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Rosine Jozef Perelberg traces the clinical and theoretical journey that led her to the formulations presented in this paper. Perelberg distinguishes between the murdered father configuration (when the individual cannot conceive of the role of the father in the primal scene) and the dead, symbolic father. The phantasy of “a father is being beaten” may frequently be found in the analysis of some male patients at the point of transition between these two configurations – that is, from the murdered father to the dead father. Perelberg discusses the connections of this line of thinking with Freud’s progressive discovery of the paternal function in the body of his work, and outlines some of the reasons for the relative neglect of the paternal function within the British psychoanalytic tradition.