When pregnancy occurs in adolescence, it is most often attributed to an « accident », and the medical-social response is to provide better information about contraception. But when we look closer, we often see a logic other than that of accident: adolescent girls who express, when they are permitted to speak, a desire for pregnancy or for a child. Why is an adolescent girl sometimes invaded by this desire, to the point of not being able to put if off even for a short time, and why is she ready to sacrifice a part of her adolescence to it ?
Pregnancy appears as an imperious demand for an immediate response to the questions that every adolescent girl ask herself about her potential fertility, or as the instant search to fill up an old lack : to have a baby in one’s arms.
Viewing a teenage pregnancy merely as the result of accident or of destiny singularly reduces the meaning of such an event. In particular, it is a misunderstanding of the adolescent’s suffering, of how difficult it is for the young girl to take care of herself, to take care of her body, to handle the psychical tensions inherent to sexuality, and to tolerate waiting.
Archives par mot-clé : Pregnancy
Alberto Konicheckis : pregnancy in adolescence, cultural area and the weaving of early bonds
In order to explore the coincidence of these two forms of identity crisis, adolescence and motherhood, two hypotheses are offered: one dealing with the cultural factor in the avoidance or facilitation of psychopathological disorders ; and the second considering pregnancy and motherhood as antinomic with regard to adolescent processes. These lines of thought are developed in three parts. The first, which is based on an interview with Inès, a young mother of gypsy origin, helps one to understand how the cultural space, shared with the outer social world, lends itself to bearing the inner psychical world. In the second part, pregnancy’s resistance to adolescent processes are dealt with through the novelties of the pubertaire and narcissitic issues. In the third part, we present the treatment of a pregnant adolescent and her family within the setting of a multidisciplinary parenthood support network.