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In 1982 two of the editors of the present volume, Cath and Gurwitt, with John Munder Ross as a third, edited Father and Child: Clinical and Developmental Perspectives, a collection of papers which focused on father and child as a dyad and attempted to address the paradoxical omission in so much of the literature
of father as a 'force in dynamic theories of neuro-sogenesis and psychopathology' (p. xvii). The present volume is in effect a sequel, attempting to examine father as a 'crucial member of the family system' (p. xvii), exploring 'the dyadic and triadic overlapping relationships with the family' in more depth; considering connexions between children and their fathers and grandfathers, and other idealized father figures such as heroic or national leaders.
Both books grew out of an American Psychoanalytic Association on-going workshop on 'Issues in paternity', in which all the editors took part. All are psychoanalysts and part-time academic teachers. They had further noted, since the publication of the first volume, that researchers and clinicians seemed reluctant to include fathers as real and significant objects with real relationships within the family, 'capable of making major contributions to the intrapsychic structure of the external lives of their children at all phases of development' (p. xvi). They set out to redress this situation as well, the present volume being the result.
The book is divided into seven sections, in each of which are included (wherever possible or suitable) clinical, theoretical, and research contributions on the subject of the section. In all the sections the editors have attempted to include 'the real relationship between the father and child within the family as well as the internalization, mental representation, and images of the father' (p. xix).
The excellent introduction summarizes the new ideas which the papers present and which the editors have generalized and consi