The desire for a child
Presented by Isabelle Alfandary
Dr Nicolas Moysan, psychiatrist
Clélia Gasquet-Blanchard, author of Giving birth
The desire for a child is not the desire that would be like that of a child, of the kind "to be Harry Potter" or "to live on Mars". It is a matter of the desire to have a child – a desire for motherhood, a desire for fatherhood. Once a child could "come" without one having wanted it: this is much less the case nowadays, contraceptive means allowing a chosen, planned pregnancy, established according to the economic, social, but also psychological situation in which one finds oneself. The desire for a child, however, overflows this situation, in so far as it can appear in a young girl or a woman of any age – more rarely in young men? – independently of the real possibilities of conception, just as it can fail to manifest itself when the actual possibility exists. Thus one must think that, if one were to seek the source of the desire and will to give life to a small being, one would find it not in "circumstances" – which nevertheless matter – but in the very life of the future parents, in all its complexity, the presences and absences that have shaped it, its joys and sorrows, its enthusiasms and disappointments, the invisible wounds it carries, its dreams, its failures, its anxieties, its hopes. There are no deeper roots, sometimes unknown, sometimes unspoken, than those that the desire for a child has – the desire to bring it into the world, to give it a language, to inscribe it in a name, to educate it, protect it, make it a person.
Robert Maggiori
