Renata Viola Vives is a psychoanalyst for children, adolescents, and adults and a COWAP Latin American representative. She has worked in the field of assisted reproduction for 15 years. Ana Teresa Vale is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst living and working in Lisbon. Currently COWAP European representative, she is also part of the editorial board of the Portuguese Psychoanalytic Journal.
This book is the valuable contribution of psychoanalysts from ctifferent regions who have developed ideas and hypotheses about the vicissitudes of pregnancy in cases of infertility and reproductive techniques. The different chapters written by psychoanalysts with vast experience in this field contribute with their understanding and ideas to the various types of problems that come to our consulting rooms nowadays. Patricia Alkolombre, Argentinean Psychoanalytic Association, COWAP Overall-Chair This book is leading the way for psychoanalysis in contemporary times, moving psychoanalysts and psychotherapists into today's world. The editors have collected contributions from diverse regions bringing thoughtful and refreshing considerations on infertility, surrogacy and donors, the passion for a child, along with pregnancy and pregnancy losses. Exploration of origin and birth fantasies, surrogacy clinic consultation, along with regional cultural mythology, offer the reader a textured infonnative immersion on psychoanalytic thinking in the current times of reproduction technologies. Paula Ellman, Ph.D., Contemporary Freudian Society, Former COWAP Overall-Chair This book is a stroke of luck in several respects: the clinically and theoretically highly qualified, often emotionally moving contributions by all the authors from different countries around the world not only enable a deeper understanding of the feelings associated with the desire to have children, pregnancy, infertility and assisted reproduction, as well as the associated help for all those affected. fnstead of focusing on deficits, the authors place the psychological development of parenthood at the center of their work. This includes working with the possibilities of assisted reproduction, and not against them - remaining at the same time open to the complexity of unconscious connections and conflicts. This shows how lively psychoanalysis can be in the 21st century. Heribert Blass, Dr. med., German Psychoanalydc Association, IPA President-elect