Desire and Passion for a Child

Patricia Alkolombre, PhD, is Overall Chair of the IPA Committee on Woman and Psychoanalysis. She is Training and Supervising Analyst of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association (APA), a Postgraduate Professor at the APA-UBA master's degree and at other institutions in Argentina and abroad. She has written on infertility, the female body, femininity, masculinity, parenthood, psychoanalysis, and gender. She is a co-author of Changing Sexualities and Parental Function in the Twenty First Century (Karnac, 2017) and Psychoanalytic Explorations of What Women Want Today: Femininity, Desire, and Agency (Routledge, 2022).

'In The Desire and The Passion for a Child, Patricia Alkolombre offers a deep dive into the implications of emerging reproductive technology for our understanding of a potential parent’s relationship to sexuality, the procreative body, and a child’s origin story. She portrays the necessity of mourning female and male infertility, a lost pregnancy, and altered experiences of self and intimate other. This is an important book for the psychoanalytic clinician who enters the contemporary biopsychosocial terrain where desire turns to passion. While new technology supports new family constellations, it also risks the creation of a child at any cost.'Harriet Wolfe, M.D., President, International Psychoanalytical Association'In this excellent book, Patricia Alkolombre offers us a contemporary psychoanalytic approach to current parenting. Clinical, theoretical, and ethical problems of assisted fertilization circulate throughout the text also grasping on the meanings of sterility in women and men. Key issues such as mourning, abortion, bodies, donation of gametes and surrogate maternity are focused framed in a biotechnological offer in vertiginous development. In this complex journey the author differentiates the desire for a child from the passion for a child, the latter as a search for narcissistic gratification that leads some women to resort without limit to assisted fertilization. This volume will enrich readers, whether psychoanalysts or not, interested in this crucial topic.'Leticia Glocer Fiorini M.D., Chair of Sexual and Gender Diversity Studies Committee, International Psychoanalytic Association IPA

• Introduction PART I About the desire and the passion for a child 1 Revisiting desire for a child 2 When desire for a child becomes passion for a child PART II Techniques in the light of psychoanalysis 3 Into psychoanalytic clinical work 4 Psychoanalysis and reproductive techniques PART III Historical (in) fertility 5 First conceptions 6 Fertility myths and rituals