Medicinski vjesnik, Vol. 19 No. (3), 1987.
Original scientific paper
Emotional reactions of fear during the pregnancy and after the birth in primiparas
Slobodan Mrđenović
Abstract
The interest for the present work arose from the author’s dealing with primiparas who developed postdelivery neurotic reactions. The work includes thirty married women just going to have their first child. Their behaviour was observed at the end of the third month, at the beginning of the fifth month and the end of the ninth month of pregnancy, and on the third day after the birth. In the focus there were their emotional reactions of fear from the moment of finding out about the pregnancy to the first nourishing their baby at the breast. Fears were explored on the basis of subjective experiences of women revealed in psychodinamic interviews. Experienced and expressed fears were categorized in five groups:
1. fears during the pregnancy,
2. fears of labour,
3. postdelivery fears,
4. fears of motherhood,
5. cultural, social and economic fears.
The above mentioned categories could be further reduced to two groups only:
a) fears relating to the mother’s own personality
b) fears relating to the child.
Emotions of fear during the pregnancy and after the birth can be understood as expressions of motherhood crisis. Interviews of women pregnant with their first child show that fears are in most cases repetition of early fears of castration and separation, then a marked ambivalence regarding the accepting of a child, and that, partly, fears result from great physiological changes in a pregnant woman. Fear, one of rather frequent symptoms in pregnancy, in mojority of cases does not turn into pathology because, due to ego’s forces, psychosomatic processes of pregnancy are neither experienced nor
treated as an illness.
Keywords
emotional reactions; motherhood of fears; primiparas
Hrčak ID:
197667
URI
Publication date:
1.12.1987.
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