This paper argues that recovering the “missing” paternal function in analytic space is essential for the patient's achievement of mature object relations. Emerging from the helpless infant's maternal contact, mature intimacy rests on establishing healthy triadic functioning based upon an infant-with-mother-and-father. Thirdness is always psychically in existence, and even the absent or deceased father is an ever-present third in the mother's unconscious mind. I advocate that the emergence of triangularity and the father function is vital in the analytic dyad, while arguing that there is a maternocentric bias in contemporary clinical theory inasmuch as the dyad remains predominantly analogized according to the mother-infant bond characterized by being held, contained, and nurtured. Nonetheless, intimate contact requires the inclusion of the paternal third to complement the dyadic maternal order. After noting the evolution of the Father concept in psychoanalysis, I present a clinical example illustrating how treatment becomes limited when the father function is minimized as a separating element within more collusive, unconsciously symbiotic analytic dyads. Finally, I propose that effective technique requires that the paternal, investigative mode supplements the maternal, maximally receptive and that the analyst's balanced interplay between these two modes of functioning - the good enough analytic couple within the analyst - serves as the separating element that procreatively fertilizes the capacity for intimacy with a differentiated other.