–8; primordial 2, 7; repression of 123, 124, 129; withdrawal 134; working through 124, 125, 134, 138 energy, alternating 64–5 England 122 erotic see sexuality escorts, to abortion 135–41 evil 3, 4, 90; foetus 13 expectations, meeting 62 fantasy: child 112, 113; child-birth 47, 48, 49; mother-child 48, 49, 50; of motherhood 36, 37, 117; of pregnancy 40, 41, 61; sexual 44, 46; unconscious 2 father see male; paternal fecundity see fertility feelings see emotions female: awareness 133, 134; initiation 54; transcendence 54; see also identity; maternal feminine see female feminism see women’s movement fertility 44–6; proof of 21, 31–6, 42, 43, 56, 147 fetus see foetus fighting see combat fire, symbolism of 94, 96 foetus: definition 17; evil 13; humanity of 20; image of 19, 72, 73, 75, 91, 114; magical power of 96; meaning of 14; as metaphor 18; and metaphysical 95; movements of 17, 18; psychic image of 19, 72, 73, 79, 85, 91; relationship with 72, 73; as sacred 99;

119

Subject index

120

status of 15, 19, 20; symbolism of 14; traditional ideas about 17, 19; ultrasound scan 17–19 France 121, 138 freedom 66 goals, of abortion 1, 11, 13, 27–30 good 3, 4 growth see development guidance, need for 52 guilt 6, 7, 25, 65, 68, 108; abortion creating 11, 63, 78, 88, 89, 106, 108, 144; abortion eliminating 11; accepting 103; of adulthood 104–9; and awareness 104, 106; and choice 111; freedom from 90; male 132; of medical staff 136; see also emotion; remorse handicapped child, symbolism of 99, 100 Holland 121 homoeopathy 99, 100 humanity, of foetus 20 identity, female 2, 34, 58, 92, 95, 146; burden of 98; changing 117; demonstration of 147; fragile 83; maternal 34, 35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 58, 65, 98, 117, 139, 144, 146; modes of 3, 58, 64, 75; non-maternal 58, 59, 60–8, 75, 99, 100, 107, 108, 117–20, 139; unrealized 113; see also female illegitimacy 12 illness, and abortion 13 image, of unborn child 19, 72, 73, 75, 91, 114 independence 68, 105, 120; see also dependence individuality see identity infanticide 71, 135 infantile behaviour see regression inhibition, male 133 initiation: and abortion 13, 28, 34, 58–63, 139; and choice 52, 53, 57;

Subject index and death 53, 54, 55; female 54; group 124; and killing 75; male 75; and maternity 37, 38, 51–7, 75; menstruation rituals 31–4; need for 51–3; sacred 53, 56; self 34; traditional 53; and transcendence 54 innocence 99, 104, 106; see also regression insecurity 113, 117 instinct, and maternity 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 86, 98, 106 Italy 23, 125, 127, 132, 135, 138, 139 Jesus see Christ Jivaro people 13 killing: abortion as 21, 26, 65, 69–76, 132, 133; and consciousness 20, 71; culturally acceptable 133; inhibition of 74; and initiation 75; justification of 74, 75; and ritual 70, 71, 72, 75, 132, 133; symbolic 74, 75; see also death; sacrifice law, abortion 20, 26, 121, 125, 129, 135, 143 life: definition of 15, 16, 133; inception of 10, 20; miracle of 31, 40; positive vision of 90; right to 96; sacred nature of 16, 17; saving, and medicine 136, 137; spiritual 16; transcendent 19, 53; value 16, 17 limitations, accepting 102 literature, of abortion 5, 6 logic, magical 2 magic, and abortion 2, 13, 21

