From psychosomatics to fatherhood research.

I began to be interested in fathers from a psychological perspective at the beginning of the 90s, when, after becoming father myself and after years of psychosomatic research at the University of Bologna, I had the opportunity to study parental affective disorders and illness behaviour during the perinatal period. I was a doctor, but a psychoanalyst too, and a member of a family therapy team in public services. Considering my psychoanalytic and systemic training, it seemed natural to me carry out research by addressing the parental couple, and not only the mother. I had planned to talk to parents, as well as giving them self-report questionnaires — but I found myself immediately in difficulty. Most of the fathers did not come to meetings and when they came, they usually spoke instead of the mother. The doctors themselves and the nurses considered this normal and tended to address only the mothers. I experienced what today is called “maternal gatekeeping” and understood that the problem was complex and had social and cultural implications. With much effort and patience, I collected data from both parents and published a study comparing depression, anxiety and somatization in mothers and fathers. Following this, I began to be considered one of the first Italian researchers who took care of the fathers: a great and unexpected responsibility! In the same years I began to be interested in attachment theory and to study the role of the father from this perspective. Affective disorders in fathers and paternal attachment became the most important fields of research within my Attachment Assessment Lab at the Department of Psychology of Bologna. In 2013 I organised “Fathers and Perinatality: Attachment, Adaptation and Psychopathology”, the first International congress on this issue. Since then I have published articles and held workshops and lectures on the father for public and private institutions. More recently, I have been collaborating with Australian researchers, in particular Stephen Matthey, University of Sidney, with whom I have developed the PAPA, a questionnaire for the screening of paternal perinatal affective disorders.