They are often burdened more than they are understood or supported. Armed with common sense, family members and close friends are all the less able to comprehend teenage pregnancies given the abundance of information on sexual behavior, disease prevention, and risky behavior, which are today assumed to prevent such “accidents of life.”
It is surprising, note in passing, the lack of effect of these external teachings without ever questioning the deficiencies in discussions and the lack of exchanges within the household itself. Reason, as Voltaire said, demands an explanation. Therefore, we must look elsewhere. At the risk of going against many feminist theses, psychologist Diana Dadoorian asserts in her book on “teenage pregnancies” that they are, for the most part, desired. While the phenomenon remains low in France compared to the United States and Brazil (9% for teenagers between 15 and 19 years old versus 54% in the USA), a third of these 16,000 pregnancies in France are carried to term. When questioned during their childbirth or through sociological surveys, many of these young mothers, who have experienced serious family problems, see the child as “someone who will finally love them.” The child, for better or worse, becomes the object of love in compensation for parental emotional rejection or emotional disturbance.
A true cataclysm both physically and in the psycho-affective realm, the adolescent period opens a field of possibilities, a new form of the all-powerfulness of infancy revisited by the sexual drive. Under these circumstances, it is feared that the love given to this child, despite all the good intentions displayed by the mother, may induce a series of consequences that might assign to the child the negative value of a symptom or have them bear its marks through various somatizations. Unknowingly, the mother thus becomes responsible for the future psyche of her baby by placing it in a “position,” an inverted parental relationship or a hint of incestuous connection, which is not necessarily its own. And if the number of single mothers between 35 and 40 years also increases in France, it is still for the same reasons, to which the economic argument is now added. Money will solidify a hesitant desire. In our modern world, maternal love may perhaps rely more on financial foundations than narcissistic ones.
Jean-Luc Vannier
Psychoanalyst
06 16 52 55 20
jlvannier@free.fr
Diana Dadoorian, Teenage Pregnancies, Editions Eres, Coll. The Life of the Child, 2005. 127p.; 18 Euros.
