RESEARCH ARTICLE


The Pain of Egg-Donation



Vassiliki Simoglou*
Department of Psychoanalytic Studies, University Paris Diderot, 8 rue Albert Einstein, 75013 Paris, France.


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Creative Commons License
© 2014 Vassiliki Simoglou.

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Department of Psychoanalytic Studies, University Paris Diderot, 8 rue Albert Einstein, 75013 Paris, France; Tel: +33(0)651123061; Fax: +33157276382; E-mail: vsimoglou@gmail.com


Abstract

Contemporary body practices providing an answer to the subjects’ demand for assisted reproduction procedures, question the subjective experience of pain. The psychoanalytic approach of pain introduces the dimension of the unconscious in bodily experiences. Clinical field work and psychoanalytic psychotherapy with an infertile woman after failed egg-donation in vitro fertilization cycles, allows an understanding of psychic pain as analogous to somatic pain and considers the human body as a psychosomatic entity. In this case study, pain becomes a vector of subjectivation, allowing for the subject to negotiate acceptance of a gift impossible to receive.

Keywords: Case Study, Egg-Donation, Gift, Infertility, Psychic Pain, Subjectivity, Unconscious.