Cette recherche doctorale est dans la continuité de nos précédents travaux. Après avoir étudié l’investissement de l’enfant à naître suite à une conception médicalisée, dans un contexte d’infertilité féminine, nous nous sommes intéressées au passage du conjugal au parental, au risque d’une « parentalité médicalement assistée ». Les résultats de ses deux premières recherches ont montré l’impact du diagnostic d’infertilité féminine, et de sa prise en charge, sur la psyché des femmes, sur la conjugalité et sur le devenir parent. Pour cette thèse nous avons souhaité changer notre regard afin de le porter sur les enfants nés de mère infertiles, en questionnant leur construction subjective au regard d’un tel contexte. Nous avons fait le choix de penser, plus particulièrement le devenir des jeunes femmes nées de mères infertiles, à travers la question de la spécificité du lien mère/fille au sein des processus de subjectivation et de la transmission d’un féminin maternel blessé par un diagnostic d’infertilité. L’appropriation subjective de l’histoire conceptionnelle étant alors au centre de cette recherche nous avons élaboré une méthodologie de type qualitative à partir du récit conceptionnel que nous avons souhaité mettre à l’épreuve dans ce contexte. Le peu de travaux concernant les enfants « nés de » nous ont amenés à conduire une recherche exploratoire s’inscrivant au sein du paradigme subjectiviste, dans un cadre d’orientation psychanalytique. Nous questionnons ainsi l’impact de l’histoire conceptionnelle sur les processus de subjectivation, la construction identitaire, et la narrativité des jeunes femmes nées de mère infertile. Si les résultats montrent que nous ne pouvons nier l’impact de l’histoire conceptionnelle sur la construction du sujet, ils ont révélé aussi que nous ne pouvions faire l’économie de penser l’influence du vécu maternel de cette histoire et du discours –ou du silence- qui l’entoure. / This doctoral research is in the continuity of our previous ones. After having studied the investment of the unborn child following a medically assisted procreation, we were interested in the becoming parents in this context. Results have shown how the women psyche, the couple and the becoming parents are impacted by the diagnosis of infertility and then its medical care. The purpose of this doctoral thesis is to focus on the child born of infertile mother, questioning their identity construction. We decided to study, particularly, the young women born of infertile mothers across the specific mother/daughter relationship and the feminine transmission injured by the infertility. The psychical working through of the conceptional story is at the center of this research. The sparsely amount of studies, regarding children born of infertile mother, led us to conduct an explorative research on this specific topic. So we elaborated, in a psychoanalytical framework a qualitative methodology based on the conceptional narrative approach, in order to test it in this context. Thus, we questioned the impact of the conceptional story upon the process of subjectivization, the identity construction, and the narrativity. If the results show that we cannot deny the impact of conceptional story on individual construction, they also reveal that we have to take in consideration the subjective maternal experience of the infertility and its medical care, more to the point the story she tells, or not, about it.

Infertility is a serious public health issue. Infertile couples may perceive infertility differently based on their own cultural background. There is a paucity of literature about how infertility is perceived among Arab women living in the United States. The purpose of this study was to be able to understand how Arab women who live in Dearborn, Michigan feel about infertility and to understand their concerns and worries about their health status. The primary research questions asked Arab women how they perceive infertility and how infertility may impact their future. This qualitative case study was guided by the social support theory and the choice theory. The social support theory is mainly used in health promotion to describe unmet social, emotional, and informational needs for a certain community or population. The choice theory helped understand the way women perceive their health issue and the way to overcome it. The case study approach was used to interview 10 participants who self-identified as Arab American women with infertility problems. The qualitative data gathered were analyzed for thematic content, using open, axial, and selective coding. Results showed that for these participants, cultural beliefs regarding infertility had affected their well-being, causing feelings of shame and incompleteness. In addition, the study's findings indicated a need for more extensive psychological services and medical resources to be available for infertile couples. Positive social change may be seen in understanding the specific issues faced by Arab American women struggling with infertility and through translating this knowledge into public health programs.

This research examined how men and women experience stress and coping during the early stages ofIVF, focusing on time, gender and couples. Both members of three heterosexual couples took part separately in two or three semi-structured interviews over a six-month period, producing fourteen accounts. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was used to preserve participants' unique experiences alongside interpretation and generation of broader themes by the researcher. Infertility and fertility treatment were not always seen as stressful, but often as a problem to be tackled in the best way, both emotionally and practically. Stress arose from specific, time-limited issues. Participants' emotional responses were shaped by perceptions of the effect of stress on fertility, a desire to stay positive, and downward comparison with other fertility patients who were perceived to be coping poorly. Participants emphasised their choices as logical, careful decisions, weighing up multiple factors including alternatives like adoption, and temporal and financial investments. Over time, perceptions of IVF changed from a precise, technical process to one subject to luck-and chance, although the process itself was perceived as becoming easier with experience. The study was originally positioned within the transactional stress and coping model, but a self-regulatory perspective provided a better fit for the data The fmdings are linked to each model where appropriate, and the implications suggest use of the transactional model to understanding specific, time- limited events, and a self-regulatory framework to explore general fertility treatment experiences. Suggestions for future work include greater use of the self-regulatory framework to study infertility and fertility treatment; paying attention to couples' willingness to adopt in shaping infertility experiences; conducting interviews at different times during treatment cycles, and during different treatment cycles; and using alternative data gathering methods including Internet Mediated Research.