New normativity and reproductive choice: an attempt at comprehension

• Main Author: Svetlana A. Bronfman
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Moscow State University, Faculty of Economics 2020-12-01
• Series: Население и экономика
• Online Access: https://populationandeconomics.pensoft.net/article/58814/download/pdf/

The article discusses two “special types” of reproductive choices – combating infertility through assisted reproductive technologies and voluntary childlessness. Particular attention is paid to the phenomenon of voluntary childlessness. Basing on the analysis of public opinion polls, reconstruction of historical realities of the second half of XX century, normogenesis studies, new psychodynamic theories of transgenerational transmission of traumatic experience, and philosophical ideas of intentionality of acceptance and hospitality, the author analyzes the existing reproductive practices in their connection with procreative norms. The reasons for the increasing spread of voluntary childlessness, according to the author of the article, are largely connected to the transgenerational transmission of experience of violence. The author’s hypothesis is based on psychodynamic ideas about transgenerational trauma and perverse maternal attitude and is that the spread of the voluntary childlessness in the generation of the 1990s may be caused by the impossibility of hospitality, acceptance, and vulnerability due to the lack of failure of the maternal functionary as a container and the lack of introjects of loving and guiding parent figures (“empty superego”). Thus, the new “shapeless” normativity, creating the illusion of “freedom to be oneself”, may prove to be a projection of a split, lifeless and empty collective unconscious superego, generated by a culture of violence that requires moral content, which has been abolished.