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In earlier work (Ross, 1974) I have reported my research on boys' wishes and attitudes towards childbearing and childrearing and have reviewed historically psychoanalytic contributions to an understanding of male nurturance and genera-tivity, issues bound up with the problem of gender identity (Ross, 1975). In this article I will attempt to synthesize from this work and from clinical and observational data a theoretical overview of successive stages in the epigenesis of paternal identity during the first decade of a boy's life. (I leave to future presentation generative development during adolescence and adulthood.)
Before proceeding to do so, however, certain caveats and clarifications may be useful. Some of what ensues is speculative and aphoristic, and many of the ideas set forth here require further evidential corroboration and conceptual elaboration. Furthermore, the sequence and timetable I have hypothesized would no doubt be subject to great individual or cultural variation in terms of intensity, departures from the 'norm', radical omissions, and so on. In fact, there is no norm; 'the boy' depicted here is what he is in most of the analytic literature—a construct or an 'ideal type' to whom a whole variety of boys may be referred for further reflexion rather than as a standard of comparison.
Even so, generalizations have not only a heuristic value but also a certain experiential validity, especially when set within the contest of what might be called the 'genetic structuralism' which is redefining all models within the social sciences. Among these is that body of abstractions referred to as psychoanalytic' metapsychology'. But, first, I will begin by citing one of its proponents from another discipline, the cognitive psychologist Piaget (1970):
Where genesis obtrudes on everyday observation … one cannot help but become aware that structure and genesis are necessarily interdependent. Genesis is simply transition from one structure to another … b