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Abstracts Phenomenology of Pregnancy and Drives

Stella Sanford, From Conception to Legitimation: The Generative Metaphorics


of the Critique of Pure Reason and the Transcendental Method
In the phenomenology of pregnancy and birth the methods of phenomenology are
brought to bear on the structure of these experiences and in the process are often
critically transformed. This paper will attempt to take a step back from these
phenomenological analyses to investigate another, perhaps philosophically
foundational, relation between transcendental method and generation and birth that
is, the relation between the metaphors of conception, generation, birth, birth
certificates and legitimacy in Kants Critique of Pure Reason (CPR) and Kants
conception of transcendental critique. It will suggest that prior to the application of
phenomenology to the experiences of pregnancy and birth, the idea of a
transcendental method, derived from Kant, is itself already problematically
informed by the metaphorics of conception, generation and birth in Kants
philosophy, and will consider the implications of this for phenomenology including
phenomenology of pregnancy and birth today. There is an established literature on
the metaphorical discourse of legitimacy in Kants CPR and its contribution to Kants
conception of critique as the tribunal of reason. However, this paper will situate the
discourse of legitimacy within another metaphorical constellation, including
conception and birth, in CPR, and consider these in relation to Kants explicit
comments on or references to theories of biological reproduction to suggest that these
may have exerted a greater influence on his conception of the transcendental than has
previously been acknowledged. Granted both that the transcendentalphenomenological method differs in important respects from Kants and that feminist
phenomenology has not been uncritical in its adoption of versions of it, the question
still remains: what of this Kantian legacy still operates in phenomenology today, and
what are its implications for a possible phenomenology of pregnancy and birth?
Sara Heinmaa, Pregnant Embodiment A Critical Perspective
A critical discussion about Iris Marion Youngs early article Pregnant Embodiment.
Eduardo Abrantes, Mother Child, and their Sound Envelope a
Phenomenological Inquiry on Embodied Awareness
Some of the most intimate, inspiring and thought-challenging glimpses into foetal life
have been provided by the sense of sound. The above refers both to the access
provided by sonic medical techniques from the early stethoscope, to the current
wide-spread ultrasonography - to the shared experience of feeling-listening and being
felt-listened to, in early motherhood. When trying to translate from the
medical/cognitive point of view into an experiential one, the questions that this sonic
experience elicit are usually focused on: how early does the foetus develop the ability
to hear? What does it hear? What does it sound like to be in a womb? Descriptions of
an oceanic, low frequency sonic universe pertain to this category. Another path of
inquiry one can follow is that taken by the French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu
(1923-99) who in, amongst others, his 1985 work The Skin Ego, proposes the notion
of sound envelope to describe the formative context of the acoustic exchange taking
place during and beyond foetal life how it is essential to the construction of both the

