Fathers Facing Their Daughters’ Emerging Sexuality

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Notes

I do not use films as psychobiographies or to analyze the unconscious of their makers. Rather, I consider them data (Katz and Richards, 1995) that, like clinical data, may be studied in terms of dialogue, events, affect, and behavior, all in the context of the ongoing life situation and historical data available. The advantage of using film in this way is that, since there are no problems with confidentiality, the most intimate details may be presented and discussed. In addition, movies, unlike clinical situations, allow many observers access to the same material. As Freud said about dreams, movies are ideal subjects for analysis in that they use context, condensation, repetition, and visual imagery to convey meaning. Freud himself used literature both to formulate and to illustrate his theories (Freud, 1907, 1913, 1919). Cynthia Ozick (1995) has said that photographs are “a stimulus to the most deliberate attentiveness: time held motionless in a vise of profound concentration, so that every inch of the seized moment can be examined,” and this applies to moving pictures as well. Of course movies do not prove anything by themselves. The clinical process provides the only setting in which to test or validate any clinical hypothesis, including those derived from movies. But movies, like literature and life, are an endless source of valuable and testworthy ideas.

Some fathers confide in their daughters about difficult relationships with their wives. This too is a seduction, inviting the daughter to fantasize that she could be a better partner to him (Freud, 1893).

George Sluizer, the director, told me that he tested his daughter for the role of the abducted girl but decided not to cast her in the part after concluding that she had more talent as a director than as an actress. Nevertheless, he said, she was “an inspiration for the role of Saskia,” and he chose actress Johanna ter Steege for the role “not mainly, but also because she had a physical resemblance to my daughter.”.

Proust, who had also waited long hours for his mother’s kiss, eventually became one of his favorite authors.

I have found it to be generally true that the capacity to form a good relationship with an adult woman is a prognostic criterion for the capacity to handle a daughter’s development. A good marital relationship is both a mark of having resolved original oedipal conflicts reasonably well and an outlet for freshly aroused passions. It is also a source of support when oedipal conflicts are revisited in parenthood.

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Notes on contributors

Anita Weinreb Katz

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.