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The first psychoanalysts viewed the father as the central figure in mental life. Early formulations by Freud, Ferenczi, Abraham and others focused on the major role of the castration complex as the major organiser for emotional growth. Their theoretical outlook was patrocentric and phallocentric, with relative neglect of the significance of mothering and nurturing in human development.
After the Second World War, there was a shift in perspective. The evolution of psychoanalytic knowledge, including object relations theories and direct observational studies on child development, resulted in an increased interest in the mother-child dyad in the 1940s and 1950s, and in the study of motherhood as a developmental phase. Melanie Klein, Anna Freud and Margaret Mahler wrote about the baby's early dependence on the mother and conflicts over separation and individuation. In the 1960s, Bion, Winnicott and Bowlby made further contributions to the significance of the early mother-baby relationship/ attachment as the bedrock of mental health. This emphasis on the role of the mother was balanced most recently by Lacan's “return to Freud” which emphasised the role of the father (the Law of the Father) in structuring the unconscious.
Until the early 1970s there has been very little psychoanalytic literature about fathering, the father-child bond and fatherhood from a developmental viewpoint. As will be discussed later, Lacan used a structuralist model, based on language, and was not concerned with development. Ross (1979: p. 317) wrote that “until recently the father has been the forgotten parent in the psychoanalytic and psychological literature”.
Slowly a number of papers and books, mainly from America, began to emerge: Cath et al. (1982, 1989), Lamb (1976), Abelin (1971, 1975). These studies use observation of actual fathers and an attempt to conceptualise the father's direct relationship with the child, as well as the father's role outside the mother-child dyad.
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