separate identity of mother and child, but also the systemic bond of their
intersubjective (re)awakening, and even to the development of language and the
structuring of drives. This paper proposes a phenomenological inquiry into the
dynamics of the embodied acoustic interface between mother and child, building upon
Anzieu's analysis, and using such notions as "resonance", acoustic permeability and
sonic territoriality in the specific context of the inaugural intersubjective experience
of child-bearing.
April Flakne, Nausea as Interoceptive Annunciation
In many cases, it is the first symptom. Many women are overcome by a distinctive
and growing nausea in the very early stages of pregnancy. Thus the announcement of
new life often comes in waves of illness. At this very early point, when the nausea
first appears, the cells are still busy dividing and are only beginning to differentiate
into what will become specific organs, functions and body parts. The body of the
other is, morphologically, nothing like a mature body. It is utterly dependent on the
host, its mother. Yet it is already affecting the (m)other body, deranging interoceptive
phenomena, as well as exteroceptive, as smells and taste predominate and color vision
and hearing. In this paper, I will provide a phenomenological account of pregnancyinduced nausea as intercorporeal affect and intersensory derangement, arguing that
the body of the other (in this case incipient) affects sensory coherence founded on the
mature body image and schema of the mother. This sensory derangement is an early
intimation of the body-schematic changes that occur later in pregnancy as analyzed,
for example, by Iris M. Young. I will contrast this view of nausea to that of three
other thinkers: 1) Sartres view, in which nausea is phenomenologically related to
objects and the upsurge of being. 2) Levinass view of nausea as a reaction to
immanence, and an urge toward transcendence (escape toward the Other). 3) MerleauPontys account of nausea as a confusion of levels, and therefore a destabilization of
space. My focus on nausea as an intercorporeal affect that manifests through
intersensory derangement will show how spatialization indeed alters, but specifically
through an interoceptive announcement of Otherness: the Other that is within me is no
less Other, but otherness neednt be conceived as an escape from body and
immanence, nor from an object-other that stands over and against me. Finally, I will
argue that pregnancy nausea is a dramatic announcement of how everyday
intercorporeality the fact that we live in a world populated by living bodies affects
sensory coherence. Other bodies affect us on interoceptive, proprioceptive, and
intersensory levels, and the Other announces herself somatically as well as
ideationally.
Tine Schauer Eri, The Waiting Mode: First-time Mothers Experiences of
Waiting for Labour Onset
Over the last decades pregnant women have experienced a change in how the medical
society views the estimated date of delivery. The time a child was expected to be born
was earlier based on womens own knowledge about the conception and the last
menstrual period. Today, the experts produce the knowledge of when a child is due
through technologies outside the womens bodies. There has been growing attentions
on the accurate estimation of the date of delivery due to the rapid development of
ultrasound technologies. Still, there is no method for the precise timing of the onset of
labour and despite the accuracy of the estimated date of delivery; pregnant women
still have to wait for the various signs of labour in their bodies. This paper explores
first-time mothers lived experiences of waiting for labour onset in the days around

the estimated date of delivery (EDD), and is based on an empirical material created in
cooperation with seventeen women before and after the birth of their child. The study
shows that participants moved into a state of active waiting, the waiting mode, in
the days around the EDD. The EDD was pivotal in shaping the study informants
experiences of waiting. The date entailed a shift in how they perceived their bodies,
and how they interpreted bodily signs. The paper comprises the interpretations of the
womens experiences and offers a discussion on experiences of the birthing body in a
medicalized context.
Erik Jansson Bostrm, Intersubjectivity How to Create the Other From the
Second Others Position
In this paper I will explore some aspects of the birth of the other from the second
others position, i.e. the coming into existence of the child from the position of the
other parent. The reason why I choose to talk about the position of the mothers
partner as the second other is that I believe that Beauvoirs theoretical framework
from The Second Sex can be put to work to reveal some aspects of the structure of this
position. I will argue that the unborn child is the unknown other and that the mother is
the subject, the centre. She is creating the other. She has the closest, most privileged
position in getting to know the other. The partner is the second other, who also tries to
get to know the other, but from a farther distance. While the mother-child relation is a
relation of directness the relation of the partner-child is a relation of indirectness. In
exploring how the coming into existence is gradual and can start before the moment
of birth or even the actual conception, I want to argue that the other is not so much
coming into existence as created as already existing, through imagination, play
and body contact stressing the points of acknowledgement, deciding that the other in
fact is where you can go either way recognizing or denying the other as existing
and introducing the other into our life world. To create the others existence is to
culturalize the other. I believe that the aspects that I reveal of the creating of the
unborn child have a wider importance, as I believe that they are more or less active in
every creation of intersubjectivity, i.e. in every creation of a community.
Alice Pugliese, Phenomenology of Drives: Between Biological and Personal
Life
In my presentation I propose a phenomenological account of drives on the basis of
Husserls unpublished manuscripts that could provide the theoretical basis for more
concrete analyses. The phenomenological reflection on drives affects the general
conception of personal experience and of the life of consciousness. I do not relegate
drives to the biological, physical and mechanical sphere derived from an abstract
interpretation of corporeity as independent reality. Instead I want to integrate them in
a broad description of subjective and personal life. A phenomenological account of
drives points out a possible transcendental role of instincts as a source of perception
and of constitution of the sense of the world. Instincts cease to be understood as an
individual, blind force and turn out to be an important component of cognitive
processes with a primordial function in the setting of relevancies and with an
intersubjective significance. This leads to the characterization of drives as a
connecting force between different levels and functions of consciousness sketching a
more complex account of consciousness itself. This poses questions regarding the
epistemological status of drives, their possible contribution to perception, experience
and knowledge and finally to the orientation of the subject in the world. In a nonreductive way drives fit into the peculiar intertwining of physical, psychological and

