"#0!v@0&02EL2*(264sE!=*!B*7)*67$)B6!&0(0%9$*2*(!):!1647#)D0*$7! 6(0%$<$(4!
! A0BC$*D0%EF)#<030%_!@>![+,-+^>!"#0!Ñ@0&02!:2*(264Ä?!=*!B*7)*67$)B6!&0(0%9$*2*(!):!1647#)D0*$7!6(0%$<$(4>! ;*!/>!@2%$)((!['&>^_! 1-%&Z@,%#+@B&5)+%@L%C&.*%+,)!)?@,)"+O&;%()#%O&@+*&1#@+(L%+%#@,)"+@B&.((>%( ![11>!-g\E +,]^>!A)*&)*ua0Z!e)%M?!5)B(<0&D0>! ! A0BC$*D0%EF)#<030%_!@>q!"0$6$*D_!@>![+,-+^?!sK$(#)B(!30$*D!$*!1647#)2*2<46$6!;!Z)B<&!*0Y0%!#2Y0!&2%0&!()! 307)90!1%0D*2*(t?!/647#)2*2<4($72#+@B&"!&'(A?-"@+@BA()(O&dk _!+\PEP-.>! >-001(3! Based on systematic clinical case studies the author describes an important unconscious fantasy found in a specific group of female analysands who had unconsciously sought psychoanalytic treatment for the same symptoms: psychogenic frigidity and sterility. In the six psychoanalyses and four long-term therapies, the analyst and the analysands finally discovered that a central unconscious fantasy, hitherto unrecognised, had determined all these women’s experience of their femininity; with the Greek myth in mind, the author called it the ‘Medea fantasy’. Pivotal to this fantasy was the unconscious conviction that sexual passion carried the risk of existential dependence on their love partner and of eventual deception and abandonment by him. These women were unconsciously convinced that they would not be able to endure such an abandonment and would react to it with lethally destructive impulses constituting an existential danger to the self and the love object—as well as, in particular, to the products of the relationship with him: their children. For this reason it seemed to them psychically imperative to forgo any creative unfolding of their femininity and symbolically to ‘deaden’ themselves and their bodies. In their long and difficult treatments, it emerged that all these patients had sustained severe traumas in their early object relations, with consequent excessive stimulation of archaic fantasies about the female body and about characteristic modalities of the early relationship with the primary object. For example, it turned out that all these women shared the striking biographical fact that, during their first year of life, their mothers had suffered from severe depressions and been treated with antidepressants. As a result, the mothers had presumably lacked an adequate capacity to present themselves to their babies as helpful, reliable and indestructible objects that could thereby have come to their aid in, for example, the progressive integration of archaic destructive fantasies. These had consequently been preserved in the form of splitoff, unconscious ‘Medea fantasies’. While the traumatic quality of their early object relations had undoubtedly favoured the formation of this unconscious fantasy in the analysands, it has to be discussed whether the Medea fantasy might possibly constitute a ubiquitous unconscious fantasy of femininity. @)15-1.*$#! The systematic clinical case studies have been further discussed with clinicians at different conferences. The “Medea-fantasy” was one of the conceptual frameworks of a large empirical study “Ethical Dilemma Due to Prenatal and Genetic Diagnostics” systematically investigated in 82 psychoanalytical case studies applying the method of psychoanalytic expert validation (see Leuzinger- Bohleber, Engels, Tsiantis, 2008). G$#.1/.\!!
Prof. M. Leuzinger-Bohleber
PDT
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