The Missing Father Function in Psychoanalytic Theory and Technique: The Analyst’s Internal Couple and Maturing Intimacy

Abstract

This paper argues that recovering the “missing” paternal function in analytic space is essential for the patient’s achievement of mature object relations. Emerging from the helpless infant’s contact with primary caregivers, mature intimacy rests on establishing healthy triadic functioning based on an infant-with-mother-and-father. Despite a maternocentric bias in contemporary clinical theory, the emergence of triangularity and the inclusion of the paternal third as a separating element is vital in the analytic dyad. Effective technique requires the analyst’s balanced interplay between the paternal, investigative and the maternal, maximally receptive modes of functioning—the good enough analytic couple within the analyst—to serve as the separating element that procreatively fertilizes the capacity for intimacy with a differentiated other. A clinical example illustrates how treatment is limited when the paternal function is minimized within more collusive, unconsciously symbiotic dyads.

• Paternal function
• paternal third
• symbolic father
• actual father
• triangular space
• triadic functioning
• maternocentric bias
• fusional dyad
• Freud
• Lacan
• paternal and maternal analyzing modes
• analytic couple within the analyst

Notes

This paper is one of a series of three that I have recently authored on the father and paternal function.

Bion’s () theory of the container has primarily been taken up in terms of a more restrictive maternal containment model that provides both understanding and relief. Caper () extends the theory to include paternal containment that helps to enable thinking without necessarily providing understanding or relief. Thus, through this paternal mode, the lack of relief becomes more bearable, and self-containment, described as “the capacity to bear one’s own experiences without understanding them” (p. 17), can develop.

This phenomenon was suggested by Swiss researchers who demonstrated that an infant engaged with either parent spontaneously looks at the other parent in order to bring him or her into the encounter (Fivaz-Depeursinge and Corboz-Warnevy ; Fivaz-Depeursinge, Lavanchy-Scaiola, and Favez ).

The notion of the more abstract paternal function, including primary identification with the primordial father of personal prehistory (Freud ), as well as secondary identification with the castrating functioning of the oedipal father, was developed in Freud’s structural theorizing (), wherein the primordial father identification was linked with the ego ideal and subsequently furthered in Moses and Monotheism ().

Freud () described this as a splitting of the (maternal) object wherein the mother’s “unimpeachable moral purity” (p. 169) is contrasted with a prostitute’s. Typically portrayed as the Madonna-whore complex, this manifested in Charles’s case in his being blocked from desire and orgasm with his wife and his consequent reliance on sadomasochistic pornography in order to achieve orgasm.

Britton () reports on a similar case, though with a more psychotic, female patient, who told him to “stop that fucking thinking” (p. 88). Along the lines of my own understanding, Britton conceptualized his patient as detecting and responding to the analyst’s efforts to “consult [his] analytic self” as a form of internal parental intercourse that threatened the patient’s very existence.

The enigmatic confrontation was gracefully conveyed by Levinas () when he wrote, “paternity is a relationship with a stranger who, while being entirely other, is me” (p. 71).

Paternal and maternal are used here in traditionally symbolic ways—a gendered, dichotomous symbolism that persists in the analytic literature. Though beyond the scope of this paper to question this dichotomy, doing so certainly merits further consideration, particularly since such qualities as “integrity” and “devotedness,” as well as other described paternal and maternal attributes, are neither exclusively such nor in fact necessarily gender-based.

Reverie as a more passive and receptive orientation offering the space for something to develop is understood as an expression of the mother’s love (Birksted-Breen ; Cegile ).