The Importance of Fathers. A Psychoanalytic Re-evaluation edited by Judith Trowell and Alicia Etchegoyen (The New Library of Psychoanalysis, 42.  Brunner-Routledge, London, 2002).  vii + 255 pp. £17.99.

This is an important book. Psychoanalysis has, in its history, not been very balanced in its views of fathers. While Freud saw the father as ‘all-important’ (as Britton puts it in his chapter), the pendulum later swung the other way and for a long time many psychoanalytic theories saw the mother as ‘all-important’. In recent times there has been much more of an acknowledgement of the important role of the father: in the USA, particularly on the basis of the infant research by Mahler, Abelin and others; in Britain, for example in the post-Kleinian development on the Oedipus complex; and in France, specifically through Lacan's contributions. By bringing together many of the existing ideas and putting forward new ones, this book goes a long way in redressing the balance.

It is also a rich and diverse book that looks at many aspects and from different perspectives. While all the authors are psychoanalysts or psychoanalytic psychotherapists from Britain and so their contributions are all rooted in British object relations theory, they cover the range of views from the three groups of British psychoanalysis as well as important aspects from American and French psychoanalysis. The contributions in the book are based on a whole variety of sources: from developmental and clinical research, from individual psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy with adults, adolescents and children, from infant observation, perinatal interventions and family work. The different chapters look at very different aspects: the role of father in child development and in the internal world; the changes in becoming and being a father; the difficulty for some mothers in allowing the father a place with the child, and the characteristics of women who overvalue their fathers to the detriment of their femininity; the effects of absence, death or disability of the father; the role of father in the boy's gender identity; and other aspects, such as adoptive fathers and grandfathers. On the whole, ev