Clinical practice in a maternity ward highlights essential prenatal psychological elements in the perinatal segment of the parenthood process.
Faced with the multiplied uncertainty about how the unborn child will turn out, prenatal parental anticipation is a determining factor. It deserves to be explored in perinatal clinical work as a relevant psychological and psychopathological marker.
In this context, the concept of « virtual object-relation » tries to explore the behavioral, emotional and fantasmatic complexity of the parents/fetus relation and its reappearances, throughout life, at the time of metamorphoses whose outcome is uncertain, such as adolescence.