- lem is troubling her and has gone into a last-minute flight.
I had assumed that about this patient and had expected, if I ever did see her, to encounter a reticent, scared, perhaps terrified person.
Instead the person who sat opposite me was a very pretty woman of thirty-five, well dressed, clear-eyed, and straight-*forward. She came right to the point.
"I'm here because I'm terrified of having children," she told me. "I must find out what's at the root of my fear."
"Was your fear the reason you canceled the two appointments?" I asked sympathetically.
"Oh no," she answered quickly, "the children were ill. We've had flu for a month. First one came down and then another."
"Children?" I asked in puzzlement. "What children?"
"Mine, of course," she said.
"How many do you have?" I asked.
"Four," she said, "but John and I want six and I thought. . . ." She paused; then, catching my smile, she looked down at the floor for a moment and back at me, and then we both burst into laughter.
She did have a fear of childbirth, however, dating from certain traumatic experiences in her childhood, and we were able to resolve it. It was a marked fear, but the important point is that even with it she had gone right on and had four children.
The maternal instinct is as deep and as ineradicable in women as the instinct to plant the seed of his species is in man. They both subserve the same ends, the continuation of the race, and even if a woman's childhood is sown with neurotic fears by unhappy parents—yes, even neurotic fears of childbirth—her desire to have children of her own will, in by far the majority of cases, survive relatively intact.
Thank heavens this is so. For the bearing and rearing of
