LAUSR

Deutsch, in her 1945 The Psychology of Women, proposed that infertility and pregnancy loss were a result of a woman’s conflicted relations with her mother, or of otherwise deranged psychosexual development.2 According to the psychogenetic theory of infertility, which Jensen shows had a remarkable array of adherents among psychoanalysts and obstetricians in the 1940s, only through proper adjustment to, and fulfillment of, her role as a child bearer could a woman resolve her infertility and attain psychological health. The arrival of new clinically powerful tools for the management of infertility by the 1970s and 1980s seemingly put energetic and psychogenic theories of infertility to rest. Today, as Jensen shows, the mantra has become time. Women are enjoined to track their ovulatory cycle and to reproduce early or risk facing a punishing biological clock. Yet, in infertility medicine’s continued focus, even today, on women rather than men or the couple, as well as in its persistent, uncritical naturalization of ideas of a conflict between women’s intellectual lives and their fertility, traces of the older moral, energetic, and psychogenic theories remain.