The paper adresses the topic of the “perverse father” in his dual existence as a mythical figure as well as a real person. Starting out from the recent unabriged edition of the Freud/Fliess Correspondence, it traces the stages in which the metapsychological status and clinical appearance of the idea of a “perverse father” has changed in Freuds writings. It is argued that the conception of a concrete “perverse father figure” was never as fully relinquished by him as contemporary psychoanalytic thinking may seem to suggest. The two levels of experience, i.e. of a concrete perverse father who chooses his own children as his sexual objects, and a phantasmatic perverse “demonic” father who dominates the phantasy life of his children, are not oppositions. The historical and theoretical discussion of the vicissitudes of the concept at the beginning of the paper is followed by two clinical vignettes which investigate the impact of both levels and their intertwining in the psychic life of our patients. The vignettes also serve to provide insight into the technical difficulties in working on both levels in the transference and counter transference within the psychoanalytic situation.