Chapter 10: Transgenerational Ambivalence In The Time To Come: How Meanings Regulate Being Pregnant and Facing Miscarriage

The main goal of this chapter is to propose and discuss the extension of the psychological notion of ambivalence in the experience of women in transi¬tion to motherhood who suffer spontaneous abortions. Here we argue that transgenerational ambivalence reaches a myriad of tensional situations that emerge in the I-Other-World relationship (Simâo, 2010). Such tensions provide, simultaneously, reconstructions of those same I-Other-World relationships in the scope of temporality (Simâo, 2015).

To achieve this goal, we depart from the theoretical elaborations of Abbey (2006) on ambivalence—understood as a constant tension between what is (“the world as it is”) and what could be the next moment, which motivates the construction of meaning. Understood as such, ambivalence sets itself in a triadic structure that encompasses three different aspects: (a) the world as it is now, (b) what could be of the world now, and (c) the world as it is in the “new” now.