Preoedipal Girls Need Fathers*

Contributions to psychoanalytic developmental theory have emphasized the father's importance for female development specifically during the oedipal phase and adolescence, generally neglecting his significance during other phases until recently. I believe that girls during the preoedipal period need reliable, nurturing, affirming, and attuned relationships with available fathers if they are to successfully enter the oedipal phase and to ultimately resolve its conflict. Prevailing psychoanalytic theory does not adequately account for the girl's preoedipal need for a father. When we do so it becomes necessary to reconsider our assumptions about the father of the oedipal phase.

Freud (1931) pointed to the need to study the girl's preoedipal phase to gain understanding of female development. In his emphasis on the girl's preoedipal attachment to her mother, however, he failed to consider the preoedipal importance of the father. Contemporary psychoanalytic developmental theory suggests that the infant initially forms a singular attachment to the mother, whose representation is gradually internalized. As the infant's perceptual and cognitive capacities mature, and as she begins to differentiate boundaries between self and mother (Jacobson, 1964), she becomes capable of evincing interest in others outside of the symbiotic orbit (Mahler, Pine, & Bergman, 1975). At this point she is thought to be capable of becoming involved with her father, considered by several theorists (e.g. Abelin, 1971; Forrest, 1966) to be the “first other” or the “first stranger.” I suggest instead that the father is not a stranger and that the infant becomes aware of, becomes interested in, and evolves mental representations of both parents concurrently and not sequentially.1 In the preoedipal