Finding One's Father: The Mother's Contribution to Early Father Representations

When Freud (1921, 1923) first presented his concept of primal or primary identification, he also commented on the development of a child's pre-oedipal psychic relationship to each of the parents. In 1921,1 he wrote:

Identification is known to psychoanalysis as the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person. It plays a part in the early history of the Oedipus complex. A little boy will exhibit a special interest in his father as his ideal. This behaviour has nothing to do with a passive or feminine attitude towards his father (and towards males in general), it is on the contrary typically masculine. It fits very well with the Oedipus complex, for which it helps to prepare the way…. At the same time as this identification with his father, or a little later, the boy has begun to develop a full object-cathexis towards his mother according to the attachment (anaclitic) type. He then exhibits, therefore, two psychologically distinct ties: a straight-forward sexual object-cathexis toward his mother and an identification with his father which takes him as his model. The two subsist for a time without any mutual influence or interference… [They] come together at last; and the normal Oedipus complex originates. [p. 105; emphasis is mine]

We have, in the decades since this paper was written, elaborated considerably upon a child's growing object cathexis to the mother, finding the development of this relationship complex and sometimes not nearly as straightforward as Freud implied. In the past ten years or so, we have also come to appreciate that there is a