CAESARIAN DELIVERY ON MATERNAL REQUEST: NEW LIGHT ON ISSUES SURROUNDING THE CHILDBIRTH EXPERIENCE

It is not always easy to give birth. Some women choose to deliver their first child through caesarean section without medical indications to do so. What is the psychic backdrop to this behavioral reality? How, in turn, does this behavioral reality shed light on the challenges that the somatopsychic experience of childbirth pose to the women who experience it? In this article, the author uses two clinical vignettes to discuss the main findings of clinical, comparative, and longitudinal research carried out in a maternity unit. The voluntary use of caesarean delivery would allow the excitation provoked by overt and latent ideas concerning the experience of vaginal birth to be contained. It would make the sexual nature of this experience manifest while also showing one of the possible strategies to contain the anxiety that this provokes. In most expectant mothers, the anticipation of pain seems to play this protective role at a latent level. Finally, childbirth, through the experience of drive unbinding that it imposes, and through its confrontation with sexual and generational difference, would constitute not only a nodal moment in terms of becoming a mother, but also a singular moment in terms of being a woman.