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This book is a delight to handle, with its firm cloth boards, deep red in colour with silver lettering, relatively large print and slim build.
The two-page list of contents makes an immediate impact. For example, chapter six is shown to have five sections on feminine development, fathering and femininity, father absence, inadequate fathering and then a summary. There is a pleasing brevity in the writer's style which is complemented by lavish referencing so that the bibliography occupies nearly a third of the book.
The author describes himself in the preface (p. xi) as a clinical and developmental psychologist, who is the father of four sons. In those capacities he was particularly interested in studying father/child relationships throughout the 1960s, and then produced this book with the sub-title ‘Paternal determinants of personality development’.
It comes as a surprise to this English reviewer to read on page one that in the United States of America in 1966 ten per cent of children were reared in fatherless families, the figure rising to near fifty per cent in some areas. Biller proceeds to compare father-absent and father-present boys. His researches show, as analysts would expect, that father-separated children produce idealistic pictures of father and, hence, are less trusting in their relationships than the control children with fathers. His evidence is that fatherlessness before the age of three is much more damaging than absence of father later, and he concludes that experiences of father-absence and father-presence along with the child's images and ideas have become built into his self concept before that age so that they are not easily reversible after that.
The next part of the book deals with development of masculinity and femininity, and here I have trouble with his definitions. His terms seem to me to rely on commonly assumed stereotypes based on collective assumptions. Confusion arises when conclusions are drawn as if these stereotypes are valid for indiv