Some Effects of the Absence of His Father on an Eight Year Old Boy

It is not easy to find papers concerned with the effect of the absent father on the early life of the child. There have been a number of papers about the effect of the father's death upon the child, for example, C.R. Reeves (1973), W. Halton (1973), and M. Harris (1973) and Meiss (1952). These papers however have been very much concerned with the effects of the death on the growing child, and the absence of the father has been overshadowed by the trauma of his death. As an increasing number of children are reared in one-parent families, the father usually being the missing parent, it becomes important to try to define the possible consequences of this family constellation, and perhaps in the process to add to our understanding of the father's part in the child's emotional growth.

Frequently referrals of such children include a suggestion that a male therapist be found. While such a suggestion is understandable, it is often difficult to implement, and, in any event, carries an implication that in some sense the therapist could, in fact, take the father's place. Referral to a woman may have advantages in that child and therapist have to work towards the development of some feeling of an internal father within the child, without as it were, external props, which the child may lack in his external situation. Andre Green (1975) notes an aspect of fathering in the complex representation of men as husbands and fathers that the mother of the baby has in her internal world to sustain her through the stresses of her relationship with the baby. In the therapeutic situation with the fatherless child, what the child has to work with is this complex representation within the therapist/mother. The child will transfer to the therapeutic situation, as Melanie Klein (1952A/B) has emphasised, those “early experiences, object relations and emotions which come to focus on the psychoanalyst: this implies that the patient deals with the conflicts and anxieties which have been reactivated b