Working with Fathers in Psychoanalytic Parent-Infant Psychotherapy edited by Tessa Baradon,  Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2019,  191 pp. Psychoanalysis and Contemporary American Men: Gender Identity in a Time of Uncertainty by Steven Seidman and Alan Frank,  Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2019,  260 pp.

Following the turn toward object relations and subsequently relational psychoanalysis, familial life continues to be re-examined in a shifting cultural landscape where psychoanalytic thinking about mothers, fathers, and children has become increasingly textured if not complicated. While a pre-oedipal lens has greatly contributed to nuanced understandings of mother and child interaction, scholarship on fathers and masculinity, while significant to a point of asserting that fathering is not tethered to biology (cf., Rothschild, 2019a), continues to be appraised as a site in need of further study. Simply, scholarship on matters domestic remains mother-centric. Two new volumes labor to shed light on the dark continent that is man albeit from divergent vantage points. In some regard, each is concerned with the implication and limits of Target's and Fonagy's (2002) idea that the father is simply another attachment figure. Tessa Baradon's edited volume focuses on the world of psychotherapy with fathers and infants, while the co-written work of Steven Seidman and Alan Frank centers on masculine identity per se. Taken together, critical aspects of a masculine functional territory become apparent in a fashion that illuminates questions and particularities regarding our shared human conditions.

As the initiator of the Parent Infant Project at the Anna Freud Centre, Tessa Baradon has edited a book on psychoanalytic parent-infant psychotherapy in which most of the contributions including Baradon's own are represented by English clinicians working at the Anna Freud Center or the Tavistock Clinic. In addition are contributions from Germany, Sweden, France, and Israel. Across these well curated papers exists the idea that a real living third sets limits for the primary parent-infant dyad, and that such a person may be considered to be engaged in the act of fathering. The chapters address working with fathers present and absent in treatment, transference and countertransference, and