Parental-fetal attachment and couvade: a study of patterns of human-environment integrality.

Abstract

The general purpose of the study was to address the difficulty of explaining fathers' prenatal attachments to their unborn children and the difficulty of explaining the phenomenon of couvade. Rogers' principle of integrality was used to derive a theory of the nature of the interactions between fathers and their unborn children as being a human-environment energy field process. The theory held the possibility of fathers having a relationship with their unborn children which was not wholly derivative of their relationship with their pregnant partners; it posited the possible association of fathers' attachment, mothers' attachment, and fathers' couvade experiences. Couvade experiences, previously studied as male pregnancy-like symptoms, were conceptualized as fathers' recognition of changes in themselves and their environments which included their emerging children. Measures of fathers' and mothers' attachments and fathers' ratings of their couvade experiences were obtained during the third trimester for 110 couples' pregnancies. The hypothesized relations among parents' fetal attachments and couvade were not supported. An inverse relation (r = -0.47, p less than 0.001) between fathers' and mothers' attachment scores led to revisions of the interpretation of integrality as used in this study.