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 psychosocial 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.