New Literary History

Our commonly accepted concept of the experience of human loss presumes that the mourner has had meaningful physical and psychological contact with the person who has been lost. But there are many situations where the absence or loss of an individual in the family with whom a child may have had only minimal contact or has never even seen is acknowledged and referred to by the adults. Many children of single mothers who were conceived by artificial insemination can never know their father; children conceived but not yet born before their fathers left home for service in the armed forces, and children of fathers who visit them occasionally but do not form a psychological connection are all faced with the similar psychological dilemma of having no actual memory of the person whom others call “father.”

How do children deal with such a void? The process of projective identification which plays a critical role in the evolving early parent-child relationship, as originally described by Klein and recently elaborated by Apprey, and Apprey and Stein, requires the actual presence of the parent. ¹ Can the psychological structure of a child who has not experienced paternal intersubjectivity during the first few years of life be relatively stable? While the importance of the maternal relationship for optimal development has been recognized and documented extensively by many infant researchers and clinicians, ² only recently has the role of the father in early development been studied in depth. ³ This omission is all the more surprising in view of Freud’s emphasis on the influence of his own father on his psychological development.

The changing social mores of society affect family structure and family relationships. With more women in the work force, attention became focused on the effect of maternal deprivation on young children. The current need for greater paternal collaboration in infant care has now shifted more attention to the children’s relationship to the father, and the special influence of the father’s psychological and physical presence [End Page 443] on development of even very young infants is an important area of psychological inquiry.

The clinical data presented below address the issue of the father’s influence during the first two years of life. Derived from two different sources, one body of data consists of analytic material: two male patients who were similar to one another in that they had both been born during the Second World War and had lived alone with their mothers during the first two years of their lives until their fathers joined the family at the end of the war. The similarity of the psychological conflicts in these two men strongly suggested that the early paternal absence they had both experienced played a crucial role in shaping their personality structure.

The second body of data came from very young children for whom paternal absence appeared to have had serious consequences. These very young children were treated, along with their mothers, in three therapeutic nurseries for which I was responsible. The nurseries were situated within institutional settings where they provided diagnostic and therapeutic services to psychologically disturbed children who were below three years of age at the time of referral to us. Most of them lived in Medicaid-supported households where the biological father might appear briefly and unexpectedly, but never became psychologically involved with his child. While these households usually included one of the child’s grandmothers and often an aunt and cousins as well, an adult male relative was almost never present consistently.

The deprived social and economic conditions of these families undoubtedly influenced the children’s development in an overall way. But there were striking similarities between aspects of the psychopathology of the two adult male patients referred to above and many of the boys in our nursery population. The nature of their maternal relationships, particularly in regard to the libidinal-aggressive balance, and distortions in the intensity and management of aggressive impulses were features common to both the adult males and the nursery boys.

Clinical material from Mr. A.’s psychoanalytic treatment illustrates the nature of his problem in...