Some Functions of the Self Personified by the Father*

A previous paper was occasioned by the observation that environmental paternal deprivation resulted in distortion of the individuating self. But it left open what processes the father symbolized, concentrating instead on the clinical evidence of damage (Carvalho 1982). A subsequent paper on the self discussed the capacity to experience and to realize the self in terms of the degree to which the mating between a deintegrative experience and its environmental complement can be tolerated. This is symbolized clinically in terms of the ability to tolerate the coniunctio between the parents (Carvalho 1985).

In this paper, I want to think about the development of this coniunctio as expressed through fantasies of the parental intercourse, i.e., those of the combined object, the primal scene, and the Oedipus complex. These provide the symbolic machinery with which to incarnate the self in the flesh and blood of object relations and in the realities of time and place. The machinery also permits eventual emancipation from too concrete and rigid an identification with actual parental objects. Some developmental processes and mechanisms that the father is used to symbolize become apparent in this context.

I will start with some material which illustrates the way in which aspects of the self which have been rigidly identified with the parents are now beginning to be less so. I will then consider earlier stages.

Andrea is 40 and has been coming four times a week for about four and a half years. Most of the time she wants me to believe that