The book presented below was written by François Ansermet, a child psychiatrist of Swiss origin, he was a professor at the University of Lausanne and Geneva. His work focuses on the development of perinatal child psychiatry. He works on various research topics related to neonatology, maternity and reproductive medicine services: such as child and child development, MAP, the relationship between social sciences and psychiatry, neuroscience with psychiatry and that with a psychoanalytical reading. It was with this work that he was recruited as the only foreigner on the national ethics advisory committee in Paris.
This book, entitled “La fabrication des enfants, un vertige technologique” discusses the subjective implications of perinatal biotechnology research such as Medically Assisted Procreation (MAP).
New advanced technologies put many resources at our disposal to enable procreation. Today the MAP is used for different types of couples: infertile couples, homosexual couples. The services face new demands like fertile couples who refuse to sexuality, the desire to have a child later, to make a child by themselves… Biotechnologies allow then to graft uteri, to keep the gametes in the cases of transsexual couples and for couples who wish to privilege their career and procreate at a later age. Here begins the “technological vertigo”. In fact, these new demands and the technological advances that flow from them are advancing faster than we can think, legislating them. For our author, these new modes of origin would gradually lead to wish to control the making of children with prediction methods allowing the selection of certain genes and not others. This book allows to think the question of determinism. For our author, there is no determinism pure and simple. Indeed, each individual in a given context, at a given moment will face a multitude of possibilities of possible choices. In spite of certain determinants, it is the subject’s response that will determine his destiny and that will impel change. The subject, because he is subject, will introduce his singularity and therefore a discontinuity that will make his destiny unpredictable.
It is by numerous clinical cases that he relates the procreative excesses. Sometimes it is the satisfaction of getting what you want at all costs rather than the desire for a child who comes first in “a time when desires are claimed as rights”. Before entering into a policy of conservationism to avoid such drifts, Mr Ansermet proposes to overcome this vertigo, this situation where everything vascillates, where we are disoriented because we have no referential to refer to assess the situation. His perspective is to go beyond the ideas received, to overcome this vertigo, to face it, without compass. He invites the subjects to invent new ways of thinking so as not to remain stuck and tend towards conservationism.
For that, he goes in this book to ask questions about what we are. He will again use the term “vertigo” by referring to the possible family photo for couples using these methods. Indeed, there may be the donor sperm or gamete, both parents, the surrogate mother. But more so, doctors, the reproductive biologist. All these actors in the procreation of the child gives rise to new modes of alliance and parentage within families. Whatever the mode of procreation the question of the origin is there! Am I the father of this child? Did she cheat on me? Did the medical team exchange my sperm donation with another?
The author refers to many works of literature. The new modes of origin and the question of origin will be illustrated by the story of Victor Frankenstein. With Amphitryon by Molière, he will show that the question of origins and identity is a source of questioning and that the link between origin and sexuality is an irrepresentable link for man. He will rely on the myth of Pandora to address a second link unthinkable for man, procreation and death. It will raise the fact that in ancient Greek mythology, man accesses procreation by renouncing his immortality. Procreation then would consist, even today, of transmitting something of oneself in order to be able to persist beyond one’s death.
Throughout this book, Mr ansermet uses his psychoanalytic references directed by Lacan and allows us to acquire tools to answer some questions raised during ethical debates.