About this event

‘What baby?’: Pregnancy and creative disavowal

This talk explores the psychic impact of pregnancy, introducing the concept of creative disavowal to understand how some women unconsciously negotiate overwhelming bodily experiences. It examines the interweaving of multiple factors, including the pregnant person’s early childhood experiences, internal objects, current relationships and environment, as well as the physiological transformations of pregnancy.

Drawing on two clinical case studies, this talk discusses women who, prior to entering analysis, experienced severe and prolonged physical difficulties during their first pregnancies or post-partum periods, leading to claustrophobic panic and profound anxieties of disintegration. Once in analysis, both women went on to have a second child. Their subsequent pregnancies were characterised by a complex disavowal of the unborn baby, conceptualised here as creative disavowal.

Theoretically, this concept is proposed as a distinct psychic process that creates an intermediate space, enabling protection from violent bodily experiences, primitive anxieties, and hatred towards the baby, while simultaneously allowing more passionate feelings to emerge and take shape. This talk differentiates creative disavowal from more destructive forms of denial, including clinical situations in which pregnancy is denied and culminates in infanticide. This distinction contributes to psychoanalytic thinking about negation, disavowal, and denial in the context of pregnancy, offering a nuanced understanding of how disavowal may function defensively yet generatively.

Clinically, this talk considers the analytic work involved in giving meaning to somatic experiences, containing emerging hostile and primitive unconscious phantasies, and creating space for the psychological—or imagined—baby to be born and held, thereby extending psychoanalytic models of pregnancy, embodiment, and early parenthood.

Alejandra Perez is a London-psychoanalyst and Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, working in private practice. She trained and worked as a Psychoanalytic Parent-Infant Psychotherapist at the Early Years Service at Anna Freud from 2016 to 2022 and continues this work in private practice. She is the Director of LEAP (the Lab of Experiences and Adjustments in Parenthood), a research lab exploring parent-child relationships and parents’ experiences during the early years. From 2012 to 2024, she served as Director of the MSc in Early Child Development and Clinical Applications at University College London in conjunction with the Anna Freud. She is author and co-editor of Perspectives on Early Parenthood and Infancy: A Psychoanalytic, Neuroscientific, Developmental and Cultural Dialogue (Routledge, 2026).

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