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Accepted Paper:
Therapy of Knowing: Californian Donor Conception and the Psychological Self
Martin Eggen Mogseth
(University of Bergen)
This paper explores how Californian donor conceived persons employ therapeutic discourse in the restructuring of identity and biographical life, which is inextricable from the context of nongenetic and unknown genetic parentage. Thus, therapy remolds relationality way beyond the therapy room.
Paper long abstract:
As a social technology, psychotherapy is increasingly incorporated in the realm of assisted reproduction in California. This is especially true in the case of younger, left leaning, educated people, both among (those seeking to become) donors, parents, and among donor conceived persons themselves. In the last decade some clinics and sperm banks have even begun to recommend consultation for both prospective parents and donors, concerning among other things the lack of a genetic link in parentage and vice versa. The tendency is indicative of a broader permeation of psychological jargon in the negotiation of relationality and personal experience in California. In this paper I wish to explore how donor conceived persons, after learning they are donor conceived, perform inwardness through psychotherapeutic discourse and in its name restructure identity and biographical life. This restructuring is inextricable from the social situation of nongenetic parentage, from the bioinformatic body, and not least from the question of the unknown progenitor. Therapy, thus, is not confined to the therapy room, but seeps into and remolds the very foundations of what it is to be relational, hence what it is to be human.