Melancholic Fathers: Tantalizing and Dangerous Objects

Abstract

This essay examines the implications of premature demands for autonomy and separation in many male children. Terming such developmental processes a form of melancholy, we notice the pressure for idealization and omnipotence on male development. The essay uses clinical material to consider the implications of these developmental pressures on men as forms of intergenerational transmission of traumatic identities, expressed through processes of attachment and separation.

Keywords:

• masculinity
• melancholy
• separation
• idealization
• intergenerational transmission.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adrienne Harris

Adrienne Harris, PhD is Faculty and Supervisor at New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is on the faculty and is a supervisor at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. She is an Editor at Psychoanalytic Dialogs, and Studies In Gender and Sexuality. In 2012, She, Lewis Aron, and Jeremy Safran established the Sandor Ferenczi Center at the New School University. She, Lew Aron, Eyal Rozmarin and Steven Kuchuck co-edit the Book Series Relational Perspectives in Psychoanalysis, a series now with over 100 published volumes. She is an editor of the IPA ejournal Psychoanalysistoday.com, which is developing cross cultural communications among the five language groups in the IPA. She has written on topics in gender and development, analytic subjectivity and self-care, primitive states, and the analytic community in the shadow of the First World War. Her current work is on analytic subjectivity, on intersectional models of gender and sexuality, and on ghosts.