Pregnancy symptoms express simultaneous desire to reject and conserve the fetus

Evidence

In both cases, the old idea that children have of fertilization through the mouth comes back to life. For infantile women in particular, pregnancy is, as in the past, assimilated to an illness of the digestive apparatus. Deutsch cites a woman patient who anxiously studied her vomit to see if there were not fragments of the fetus; but she knew, she said, that this obsession was absurd. Bulimia, lack of appetite, and feeling sick signal the same hesitation between the desire to conserve and the desire to destroy the embryo. I knew a young woman who suffered both from excessive vomiting and fierce constipation; she told me that one day she had the impression both of trying to reject the fetus and of striving to keep it, corresponding exactly to her avowed desires. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1455

Categorization

• DEFINE: The oral assimilation of pregnancy — the archaic imago linking conception to the digestive tract — is a key psychoanalytic concept Beauvoir draws on.
• SEED: The case of the woman inspecting her vomit for fetal fragments is a vivid, unsettling image that could anchor an essay on the body’s own ambivalence about pregnancy.
• XREF: connects to: Pregnant women can feel masochistic pleasure from pain that threatens a miscarriage; Expressed attitudes toward pregnancy mask women’s contradictory and repressed inner feelings. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1433; Pregnancy vomiting reflects unconscious rejection of the child — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1454 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Pregnancy vomiting reflects unconscious rejection of the child #exemplifies (0.90) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1454
• Expressed attitudes toward pregnancy mask women’s contradictory and repressed inner feelings. #corroborates (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1433
• Pregnancy symptoms and menopause are interpreted as species-resistance by woman #expands (0.75) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 110