In this article the author offers a brief examination of the history of fathers as they have been represented in the psychoanalytic tradition. Of particular interest is the way in which the father, as a principal foundational figure in the history, is later eclipsed by the foregrounding of the mother. The author traces the father's presence, absence, and then reappearance in this account. He suggests that the father's eventual return to a central position in psychoanalytic thought is a consequence of Lacan's reinterpretation of Freud's oedipal father. This way of thinking posits the father as a symbolic figure who eludes gender specificity but who plays a key role in the child's separation from the mother and entry into the wider world.