Entre(linhas) da UTI Neonatal: a experiência emocional de mulheres-mães durante a pandemia

Abstract

Throughout the pregnancy-puerperal cycle, women experience a fall between the imagined baby and the real baby. In the present study, we aimed to investigate the emotional experience of women-mothers in cases in which this fall happens abruptly, with the early hospitalization of the newborn in the Neonatal ICU. For this purpose, during the second year of the pandemic, therapeutic consultations were carried out with 11 women who were following the hospitalization of their babies in the Neonatal ICU of a hospital in Minas Gerais. In some of the therapeutic consultations, drawings-stories were produced by the participant-researcher duo, according to the squiggle game paradigm. After each therapeutic consultation, the researcher wrote a transferential narrative about the encounter. The material was analyzed psychoanalytically, which allowed the emergence of three categories about: 1) the relationship of the mother with the baby; 2) the relationship of the woman with herself as mother; and 3) the relationship of the mother with those who make up the hospital environment. Through them, it was observed that the participants felt: 1) insecure regarding the hospital discharge of their babies, 2) blamed for the fantasy of having failed as mothers and for feeling imprisoned in this peculiar maternity; and 3) helpless in the hospital by the professionals and the baby’s father. Although the participants revealed the ability to bond with their babies and to constitute a sufficiently good hospital environment with other mothers in the same situation, we conclude the importance of interventions with this population.