Gli aspetti psicologici della diagnosi prenatale: uno spazio comune di prevenzione tra il somatico e lo psichico

Sylvain Missonnier stresses the "extreme" nature of the pre-birth diagnosis, that has become a standard routine in Maternal Wards nowadays. If a new-born hits the enigmatic foundations of our being, an embryon or a foetus drives us to assume stronger defences, that root in the "uncanny" domain. Particularly, the visual encounter with a foetus by ecography produce a large arrow of strong paradoxical reactions into the staff. They lead to unescapable uncertainties and anticipatory processes. The Author shows his consulting interventions in individual, couple and family settings, the group birth-preparing activities, the Balint groups with the medical, nursery and ecographist staff in the Maternal Ward. All those activities let them build the "group psychic apparatus" (René Kaës); it "carries out a particular psychic working, that is to produce and hand the psychic reality of the group and within the group". The paper focuses on the clinics of informing parents that their foetus/new born presents some disability, of scheduling the labour (labour by appointment) and of lightening the ecographic results. As a psychoanalyst, Missonnier starts from the triangular exchange between the foetus’ pictures, parents and ecographists, so determinig the dynamics of the parenting processes. The potential role of the ecographic encounter between these tree subjects is to organize the psychical parenting and to constitute a stepping stone for a multidisciplinary cooperation in order to accept the diagnosis and its implications on the individual and social elaboration of the tremendous uncertainty due to a conception that stands and opens between death, informity and monsterbounderies.

Sylvain Missonnier, Gli aspetti psicologici della diagnosi prenatale: uno spazio comune di prevenzione tra il somatico e lo psichico in "SETTING" 29/2010, pp 61-77, DOI: 10.3280/SET2010-029002