It is worth considering that the lady is conflicted, because of family-of-origin unresolved issues, about pregnancy itself or about motherhood. I would suggest that she has significant unconscious conflicts centered on pregnacy or motherhood. It is possible, for exmaple, that she fears her mother's disapproval of such or that she is not so individuated from her mother that she ends up feeling unprotected herself from her mother's intrusions in the family life of the young couple and their childrearing. A reason I have for making this very tentative suggestion is that the focus of the conflict is presented here as if were solely an intepersonal conflict between the lady and her husband. However, such interpersonal conflicts, when they reach such levels of intensity, are often (but not necessarily) expressions of intrapsychicic conflicts that parallel the interpersonal. The lady seems from your limited description to be indentified with the part of herself that does not want children but rejects this part perhaps because of her individuation strivings that compete with whatever fears make her disinclined to have children. We don't have much information to go on, not about the wife or the husband, but we have less about the husband's conflict. It would appear that he at least is party to a projective counteridentification in relation to his wife's conflict. He no doubt has conflicts of his own on this very issue of having children and/or pregnancy or else this issue is a displacement object for others of his conflicts. The first place to look to explore his conflicts is also in the area of pregnacy and fatherhood. It would be useful to know a lot about the relationships each of these partners has or had to his or her parents.
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