Couvade

COUVADE

Couvade is a kinship usage reported among primitive tribes like the Khasi and the Toda. The practice consists in making a husband lead the life of an invalid, along with his wife whenever she gives birth to a child. He refrains from active life, goes on a sick diet and observes certain taboos.

This kinship usage involving wife and husband has been variously explained. Some authorities have seen in it a survival of the traditional stage of the maternal-paternal complex. In the maternal-paternal stage, where residents may be matrilocal but inheritance patrilineal, or conversely, some conventional methods of ascertaining paternity are needed-keeping, the father confined in a room or the customary bow and arrow ceremony of the Toda. Malinowski believed couvades to be a cementing bond of married life and a social mechanism designed to secure paternal affection. Raglan regards it as an irrational belief which may be prior to marriage and even a contributory cause of the emergence of marriage as an institution.

Some writers have sought to give a psycho-analytical explanation. They have attributed this usage to the husband’s desire to lighten the wife’s discomforts by the process of participation through identification.