Supervisors info:
Αναγνωστόπουλος Δημήτριος, Καθηγητής, Ιατρική Σχολή, ΕΚΠΑ, Επιβλέπων
Ιεροδιακόνου-Μπένου Ιωάννα, Αναπληρώτρια Καθηγήτρια, Ιατρική Σχολή, Α.Π.Θ.
Μαρία Τζινιέρη-Κοκκώση, Πρ. Μ. Επίκουρη Καθηγήτρια, Ιατρική Σχολή, ΕΚΠΑ
Summary:
This research paper examines breastfeeding from the mother's side, as well as the impact the relationship between lactating women and their mothers has on it. In the very beginning of motherhood, during pregnancy and mainly during lactation, emotions are revived and fantasies are emerged from the mother‟s infancy and childhood. While facing deficits, primordial and oedipal anxieties, a mother is invited to make a choice about the way she will nourish her child. Investing more or less on breastfeeding, she starts a process of renegotiation of her own conflicts.
Through nine semi-structured interviews of mothers who accepted to share their own experience, the material that was emerged, concerns their lactating experience as mothers and also as children of their own mothers. After a reference on the psychoanalysis of the female breast and breastfeeding through Freud, M. Klein, Winnicott and some more contemporary psychoanalytical voices like Lebovici and Kestemberg, H. Parat and M. Friedman, an Interpretative phenomenological analysis of the material for each participant will follow. We conclude with the examination of this material divided in lactating groups, based on the period each woman breastfed:
Group A (3-4 years), Group B (9-12 months) and Group C (3-4 months)
This research could be useful, as breastfeeding is psychoanalytically examined with an interest mainly based on the infant‟s development, whereas a psychoanalytical dialogue based on the woman‟s- mother‟s perspective is rare. The findings could be useful for a meta-analysis work, in a general research meeting the same interests.
