Assessing prenatal attachment in a sample of Italian women Anna Maria Della Vedova*, Francesca Dabrassi and Antonio Imbasciati Faculty of Medicine, Clinical Psychology Division, Brescia, Italy (Received 26 April 2007; final version received 26 October 2007) The term prenatal attachment refers to the affective investment that parents develop towards the unborn baby during the gestation period. Recent research supports the idea that the early relationship between the woman and the child she’s bearing is related to the quality of postnatal mother–infant interaction and to the improvement of the woman’s health behaviour in pregnancy. This study focuses on the process of the woman’s bonding with her foetus and aims to assess the psychometric properties of the Italian translation of Prenatal Attachment Inventory (PAI). The PAI was translated into Italian and administered to a sample of 214 low-risk pregnant women. As prenatal attachment is supposed to measure the mother’s capability to emotionally invest in the foetus, the Toronto Alexithymia Scale was also administered to assess the pregnant women’s alexithymia level. The results illustrate that the Italian version of the PAI maintains the main psychometric characteristics of the original version. Explorative factor analysis suggested a five-factor structure. The association between low level prenatal attachment and high level alexithymia may be of interest in mother–infant wellbeing promotion programmes. Keywords: attachment theory; alexithymia; prenatal attachment inventory Introduction The prenatal origin of the parent–child relationship was first alluded by authors from a psychoanalytical domain affirming the relevance of the parent’s affective investment towards the unborn baby. Deutsch (1945) depicted the woman’s affective investment towards the foetus as a process in which she gradually becomes aware of as an individual being, increasingly recognising the separate person. Winnicott (1958), with the concept of ‘primary maternal preoccupation’, emphasised the woman’s involvement with the baby she’s bearing, therefore identifying with the unborn baby’s needs, protecting, loving and bonding emotionally with it. Extensive literature focused on psychological processes involved in transition to motherhood as adaptation to pregnancy and maternal role attainment (Rubin, 1975, Mercer, 1986), maternal identity forming (Benedek, 1959, Bibring, 1959, Pines, 1972), maternal representation of the unborn baby (Soule `, 1982) and maternal representation of pregnancy (Ammaniti et al., 1995, 2006). Bibring (1959) outlined that becoming a mother is a process in which a mother redefines herself to herself and others, an evolutive ‘crisis’ of a woman’s identity. Following these authors, the process of forming maternal identity is interwoven with the process of developing an emotional tie with the unborn child. From the 1980s, this emotional tie has been defined as ‘prenatal attachment’ (Cranley, 1981, Condon, 1993, Mu ¨ller, 1993) referring to the Bowlby theory of *Corresponding author. Email: dellaved@med.unibs.it Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology, Vol. 26, No. 2, May 2008, 86–98 ISSN 0264-6838 print/ISSN 1469-672X online # 2008 Society for Reproductive and Infant Psychology DOI: 10.1080/02646830701805349 http://www.informaworld.com