epistemological dimensions that constitute our daily experience. The assessment of


this epistemological basis will then open up two different research directions. On the
one hand we have to inquire into the problem of the foundation of science and in
particular of medicine as a science and practice bound to the personal experience of
body. Medicine is a natural, hard science that yet addresses the whole person with
its uncertainty, ambiguity and shaded position and thus needs a peculiar and critical
foundation. The new development of technology opens many questions concerning
the availability of the own body and the symmetric or asymmetric relationships with
others so that the epistemological reflections about medicine show immediate effects
on a general ethical ground. On the other hand, the phenomenological account of
drives as an integral part of the life of consciousness suggests an important moral
assumption: instincts and drives are neither a merely private matter nor can they be
used as a simple excuse for irrational, egoistic or immoral action. Interpreted as
transcendental, transpersonal forces like Husserl appears to do, drives can provide
ground for the encounter with others, for mutual understanding and respect. Finally I
will explore the ethical issues deriving from a critical and phenomenological approach
to drives.
Natalie Depraz, The Intimate Other: a First-Person Phenomenology of
Pregnancy
On the basis of a first inquiry on the experience of pregnancy (published 2004 and
more recently 2011 in French), I would like to focus on a more limited segment linked
to a first-person experience which ended up with a caesarean birth. Reflecting on such
an experience in contrast to other natural pregnancies, I would like to describe anew
and further the modality of intimacy of the coming other at work and the
differentiated relationship to boundaries and suffering between self and other thus
created. Following the self-elicitating method founded by P. Vermersch, I will test the
following theoretical hypothesis: caesarean birth is a case of delivery which seems to
partly avoid suffering on both sides (mother and child), in contrast with a natural
delivery. What are the lived effects and experiential features of such an event? Does it
question and displace the usual boundaries between self and other during natural
pregnancy and delivery? Does it create other kinds of interactions between mother
and child? While re-living my own experience through a self-elicitation of it, I will try
to give some first accounts and checkings of the mentioned hypothesis.
Jonna Bornemark, Being One and Being Two
In the Western philosophical tradition intersubjectivity tends to be discussed from the
starting-point of a meeting between two adult human beings. Here subjectivity is most
often constituted first, and only thereafter intersubjectivity. In contrast to such
approaches philosophers like Gail Soffer have used a phenomenological genetic
approach through which the development of intersubjectivity is investigated from the
starting-point of the experiences of the infant (as we understand it). In this paper I
would like to continue Soffers analysis and discuss the experience of pregnancy as an
experience that goes beyond the categories of you and me, for the child as well as
for the mother. With the aid of Edith Steins concept of Einfhlung and Max Schelers
concept of Einsfhlung I would like to discuss pregnancy as a paradoxical experience
of being one and being two at the same time. I want to investigate how a certain layer
in experience could be formulated as a shared experience of life, an experience
beyond subjectivity but simultaneously an experience that immediately separates us.

In such a way intersubjectivity finds its roots not only in subjectivity, but also in an
experience that goes beyond subjectivity.