121

Subject index magical properties, contraceptives 10 male: and abortion 13, 14, 132–4; awareness 106; emotions 132–4; guilt 132; initiation 75; and pregnancy 42, 132–4; rights 132; values 133; violence 132; see also paternal masculine see male Mataco people 12 maternal: archetype 134, 139; attitude 61, 62; complex, destructive 98, 100, 101, 115; emotions 61, 62; function 48, 49; instinct 47, 56–9, 61, 62, 86, 98, 106; principle 7, 61–3, 68, 82, 98, 99, 106, 139; see also identity, female maternity see motherhood Matuntara people 14 maturity 28, 35, 51, 58, 92, 107, 114; and guilt 104–9; see also development; self-awareness meaning, of abortion 3, 11, 12, 21, 30, 60, 117; see also significance; symbolism medicine, and abortion 135–41 memory 7 men see male menopause 110, 113–17; power and 116, 117; as renewal 116; transition of 114, 115, 117 menstruation 17, 115, 116, 135; celebration of 31, 32; cycle 64; and initiation 32, 33, 34; myths of 33; rituals 31, 32, 33, 34; symbolism 33 metaphor, of abortion 100, 102 mid-life crisis 116; see also menopause Milan 139 miracle, of pregnancy 31, 40 miscarriage 17;

122

Subject index spontaneous 27; see also abortion moral: attitudes 105; conflict 101, 105–7; awareness 105; consciousness 107; responsibility 77, 78; self 105 morality, and abortion x, 21, 24, 25, 67, 106, 136 ‘morning after’ pill 137; see also birth control mother: beyond 64–8; —child symbiosis 67, 83, 84, 95, 96; great 65; unconscious search for 119; see also regression motherhood 2, 3; abortion as preparation for 13, 101, 102; ambivalence towards 118; and career 55–7; choosing 55, 68, 100, 118, 119; fantasies of 36, 37, 117; and initiation 37, 38, 51–7, 75; need for 58; and neurosis 78, 118, 119; and power 120; primordial 2, 7, 68; readiness for 102; and regression 39, 57, 62, 63, 67, 109; rejection of 62–3, 64–8, 117–20; and self-esteem 120; transcendence of 36, 56; unconscious desire for 11, 28; see also maternal motivation, for abortion 146–7; unconscious 146 mourning 6, 30, 89, 92, 96, 124, 125, 134, 136; see also anguish; emotions murder see killing; sacrifice mythology 2, 62, 64–6, 68, 86, 133; of menstruation 33 Navaho people 33 negative see shadow Netherlands 121 neurosis 23, 24, 27, 28, 29, 102, 118, 142; and abortion 23, 24, 27, 28, 108;

123

Subject index and motherhood 78, 118, 119; and pregnancy 38 New Guinea 54 ‘no’, saying see assertiveness ‘not-mother me’ see motherhood, rejection of nurturing see maternal principle offerings see sacrifice opposites, reconciliation 96; see also ambivalence orgasm, vaginal 48, 49, 50 pain: of abortion 107, 127, 130; in child-birth 55; psychological 69 Papua people 54 parturition see birth passivity 86, 100, 102, 113; see also dependence paternal principle 7, 67, 82; see also male personality see identity; psyche pill 9: unacceptability of 10, 43, 44; see also birth control play, rediscovering 116 positive 90, 92 power: and abortion 66; and menopause 116, 117; and motherhood 120; and pregnancy 42 pregnancy: as abnormality 29; by error 9–11, 50; fantasy of 40, 41, 61; feelings of 59, 60; first 12; and harmony 39; as illness 72, 136; as initiation 37, 38, 51–7, 75; joys of 39, 125–8; male reaction to 42, 132–4; miracle of 31, 40; and neurosis 38; and power 42; projection onto 36; as proof of fertility 21, 31–6, 42, 43, 56, 147; recognition of 86, 87;

