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I propose that parents revisit their own oedipal passions and conflicts parallel to their children's passages through their oedipal phases. The child's oedipal behavior stirs up in the parent old attachment and separation issues as well as old desires and competitions. This both tests the parent's old solutions and offers the chance of new ones. In my view the parent not only is reacting to the child but is also experiencing the destabilization of his own intrapsychic structures. Such destabilizing, which occurs in any important period of psychological transition or development, is both promising and potentially dangerous; it opens
Faculty and a supervising analyst at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and at the Object Relations Institute; member of IPTAR and the IPA; clinical supervisor in the clinical psychology doctoral program at City University of New York; in private practice in New York City.
Earlier versions of this article were presented at The Psychoanalytic Society Conference, on May 9, 1998, in New York City; The American Psychoanalytic Association, on May 16, 1999, in Washington, D.C.; The Association of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, on September 9, 1999, in Mexico City, Mexico; New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, on September 16, 2000; The Psychoanalytic Society of Long Island, on November 12, 2000; and the Object Relations Institute, on April 20, 2002, in New York City.
I want to thank Alma Bond, Phyllis Dischel, Ada Frumerman, Roz Goldner, Lynda Gunsberg, Norman Handelman, Stanley Lieberman, Ilana Litvin, Doris Pfeffer, Arlene Richards, Joan Schwartz, and the Martin Bergmann Study Group for their thoughtful readings of previous versions of this paper. I also want to thank Eve Golden for her invaluable help in the development of this paper.
The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 57, ed. Albert J. Solnit, Peter B. Neubauer, Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling (Yale University Press, copyright © 2002 by Albert J. Solnit, Peter B. Neubauer, Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling).
up the possibility of more mature and more adaptive resolutions of revisited conflicts but also poses the danger of cracking a brittle or rigid adjustment, prompting a return to more primitive ways of coping. The resulting inner turmoil may produce disruptive thoughts, affects, and sometimes behavior, ranging from temporary benign regression to severe decompensation.
It goes without saying that oedipal revisitations occur in both parents in conjunction with the oedipal stages of children of both sexes, but I focus here on paternal reactions to, and enactments with, daughters. It may be argued that not all men experience such a crisis, although my belief is that all fathers do. This paper illustrates the way it can appear in a number of different men. Awareness of this possibility enhances our understanding and clinical work with men and with their daughters.