Sarah LaChance Adams, Sex and Fecundity in Bataille: Death, Fusion, and Cell
Division
Bataille describes the eroticism as assenting to life up to the point of death and as
marked by the search for a feeling of continuity. Death, reproduction, sex, and
religion are some of the ways in which we seek this continuity. When asexual beings
reproduce by splitting into two new creatures, Bataille believes, the original animal is
destroyed. However, there is a moment of continuity between the two beings when
one becomes two. The continuity found in sexual reproduction is distinct; it occurs
when two creatures momentarily fuse into one, when sperm and ovum unite. Bataille
claims that we are revolted by the grotesque idea of dividing as asexual organisms
do, and that we more easily entertain the idea of fusion with another. In response to
this, I argue that pregnant women undergo a process not unlike single-cell division.
The original woman is destroyed as her body becomes directed to the service of
another. Her identity is cleaved and ambiguous, neither solely her own nor anothers.
Sexual reproduction is as much about division as it is fusion for the woman who
harbors the foetus. Bataille further claims that erotic life need not be related to
reproduction. Bataille is correct that the telos of erotic sexual activity is not reducible
to reproduction alone. However, the possibility of getting pregnant is rarely far from
the mind of pregnable women during sex. Furthermore, getting pregnant is a greater
example of erotic life than Bataille anticipates because of the various deaths the
pregnant woman and mother undergoes. Batailles account is ultimately androcentric
as it ignores the differing perspectives that pregnable, previously pregnant, or
currently pregnant women may bring to the encounter. A more complete account of
erotic life requires the contributions of female-bodied experience, which I intend to
provide.
Erik Bryngelsson, The Problem of Unity in Psychoanalysis: Birth-trauma and
Separation
By proposing the event of birth as the original and universal trauma that each human
being suffers from, psychoanalysis found a means to posit an originary experience of
unity with the mother to which all human actions in the last instance strive to recreate.
One of the problems, however, with locating the beginnings of the individual in
intrauterine life is the same as with primary narcissism where the child would be
self sufficient and completely satisfied, in these states of full unity, there can be no
such thing as an individual. Lacanian psychoanalysis solves this situation by reversing
the terms: the childs first experience is not located in an undifferentiated state with
the mother, be it in intrauterine life or in the mothers care. The child mother unity is
the effect, not the foundation of the individual. As every child is prematurely born,
incapable of caring for herself, her primary experience is rather that of discord. The
identity she procures through a narcissistic image of herself as self subsistent is the
anticipation of completeness. Full satisfaction in this union is however impossible,
since it is only an illusion; a harmony the bodily drives can never achieve. And too
much pleasure can be unbearable, as can also an exaggerated proximity between
mother and child. Anxiety intervenes then not as the signal of the danger of being
separated from the mother, on the contrary, anxiety is a signal against the danger of
being swallowed by an intrusive quest for an imaginary unity; in this case the pleasure

principle really does serve the death drive. I will try to present how the child confronts
her own coming into the world by separating from the mother in order to relate to
others. This separation is accomplished in relation to the mothers intrusive and
alienating desire, by the introjection of that which was foreign into the most proper,
subsequently, this ex timate object is the cause of affective relations to others.
Anna Petronella Fredlund, The Phenomenological Analysis of Breastfeeding:
Enslavement by Biology or Activity of Transcendence?
My aim here is to examine some of Beauvoirs statements on the biology issue about
the female body, notably those on breastfeeding, and relate them to recent research on
breastfeeding. Whether Beauvoir relied uncritically on the medical science of her time
when she pronounced her statements on biological facts, or whether she is simply
giving a description of the contemporary medical perspective on woman, in the way
that she is accounting for other mythologies, is rather ambiguous in her texts.
However that may be, there are reasons to believe that it is medical science that has
transformed the social activity of breastfeeding into a natural (mal)function, needing
the remedy of science and the aid of the formula and baby food industries to work
properly. Therefore, a phenomenological analysis of breastfeeding must take into
account womens experience of breastfeeding in all its diversity, but also the political
stakes of science and how it deals with the female body. In the earlier work Ethics of
Ambiguity, the fundamental tie between existences is clearly affirmed in that my
concrete freedom is dependent in a radical way on the freedom of others. In The
Second Sex, by contrast, this inter-human dependency functions as one of the reasons
for the subjugation of women. If we take a look at recent research on breastfeeding it
may appear that the experience of breastfeeding, contrary to what Beauvoir claimed,
is a pre-eminently intersubjective and communicative activity, and reveals the
ambiguity of human existence that was so important for her thought: a mortal and
vulnerable being whose meaning is from the outset determined by the society it lives
in, a transcendence in immanence. In order to make a convincing phenomenological
analysis of breastfeeding, the crucial notions we rely upon must be understood in a
new way. If the concepts of transcendence and immanence are seen as dialectically
related to one another, then the immanence of bodily functions, breast and mammary
glands can become the precondition of a particular kind of loving relation to another
human being, who is different and yet intimately close.

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