Fathering from Infancy to Old Age: A Selective Overview of Recent Psychoanalytic Contributions

This paper highlights briefly the more significant and promising psychoanalytic contributions to our understanding of fatherhood and fathering during the last 20 years, and attempts to show how these recent concepts differ from the more classical ones. Indeed, these decades have been marked by two striking insights about fathers not exclusively derived from psychoanalytic data. The first is an enriched appreciation of a father's uniquely significant role in healthy family development at all points along the life span, both before and after the classical oedipal period. Second, we have become aware of the perplexing but consistent historical tendency of excusing fathers from blame as well as therapeutic interventions in unhealthy family syndromes (Ferholt & Gurwitt, 1982; Caplan & Hall-McCorquodale, 1985). A major outcome of this second tendency, in almost all theories and therapies, has been the placing of inordinate blame on mothers for their children's developmental problems.

During the post-World-War-II years a growing number of women sought greater individual equality and fairer representation in a number of ways. These efforts may have derived from women's increased participation in the war effort, and gradually extended from decision-making in the public sector to changes in our most sacrosanct theories about intrapsychic, epigenetic representations of the sexes. This increasingly significant groundswell led to a more realistic appraisal of the roles of both sexes in Western family life—for in truth, both had been skewed and dominated by archaic patriarchal traditions and prerogatives. Thus, today's fathers are being called upon increasingly to share the maternal or nurturing responsibilities for offspring and home. In contemporary middle-class America many men do seem interested in the nurturant responsibilities