124

Subject index

125

and regression 39; as renewal 34, 35, 36, 39, 45, 102, 108, 110, 111, 113, 118; repititious 35, 36, 40, 42; as sacred 38, 39; and self-esteem 36; and self-renewal 34, 35, 36, 39, 102, 108, 110, 111, 113, 118; and sexuality 47, 48; symbolism of 29, 35; trap of 29, 60; unconscious desire for 11, 22, 29, 31, 34, 36, 108, 109, 146; unwanted 1, 3, 10, 11, 115, 143 prohibition 141 Pro-Life Movement 133 projection 69; onto pregnancy 36 protection: medical 136, 140; self 131 protective behaviour see maternal principle protestant see Christianity psyche 71, 90; and abortion 2, 5, 6, 11, 28, 108, 123, 124, 142–5; disturbed 23, 24, 27–9, 102, 118, 142; see also ego; self psychoanalysis 77 psychology: and contraception 10; depth 13 psychotherapy, and abortion 23, 24, 69, 128, 136; see also counselling puberty 116; rituals 33, 52, 53 punishment 65; abortion as 29 Radical Party 127, 128 rationality 2, 13; and contraception 10, 28, 45; and sexuality 45; secular 25 regeneration see renewal regression 39–40, 95, 100, 101, 102, 114, 115, 119, 139; and motherhood 39, 57, 62, 63, 67, 109; and pregnancy 39; see also innocence relationship: importance of 105; marital 111, 115; mother-child 83, 84, 95, 96 religion see Christianity;

Subject index

126

see also secular remorse 124, 136, 143; see also guilt; mourning renewal, pregnancy as 34, 35, 36, 39, 45, 102, 108, 110, 111, 113, 118; menopause as 116; see also birth repeated abortion 11, 21, 22–6; compulsion of 30; and morality x, 21, 24, 25; and pathology 23, 24, 27, 28; prevention 25; and psychotherapy 23, 24; unconscious purpose of 27; vicious circle of 28 repression 69, 72, 92, 101, 137; emotional 123, 124, 129 reserve 69 respect, showing 140, 141 responsibility: ethics of 77, 78; for abortion 86, 91, 92, 105–7 revenge 65, 68 rights: and abortion 22, 26, 123, 135; to life 96; male 132 risk, attraction of 10, 45 rites of passage 34, 99, 141; see also initiation; ritual ritual: and abortion 29, 123, 141; accompaniment 135–41; and aggression 132; killing 70, 71, 72, 75, 132, 133; and medical staff 136, 137, 138; menstruation 31, 32, 33, 34; needs 7, 31, 32, 51, 52, 70–2, 99, 141; observance 11; puberty 33, 52, 53; see also rites of passage; sacrifice sacred 95; foetus as 99; and initiation 53, 56; loss of 53, 70; life as 16, 17; pregnancy 38, 39; sexuality 45

Subject index

127

sacrifice 71, 98–103, 120; offerings 123; of self 99, 105, 106; see also killing; ritual sadness see mourning secrecy, and abortion 5, 69, 121 secular society 25, 53, 57 self: celebration of 118, 120; confrontation 102; definition 83; experiencing 49, 109; moral 105; protection 131; reliance 68, 105, 120; renewals see renewal self-awareness 50, 54, 64, 75, 82, 95, 102, 104, 120, 131, 133; lack of 85, 86, 106; see also consciousness; development; psyche self-esteem: lack of 79, and motherhood 120; and pregnancy 36; see also confidence sexuality: and abortion 46, 50; awakening 117; and child-birth fantasy 47, 48, 49, 50; clitoral 48; and contraception 44, 46, 50; control of 33; divine union of 45; dreams 85; expression of 44; fantasies 44, 46; and growth 46; irrationality of 45; and pregnancy 47, 48; and risk 45; stable 46; surrender to 131; symbolism of 45, 46, 47; vaginal 48, 49, 50 shadow 86, 90, 97 shame 144; see also guilt; remorse shock, of abortion 122, 123 significance, of abortion 25, 26, 70, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141;

Subject index see also meaning; symbolism sirens 99 sociological aspects, of abortion 2, 5 solidarity, of women 122 solitude: abortion in 69, 71, 137; of adulthood 108 sorrow see mourning soul see psyche South America 12, 13 space, allowing 7 spontaneity, diminishment of 10 statistical studies 2, 5 sterility, and the pill 43, 44; see also birth control supernatural see magic; see also rationality Sweden 142 Switzerland 138 symbolic values 7, 53, 67, 84 symbolism 7, 53; of abortion 13, 73, 75, 100, 101, 138; of birth 78, 82, 95; of bread 89, 90, 96; of child 112, 113, 117; and contraception 10; and contradiction 7; of fire 94, 96; of foetus 14; of handicapped child 99, 100; of menstruation 33; of pregnancy 29, 35; of sexuality 45–7; of uterus 33 taboo 1, 6, 7, 14, 21, 141; transcendence of 14 talking, about abortion 122 threshold, crossing 74, 75, 76 time, allowing 7 tolerating abortion 135 tragedy 3, 4 transcendence: of abortion 141; and contraceptives 10; of death 96; of existence 53; female 54; and initiation 54; of life 19;

