Introduction to Reconstructing Fatherhood

Abstract

An introduction to three papers that focus on fatherhood. Common to each paper is an understanding that the loss of idealization in adult identity development affords working with an aftermath of melancholy that can alter the role of fatherhood in a pro-social direction. To that end, intersectionality, essentialism, and challenges of being Other are addressed with a focus that is simultaneously clinically and culturally attuned.

Keywords:

• father
• intersectionality
• essentialism
• melancholy
• other.

In thinking on fatherhood two pop cultural references begin to swirl in my mind prodding a humbled awareness that a neatly synthesized introduction is out of the question. This lack of synthesis serves as a major point of introduction to a conceptualization that is at once varied, particular, and perfectly imperfect. In one octave, I hear a sentimental character from the film Finding Nemo (Stanton, 2003) exclaiming, in a histrionic tone, “There’s a father,” as though credit is to be given for simply showing up without regard to depth or distinction. In another register, in Patti Smith’s song Birdland, she repeatedly sings the word “Daddy” from the perspective of Wilhelm Reich’s abandoned son who begins to believe that his father is not dead but an alien (Smith, 1975/2010). The resulting cacophony is a tantalizingly paternal and musical fort/da that in its ambivalence to harmony attempts (albeit reluctantly) to thwart and break into time and relationality.

From a clinical perspective, we may idealize a temporal existence as good enough (Winnicott, 1971/2005). This idea of a being embedded in a triad with two caring, responsible and differentiated adults where some sort of average expectancy is met comes easily to a nostalgic and/or hopeful mind. Awareness of such an ideal creates its own pressure to be a good enough father, if only to lower the cost of future psychotherapy bills. In the first of the three papers that follow, Robert Grossmark suggests that quite often this pressure to be good enough is felt, and creates its own crunches in clinical enactments (Black, 2003; McLaughlin, 1991) related to mental representations of The Father, a subject of encompassing know-how. Grossmark adds that such reactivity is generally unavoidable as parental engagement challenges one to enter the present with psychic force similar to Ulysses making his way home. Our consulting rooms often reveal that rigidity and creativity co-occur in varied states of integration. Grossmark notes that the psychoanalytic encounter seeks to capture and hold the arising manifestations of these unfinished areas.

In concert with earlier work on the ramifications of perceived emasculation and reactivity by theorists such as Marcuse, 1955/1974) and Lasch (1979), Grossmark notes that a father’s realization of being “A Father” rather than “The Father” involves loss, dread and anguish. Grossmark adds that this loss of male privilege is necessary if one is to recognize and respect that children are subjects in their own right. In line with Grossmark’s (2016) earlier work on companionship, we are treated in the papers that follow to meditations on broken containers and desires for containment in addition to nuanced comparisons of holding and letting go.

Grossmark’s use of class difference as a justification for undifferentiated contempt in what appears by omission to be a clinical presentation of so called “white people’s problems” opens a path to hearing C. Jama Adams’s work. Adams makes explicit the manner in which racialized and economic social variables intermingle to reveal a father’s absence as one that is mediated by the social field. Through making absence explicit in such a social-cultural manner, it becomes possible to subsequently mentalize the needs of shall we say a young black Icarus who is in need of assistance if he is going to negotiate his inherited wings (cf., Mitchell, 1986).

Through his focus on race, Adams turns to the societal resources necessary for good-enough fathering, and asks that we bear how agency is limited on the basis of the intersection (Crenshaw, 1989) of race, masculinity, and fatherhood. In omitting class as a separate and distinct term, Adams depicts an essentialism that considers not simply that race is too often correlated with income, and income with education and resources, but that social class, income, and education are too often naturalized within a psychological essentialism of racism (Haslam, Rothschild, & Ernst, 2002). Adams describes how a black man is twice negatively essentialized on the parental frontier: First on account of race, as the aftermath of slavery leaves a black person preoccupied with issues of safety in contemporary culture, and secondly because of a gender role and biological difference in a culture that essentializes a mother-child dyad. A theme of developing relational capacities of attunement and creativity to work productively with limits and particularities is central to these understandings of fathering.

The particularities of limits and the loss of male privilege are also central to Adrienne Harris’ writing. There Harris finds melancholy, a functional state in which one is preoccupied with a damaged or dying internal object. For Harris, melancholy as a response to what is damaged and dying, is simultaneously a problem and an opportunity for growth. Melancholy may be understood as a sign of twilight casting a shadow that tarnishes an idealized exemplar of The Father. Within a relational matrix, a tarnishing melancholic shadow reveals an experience that is one of chronically longing for and caring for a damaged father. As a symptom, the shadow of melancholy may become a challenge to undifferentiated defenses creating an opening in which growth is possible. The madness that may be found in awareness of such an opening is found in Nietzsche (1882/1974) who famously writes that god may be dead, but we need vanquish the shadow as well. In Harris’ hands we see how intractable this shadow of father or godfather is, and how the wish to vanquish is itself the product of a mind rooted in a frame that oscillates between idealizing and devaluing. Harris finds an origin point for such a frame in a failure between parent and child that maintains a sinister negative tie through a perverted linking in which one becomes preoccupied with a dead-alive other whose undifferentiated status is felt to be similar to that of a conjoined twin. Eigen’s (1999) term toxic nourishment comes to mind through Harris’ writing of spectral object relations that are hated and feared.

Through melancholy Harris seeks to illuminate a phenomenal state that is present across the portraits of fathers found in each of the following papers. Her aim is a paradoxical palliative care that situates grief in a manner that rejuvenates autonomy. In her hands, fatherhood itself is a function that breaks with a fixed essentialist location while demanding that we simultaneously account for the particular and specific ways fathering may manifest. Particular pressures around gendered performance amplified by variables such as race and biological sex demand an intersectional focus that is attuned to historically and culturally mediated psycho-social identities.

Casting fatherhood as a dynamic function across particular social identities favors the democratic, feminist, and flexible over the nationalist, misogynist, and rigid (Rothschild, 2004). In that spirit, Grossmark asks that we find what is similar between surviving a soccer match as a member of an intact family and getting through the summer before college as a member of a fragmented family. Adams invites us to hear that an amoral capitalism and its drag queen hand maiden called patriarchy is a significant discontent threatening the ointment of civilization. In concert with Adams and Grossmark, Harris’ clinical focus conjures not only a father’s rupturing “No” (Foucault, 1977), but a child’s resistance consistent with Peter Pan’s terrified exclamation: “I won’t grow up” (Barrie, 1911/2000). In each of the papers that follow clinical portraits reveal the intractable qualities of identity reified, as reactive and anxious stuck points threatening dynamic intimacy.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Louis Rothschild

Louis Rothschild, PhD, is a clinical psychologist based in Providence, Rhode Island. His writing is presently centered on rapprochement between fathers and sons ((where he has penned book chapters in three edited volumes in addition to two journal articles.)) A past-president of the Rhode Island local chapter of the Division of Psychoanalysis (39), he served on the steering committee for the 38th annual spring meeting of Division 39 which took place in New Orleans, his birthplace.