Dream Narration in Healthy and At-Risk Pregnancy

During pregnancy and the transition toward motherhood, a special time for the restructuring of the female identity and representational world, dreaming may play an important function in the psychic life. If we accept that psychological and psycho-social risk factors influence representation during pregnancy, this article explores, from a psychodynamic perspective, how the presence/absence of biological risk is represented into women’s dream narration. Forty dreams of pregnant women (20 healthy pregnancies/20 at risk) were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. We performed a thematic analysis of multiple correspondences to see whether the dreams recounted by the women in the 2 different categories had any specific characteristics. Four thematic clusters resulted, which, after interpretation using factorial mapping, fall into 3 sense vectors: from the unrepresentable to the representable; from dependency to reciprocal relationships; from undifferentiated to different. The work we did enabled us to observe that in healthy pregnancies dreams have a mainly elaborative function, whereas when there are risk factors, it seems to be difficult to construct a psychic representational space