=Fear of Pregnancy.= Unfortunately, civilisation has surrounded motherhood with so many complications, social, ethical, financial, sentimental, etc., that in very few women, indeed, is that biological process an unmixed pleasure, dissociated from all pain and anxiety.
Vomiting, which expresses the female's disgust for her condition, or her mate or the offspring; cramplike tensions, expressing her worries about her appearance, her anxious thought of financial or social consequences; anxiety states, affecting the adrenals, which discolor her face (pregnancy mask), make pregnancy hideous in many cases.
Even the process of parturition seems to have become more painful and dangerous with advancing civilisation.
Any one who has seen, for instance, Mexican women barely interrupting their labor in the fields to give birth to a child, and resuming their tasks an hour later, must realise that autosuggestion has much to do with the physical disability of the civilised woman in child bed.
In spite of the complexities of modern life, the female organism which is not affected by fear complexes, must expect a pleasure premium from pregnancy, lactation and other duties of motherhood. This would supply us with an organic basis for the mother's attachment to her offspring which is observable almost in every animal species.
That a number of women may be found who hate their children owing to the suffering to which unwelcome motherhood and difficult parturition have subjected them, is easily understandable. In fact we face a vicious circle. The unwelcome pregnancy will be an unpleasant one, followed almost unavoidably by painful delivery, etc.
=When Mother Love is Lacking= or when a mother hates a very young child, the psychologist must look for morbid unconscious influences which analysis should remove as soon as possible.
Stekel, the Viennese analyst, tells of a woman who was very fond of three of her daughters but, for some mysterious reason, detested the fourth one. Analysis revealed that she imagined she saw every one of her husband's faults reproduced and magnified in the unfortunate child.
She also imagined that she loved her husband very deeply.
The year when the unloved child was conceived, however, she had fallen in love with another man, a young poet. She remained "technically faithful" to her husband, altho, when in his arms, it was always the poet to whom she was giving herself.