A experiência de maternidade na contemporaneidade

Abstract

Each woman experiences motherhood in a unique way and it can be related to contemporary aspects. It is seen that many experiences of human life undergo changes over time and it would not be different with the act of becoming a mother. This dissertation, consisting of two studies, presents and discusses a research that aimed to investigate how mothers of our time have experienced motherhood. Study 1 aimed to seek, in the scientific literature, studies on the experience of motherhood from the perspective of the mother. An integrative literature review was carried out, stemming from the guiding question: “Are there current studies that investigate and show the experience of motherhood from the perspective of the mother?”. The studied sought qualitative studies, published from 2016 to 2022, in the field of Psychology, in Portuguese, English and Spanish, in the LILACS, SciELO, PsycINFO (APA), SCOPUS and Web of Science databases. Data analysis was supported by the Thematic Analysis tool and, in the end, the constructed categories were discussed according to the perspective of Winnicottian psychoanalysis. The corpus of this study was comprised of 18 articles found in the LILACS and Web of Science databases, in the English and Portuguese languages. In addition to presenting the perspective of women who become mothers, these articles have a common point: highlighting the importance of support directed at women who become mothers. Study 2 aimed to understand the experience of motherhood in a group of primiparous women. It was carried out along the lines of an empirical, qualitative and descriptive research. In total, 15 women who are mothers participated in this study, by consenting to answer an online Sociodemographic Questionnaire and a Semi Structured Interview. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, analyzed based on the Reflective Thematic Analysis and the discussion of the results was based on the theoretical framework of Winnicottian psychoanalysis. In this study, it was also possible to observe the 12 importance of support for women, which proved to be scarce during the period of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, they sought new forms of support for each other, such as WhatsApp groups where only mothers could participate. The moment of the interview proved to be a safe space for expressing the need to talk about the good and difficult experiences of motherhood. This study warns about the emotional health of mothers, as it was noted that, especially during the first days and months after the birth of a baby, the risk of emotional illness for mothers increases.