Psychodynamic Aspects of Pregnancy and the Puerperal Experience

During the life cycle, women will undergo different changes that inevitably alter self perception. The unannounced visit of the menarche that brings along other physical changes such as secondary sex characteristics and the dramatic bodily and emotional changes during pregnancy and menopause continuously forces a reconstruction and adjustment to the sense of self. Such dramatic changes sometimes result in conscious and unconscious conflicts related to present and past maturational periods of development. In this paper, I would like to concentrate in the importance of the puerperal experience from a psychodynamic lens in an attempt to phrase conscious and unconscious events that occur in the shift from pregnancy to child rearing.