Paternal Deprivation in Relation to Narcissistic Damage

IT IS REMARKABLE to what extent the father has been neglected as a facilitating figure in considering the development of the individual. Until it was very difficult to find much about the father as such a facilitating and sought-for figure, and most of what was written seemed to concentrate on his forbidding aspect along the lines originally conceived by Freud (7).

Ross notes that despite Freud's theoretical preoccupation with the prohibitive father, he was in fact constantly searching for a Hamilcar to his Hannibal in, for instance, his relationship with Fliess (Ross 13). Other writers have noted similar relationships, such as those with Brentano and Breuer. Ross shows how Freud was blind to the positive father in the Oedipus myth, and he makes reference to the ‘Laius complex’, pointing out that Oedipus's (like Freud's) preoccupation with the past can be seen in terms of his search for the father-guide and mentor he never had. Ross further points out the pathos in the situation where Oedipus kills the father he has never known and so cannot recognise.

Indeed, remarkably little attention was paid to the subject until Ross's paper in . As late as Burlingham (4) remarked on the lack of literature concerning the father and the pre-Oedipal child, and there was little until apart from Abelin's paper in (1) and the paper mentioned already by Ross in . In papers appeared by Layland (10) and by Kay (9), and Seligman (15) published a paper in .

Apart from this Malan stresses the positive longing for the father (MALAN 12, pp. 60 and 62), and among family therapists Skynner has stressed the importance of a father in the establishment of boundaries, authority and control (SKYNNER 16). Outside the analytic field Rutter made a plea for the acknowledgement of the importance of significant figures in the family other than the mother, and especially for that of the father (RUTTER 14), while a book entitled Paternal Deprivation was written by a psychologist rather than