5. The Role of the Father in Early Development

The move from theorizing about mental states to building models of the mental apparatus enables us also to move from a linear phase-organized theory of development to a more imaginative field-description of the process. We evolve ‘stories’ about a mind that builds itself by ‘learning from experience’ and develops faults and distortions from the evasion of the truth about these experiences. The ‘story’ that we carry into our consulting rooms as the backdrop for understanding and describing the phenomena we encounter with each individual patient is something of a prototype. In no sense is it ‘normal’ statistically, yet it is far from idealized since it includes a description of the steps in cognitive development and structuring of the personality with many nodes of conflict. Each one of these nodes is a point for the origin of distortions and faults. A backdrop of cognitive development and structuring implies the operation of thinking to resolve conflicts of meaning and, while it undoubtedly contains an internal logic, it is in no sense linear in the manner of theories of ontogenetic biological development. Rather it tends to present a somewhat spiral configuration, like the analytical process itself, thus giving a new meaning to Freud's concept of working-through.

The prototypic story (model) of development tends, of course, to be weighted heavily on the side of the evolution of the mother-child relationship, to which the role of the father must be appended as an important modulating, and potentially modifying, force in the field. It is a source of some of the most important faults and distortions regarding both character and psychopathological constructs. It is no simple task to describe this prototypic story, mainly because it functions in the consulting room in a predominantly unconscious way, being dipped into by the countertransference, and furthermore changing all the time as new clinical (and personal) experiences generate new ideas and rearrange old configurat