Margaret Atwood and Assisted Reproduction: From Fantasy to Reality

ABSTRACT

This article raises the bewildering impact of artificial reproduction techniques (ART) for analysts, for the family, for the couple, and for their children. It explores a number of concerns, some of which include: the dissociation of sex from reproduction; the relative absence of the usual time limits that people have traditionally taken into consideration to conceive; questions about generation and age; the risk of perceiving oneself as omnipotent; the need to renovate the story of how one came to be; the impact of ART on the way the primal scene and the Oedipal complex are worked through when there is no longer only a triangle, but more people involved in procreation; the children’s identity (Who are my real parents?) and the impact on the identity of the women involved in participating in the procreation such as the egg donor or surrogate. It also addresses the impact of ART on the analyst who has to deal with situations for which he or she is not prepared either personally or professionally. It begins by exploring Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, and its present day relevance to ART. Atwood’s vision was prescient. The similarity between the lives and experiences of her Handmaids and that of today’s commercial surrogates in India is often striking. It also presents some ways in which literature and media are predicting the challenges that ART will bring in the future. It explores how what was fiction a few decades ago has become reality and how what we presently think of as fiction will perhaps be a reality in the not-so-distant future. The second part of the article presents a clinical vignette in which a couple presents with infertility in the wife, whose infertility was the consequence of chemotherapy treatment she received as a young adult. She decided to look for a donor in a European country and succeeded at getting pregnant. However, though successful, the pregnancy proved to be extremely difficult. When a second pregnancy was desired, the same donor provided with her ova. To avoid the complications of the first pregnancies, the couple accepted the wife’s sister’s offer to carry the pregnancy. Their daughters are now two and four years old.     

Psychoneurotic Art: Its Function in Psychotherapy by Margaret Naumburg

This article describes group psychotherapy with nursing home residents, ages 64-96, which utilizes the nonverbal and symbolic activities of drama therapy to facilitate an orientation to insight and transference phenomena, in contrast to the purely supportive techniques often used with the elderly. A case study of a long-term therapy group is described with examples of how the patients confronted their physical limitations, the death of their parents and of themselves, and transferences to the therapist. The media of creative drama, by concretizing and symbolizing difficult feeling states, and thus encouraging verbalization, may be a useful aid in extending the benefits of expressive psychotherapy to the impaired elderly.     

A four-fold humanity: Margaret Mead and psychological types

Beginning in 1933, while working in New Guinea, Margaret Mead developed her so-called squares hypothesis. Mead never published its terms, though she made a brief comment on it in her autobiography, Blackberry Winter (1972), and the arguments found in Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935) and the research leading to Balinese Character (Bateson & Mead, 1942) bore its imprint. Beginning with William McDougall's distinction between temperament (innate predispositions) and character (learned organization of habit), Mead articulated a morphological approach to the interplay between biology and culture that yielded four primary and four intermediary personality types. Under specified but not inevitable circumstances, the conscious choices of a given people could render one or another of these types characteristic or predominantly stable within their population, giving each of the other types a definite relation to the dominant type and thereby the cultural ethos of its society. Persons of each type followed a developmental path specific to their type different both from that of other types and in its manifestations given the various relations of the individual's type to the dominant type. Mead's hypothesis was, therefore, a vision of the unity and diversity of a single human species as well as an approach to the differing psychological positioning of individuals in cultures. In examining Mead's hypothesis, this essay also takes up Mead's debts to several leading psychologists (McDougall, C. G. Jung, and Erik Erikson), and (provisionally) how her vision differed from that of Ruth Benedict.     

Thompson's Margaret Thatcher illusion: when inversion fails

It is argued that the whole face is more dominant than the individual features. In the case of a jumbled face the external pattern is dominant when a face is upright, whereas the internal pattern is dominant when a face is inverted.