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This group was formed some two years ago and consists of three staff members and two senior students. The group was set up to examine the effect of the loss of the father on children in the first five years of life. In the children in our sample
such a loss occurred through parental separation or divorce. Our scrutiny of the analytic and observational material available has directed us to three main areas of study:
the pattern of oedipal development;
the processes of identification, with particular reference to sexual identifications;
the degree, quality and timing of superego structuraliza-tion.
Our study has highlighted the persistence of pre-oedipal tendencies through the oedipal phase and beyond; these children frequently show a very distorted sequence of phase development. Just as we have been struck by the incidence of pseudo-oedipal behaviour, we have become similarly aware of the pseudo-latency in the children we have studied. It could well be that the inconsistencies and dangers inherent in negotiating the oedipal phase and having to give up the exclusivity of the dyadic, preoedipal relationship with a mother who is also the one remaining constant object, proves too much for these children; thus, they seem to carry the exaggerated ambivalent investment of the primary object with them into latency, adolescence and even into adulthood.
The degree of persistence we have noted in these children—in their problems over giving up earlier patterns of drive expression and over the continuing immaturity of the level at which they relate to their primary object, the mother—is also reflected in other areas of their personality. Prior to treatment, we found that cognitive ego functioning was sometimes interfered with. It was as if these children could not allow themselves to use their normal curiosity to gather information about their bodies, their parents, the physical world and—eventually—to participate in formal learning at school. Rather, they felt compelled to restric