Pregnancy: The Three Phases

Doctors have long studied the physical aspects of pregnancy, but they have paid little attention to its psychological effects. Recently scientists have begun to make up for this lack. Their conclusion: pregnancy is not a time of passive waiting by the woman alone, but an experience of active metamorphosis for both man and woman; while a baby is being formed physically, a family is being created psychologically.

That view is held both by Manhattan Psychoanalyst Max Deutscher, who has just begun a new study of the dreams and fantasies of first pregnancy, and by San Francisco Psychiatrist Arthur Colman and his wife Libby, authors of Pregnancy: The Psychological Experience, to be published in January by Herder & Herder. As Deutscher and the Colmans see it, the transformation of marital partners into parents goes through three stages lasting three months each. THE FIRST TRIMESTER is basically a time of shock, during which the coming birth is recognized as a cause of major chang es. The wife becomes more dependent, and her need for support gives the husband a chance to practice being a father. At other times, the husband's dependence on his wife, spurred by fear that he may lose her to their child, gives the woman an opportunity to be maternal. Pregnancy, in short, becomes a rehearsal for family life. Husband and wife compare themselves with their own parents, a process that may stimulate self-doubt and guilt (Can they do as well as the older generation? Ought they to do better?).

THE SECOND TRIMESTER is more peaceful. The most important event is the quickening, when the developing infant's movements can first be felt and it begins to seem human. According to Deutscher, couples report playing with the wife's belly and "pushing it to call forth a response from the fetus." There is, he says, "a sense of hilarity and awe, of joking and solemnity and of some quality of respect" that is almost religious.

In this period, mothers may talk to the fetus (''Let's go shopping today"), and most couples give the baby a name --though Deutscher has found that maladjusted couples may christen it "The Thing" or "The Monster." Both husband and wife have fantasies about their child's personality.

THE THIRD TRIMESTER is dominated by two themes: the couple's increasingly obvious sexual differences and their fears of death. The woman's enlarging body increases her sense of strangeness and sexual isolation from her husband, but it also heightens her feeling of femininity and her husband's pleasure in his masculinity. One woman told Colman that she felt radiant when her husband looked at her approvingly "as I clambered up the stairs in my new awkward way." But Colman reports the depression that he himself felt after a concert he attended with his pregnant wife. "The pianist and Libby were both creative; I was nothing," he says.

The second theme is often expressed as worry over delivery--a worry that can affect men as well as women. Frightened by a film depicting childbirth, one husband dreamed that his wife painlessly delivered nine cellophane-wrapped babies in cardboard boxes. In Deutscher's experience, couples who do not express their fears frequently fail to create a real family.

For the others, he says, delivery is followed by "laughter, great glee, triumph, perhaps, a sense of completion and a sense of beginning."

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