Meeting of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

DISCUSSION: Dr. John McDevitt agreed that the immediate determinants of object choice and object relations are unconscious fantasies rather than early object relationships in any one-to-one sense. These fantasies stem from inner and outer forces that shape the mental apparatus throughout childhood, latency, and adolescence. Even though the main focus of the case presentation was the manner in which early object relationships or their absence shaped the patient's subsequent unconscious fantasies, little other than the father's absence was presented concerning their origin. Dr. McDevitt suggested that their development must have had some relationship to the boy's actual experiences and were not simply determined "autonomously." Furthermore, however determined, fantasies alone cannot take the place of an actual father in psychic structure formation. Even under the best of circumstances the absence of a father must interfere with development. Any such interference would naturally determine subsequent fantasy formation. There was insufficient data to speculate about this aspect of the case.

Dr. John Munder Ross emphasized the importance of the patient's abiding "father hunger" in shaping his preoedipal, oedipal, and adolescent development. The patient seems to have been presented all too early with the cruel and, for a child, untenable fact of his father's abdication of parenthood. Consciously, the obviously smart little boy no doubt accepted his circumstances while yearning for reunion with a good, even superhuman father. He constructed an idealized image of the