You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Drs. Kavaler-Adler and Brok tell of three daughters' experience of their fathers as oversized internal part objects whose wills, whims, and needs dominated the inner landscape of their child-minds. Adrian, Lillian, and Myrna illustrate the long-term impact of the fragmented perceptions of their fathers as totemic introjects of dependency, greed, and/or sexuality, demanding to be sustained by unceasing veneration, caretaking, and desire by daughters who experience themselves as the major suppliers of emotional goods.
In Dr. Kavaler-Adler's object relations vision of the child's primitive internalization, the father imago dominates the daughters' part-object relationships. I propose to invert that construct in the interest of synthesizing the implications of the three cases, and to look at these women through the lens of their male parents' part-object views of them. In so doing, I draw on the relational tilt of Dr. Brok's perception that men who abuse their daughters as part objects are not capable of seeing, much less appreciating, them as independent subjects: the fathers' use of their daughters constitutes a functional denial of their subjectivity.
Adrian's subjectivity is battered repeatedly—no less when her father idealizes and adores her than later when he persecutes her, and again in the parental separation drama theatrically staged in the family library. Lillian, on her trip to California with her father, is interchangeable, in fact literally interchanged, as his object, first with an anonymous chorus girl, then again with her own mother. And the very existence of Myrna, conceived explicitly to replace family members lost to the Holocaust, is cast from birth as her parents' part object (or selfobject). Her father never lets her out of his sight, hanging around her, despondent and sexually dependent, to the apparent exclusion of his wife. Daughters, Dr. Brok reminds us, may be used as stand-ins for wives—and wives as stand-ins for the youthful mothers of memory