You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
We are very proud to announce the 2008 recipient of the annual Symonds Prize: Tabitha Freeman, Ph.D., for “Psychoanalytic Concepts of Fatherhood: Patriarchal Paradoxes and the Presence of an Absent Authority.” Dr. Freeman is Research Associate, Centre for Family Research, University of Cambridge, and Research Fellow, St. Edmund's College, University of Cambridge.
Once again, we received many excellent submissions in this second year of the competition, which is made possible by the Alexandra and Martin Symonds Foundation. We chose Freeman's essay for its astute and nuanced engagement with classical and contemporary psychoanalytic literature on a topic now finally receiving its psychoanalytic due: paternal subjectivity and its paradoxical presence and absence in psychoanalytic thought. This consideration of the “tension between the symbolic presence and substantive absence of fathers … built into the heart of orthodox psychoanalytic theory” recruits contemporary feminist gender critique, developmental theory, and many schools of psychoanalytic thought. Focusing on “key sites of silence and contradiction in Freud's account of the Oedipus complex that are attributed to the negation of paternal intimacy in early infant relationships,” it also addresses “the wider cultural rhetoric” about fatherhood as a social institution, role, and subject position. In this regard, Freeman's sophisticated contribution captures the interdisciplinary gesture at the heart of this journal's mission.
We hope you enjoy this award-winning essay and invite you to apply for the Symonds Prize 2009, whose winner, like this year's, will
receive publication in Studies in Gender and Sexuality and $500. You will find an announcement for the competition and application instructions at the beginning of this issue.