Midlife reactions to mastectomy and subsequent breast reconstruction
M. K. Goin and J. M. Goin
The well-documented psychological disturbances that follow mastectomy have
been said to be less frequent and intense in postclimacteric women. Data
from our interviews with mastectomy patients, 12 of whom were
postclimacteric, indicate otherwise. Their distress was often outwardly
different, but inwardly still traumatic. During frequent, open-ended
interviews, feelings were revealed of loss, depression, and shame about
sexual feelings that the patients believed to be inappropriate to their
age. These revelations were facilitated by the frequency of the interviews,
the decreasing unconscious use of denial as time passed, and the knowledge
of the possibility of breast reconstruction. The patients' need to pretend
to themselves and others that the mastectomy was relatively unimportant
added an extra burden to the usual stress of coping with midlife anxieties.
Reconstruction decreased the mastectomized woman's feelings of dependence
and mutilation.