128

Subject index of motherhood 36, 56; of nature 96; and taboo 14 transformation see development transition, of menopause 114, 115, 117 trap, of pregnancy 29, 60 ultrasound scan 17, 18, 19, 73, 87, 93, 136 unclean, becoming 85, 86, 90, 94, 95 unconscious 2; and abortion 24, 27, 28, 29, 31, 81, 108; conflict 146–7; and contraception 10; contents 97; desire 11, 22, 29, 31, 34, 36, 108, 109, 146; dreams and 72, 77, 78, 79, 81, 88, 89; fantasy 2; integration 86 understanding, abortion 6, 67 union, divine 45 United Kingdom 122 unknown: seeking 29, 30; within us 69, 72 uterus: contractions 50; symbolism of 33 vagina: contractions 50; and maternal function 48, 49; orgasm 48–50 values, symbolic 7, 53, 67, 84 violence: of abortion 138; male 132; roots of 71 virility see fertility will power 66 women’s movement 121–31; and abortion 121, 124, 127, 128 word, power of 67 working through, emotions 124, 125, 134, 138

129

INDEX OF NAMES Aesculapius 137 Agnes 79, 85–96 Amazons 65 Amor 62 Anubis 86 Aphrodite 117 Apollo 64 Artemis: abortion as offering to 66; energy of 65–6, 100, 105; myth of 2, 64, 65, 66, 68 Athena, myth of 2, 64, 66, 67, 68 Baudrillard, J. 16 Brewer, C. 143 Burkert, W. 71 Cerberus 86 Charlotte 122 Clytemnestra 133 de Beauvoir, S. 116 Demeter 65, 117 Deutsch, H. 47, 48 Devereux, G. 12, 29 Dostoevsky, F.M. 106 Duden, B. 15, 17 Ekbland, M. 142 Erinyes 67 Ereshkigal 82 Eumenides 67 Francescato, D. 142, 145, 146 Freud, S. 28, 29 Friedman, C.M. 142, 143 Gehrts, H. 54 Giegerich, W. 71 Gilligan, C. 61, 105

Index of names Gorgon 66 Greenglass, E.R. 144 Guggenbühl, A. 44, 46 Handy, J.A. 143 Hecate 117 Hera 64, 117 Herta 79–85 Hestia 117 Isis 82 Jung, C.G. 28, 97 Kellerhals, J. 9, 23, 24, 25 Kore 65 Kummer, J.N. 142 Lamarck, J.-B. 15 Lask, B. 144 Leda 64 Lincoln, B. 32, 33 Lorenz, K. 74 Marcus, H. 142, 144 Medea 65, 133 Menne, K. 146 Merz, M. 23 Metis 66 Moersch, E. 146 Muhr, J.R. 144 Niswander, K.R. 142, 143 Oedipus 3, 106 Olson, L. 143 Orestes 67 Pare, C. 142 Paris, G. 66 Parker, R. 118 Pasini, W. 9, 23, 24, 25 Patterson, R.J. 142, 143 Payne, E.C. 144 Peck, A. 142, 144 Peitus 67 Perseus 66 Petchesky, R.P. 18, 123 Protheroe, C. 143

131

Index of names Psyche 62 Raskolnikov 106 Raven, H. 142 Redgrave, P. 64 Robbins, J.M. 143 Rothmann, B.K. 18 Sardi, F.S. 11, 12 Shaw, P.C. 146 Shuttle, P. 64 Sophocles 106 Steiner, A. 50 Sutter, J. 146 Telemachus 67 Weber, M. 77 Zeus 64, 66

132