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Colette Chiland, the French child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, wrote in her paper about fathers: ‘Nothing can be said about “the father” in general. Something can be said about a particular father conjoined with a particular mother, and about an absent father only in relation to the qualities of the mother’ (1982: p. 371). Notwithstanding this obvious truth, psychoanalysts, particularly over the past quarter of a century, have evolved increasingly complex models of the role of ‘the father’ in normal development and in so doing made significant assumptions of homogeneity of family structure, individual behaviour and interpersonal relationships. Of course there is a paradox, or at least a dialectic in these generalisations. The nuclear family of Western society is to a considerable degree structured by gender roles. By contrast, the focus of psychoanalytic interest is invariably in deviations from such social norms that might explain, and arguably underpin, individual differences which lie at the heart of psycho-analytic clinical interest.
The dialectic which the homogeneity assumptions of psychoanalysis entail has been part and parcel of psychoanalytic writing from its earliest days. Psychoanalysts attempt to provide general developmental theories on the basis of exceptions from or negations of these ideas presented by clinical experience. Nowhere is this dialectic so readily apparent as in the psychoanalytic literature on fathers, where generalisations about the role of the father are readily made but remain poorly integrated with the observations of individual fathers with individual children under their care. In this chapter we shall critically consider three psychoanalytic theoretical frameworks within which the role of fathers has typically been considered: (1) the Oedipal father, (2) the father who enables separation from the mother, and (3) the role of the father as originator of triadic psychic capacities— specifically symbolic function. In the