You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This article discusses the question of what functions influence children's experience of real interactions with their fathers and
Dr. Lemche is Director of Research and Assistant Medical Director, Dresden University of Technology, Medical Faculty Carl Gustav Carus, Department of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics; currently also Wellcome International Visiting Scientist, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College of Medicine and Dentistry, Neuroscience and Emotion Section, London.
Lothar Stöckler is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and group analyst, currently a graduate student of psychology, Free University of Berlin.
Acknowledgments. The authors wish to express their gratitude to Drs. Gisela Klann-Delius, Robert N. Emde, and Peter Fonagy for their constructive comments on previous drafts of the manuscript. The work of the first author has repeatedly been supported by the Köhler Foundation in Munich and by the Research Advisory Board of the International Psychoanalytic Association in London. This paper has been written while on a postdoctoral research fellowship grant of the Köhler Foundation.
mothers and their internalized mental representations in the development of affect regulation during infancy and early childhood. Following a review of empirical studies on the gender-specificity of father-infant interactions, a model of the development of mental parental representations is presented that allows a more detailed description of the role played by these representations in emotion dispositions. It is proposed that according to the theory of early triangulation and current knowledge on representational development, children are not able to represent both parents cognitively in a common mental space before the age of 18 months. It is argued that this capacity for joint mental representation of both parental figures is essential for effective modulation and transformation of affective states. Furthermore, it is conjectured that this differentiated joint image of both mother and father is of crucial importance for the emergence of interindividually specific patterns of affect regulation in 3-to 5-year olds. A model of emotion regulatory mechanisms based on observations from early expressive behavior is presented. Implications of these views for clinical manifestations of mature versus primitive patterns of defense are discussed.