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Each parent has conscious and unconscious fantasies and expectations about their own infant, influenced by each other, their own parents, and their childhood experiences and memories (Lebovici, 1988). In addition, Blum notes the influence of the culture and society in which they were reared and live. Unconscious representations of the infant, unmodified by postpartum realities, predispose to an impaired capacity for attachment, mentalization and integration in the child (Beebe & Lachman, 2002). Under favorable conditions, a dialogue (Spitz, 1965) develops between mother and infant, which results in mutual understanding and affect regulation (Emde & Leuzinger-Bohleber, 2014; Fonagy & Target, 2003). Basic trust and mirroring (Erikson, 1979; Kohut, 1982) and affectionate early object relationships in a setting of safety and security are crucial for the development for both attachment and separation–individuation. In keeping with the overdetermined character of mental representations guiding mother–infant bonding and parental empathy, Blum notes the biological contribution, e.g., secretion of oxytocin and discovery of mirror neurons (Ammaniti & Gallese, 2014). Blum (2017) described analytic work with a patient whose image of herself as an ideal mother coexisted with an opposite representation of herself as rageful, punitive, and self- punitive (Blum, 2007; Papiasvili & Mayers, 2017). There appeared to be an extraordinary dissociation between a good and a bad self-representation, and her representation of her toddler as a loved and a hated object (Kernberg, 2011). Analytic work fostered reintegration of more mature realistic self and object representations. VI. Cd. Rosemary Balsam : Mental Representation of the Female Pregnant Body : Balsam (1996, 2000, 2003, 2008, 2015) contends that the pregnant body—the premier icon of the mature female body—has vanished from the psychoanalytic theory of female development. Until the restoration of this missing entity on a par with the phallus, the developmental theory for both sexes remains fixated in phallocentrism. Balsam traces some of the evidence for this claim in the psychoanalytic literature (e.g., relevant aspects of the case of Little Hans), but also in the medical teaching, in particular illustrations from the first dissections of female bodies in the sixteenth century, which demonstrate a view of the female body as essentially male. Balsam notes the enduring tendencies that both males and females have had, to distort the female body image. She highlights the controversy between the plasticity of the female form in all its developmental phases, including pregnancy, and the paradoxical requirement that stable mental representations be established upon an elusive set of shifting images.
VI. Ce. Adrienne Harris : Gender as a Soft Assembly Harris (2000) explores gender as a site of multiplicity and gendered life as multiply sexual, from Relational, chaos and complexity theories perspective.
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