Couvade and the Phallus

The cultural practices known collectively as couvade and their analogues in cultures that do not have formalized couvade rituals have been treated at various times in psychoanalytic literature. Couvade rituals are practices that involve the husband of a woman in labor acting out childbirth and undergoing the same performances, ritual segregations and the like, that the parturient undergoes in the culture (Newman 1942). Although various explanations of these phenomena have been offered in the literature, the one that seems most plausible is that these rites reflect an underlying male anxiety about and envy of the female body and its overwhelming plenitude vis-à-vis the miserably lacking male body, which cannot menstruate, become pregnant, give birth, or lactate.1 The geographically