The Open Pain Journal

2014, 7 : 41-45
Published online 2014 November 24. DOI: 10.2174/1876386301407010041
Publisher ID: TOPAINJ-7-41

RESEARCH ARTICLE
 The Pain of Egg-Donation

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

* 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.