I am theorising that the father's body is part of the necessary knowledge of an infant and a growing child. Furthermore, I suggest that fathering puts a man in touch with himself, and brings into being a heart which men sometimes feel they do not have.
Published in Landmarks.
by Heather Formaini
Abstract
I am theorising that the father's body is part of the necessary knowledge of an infant and a growing child. Furthermore, I suggest that fathering puts a man in touch with himself, and brings into being a heart which men sometimes feel they do not have. It connects men to the vulnerability and fragility of children and thereby to their own feelings of vulnerability and fragility. It opens up the humanity which may have been cast into their own shadow personalities at the time of 'dis-identification' from the mother.
Key words
Fathers, body, psychoanalysis, shadow, masculinity
THE PURPOSE of these remarks is to stir up some thinking about fathers and their bodies, and to direct that thinking towards the way mothers and their bodies are often theorised. I hope to show the importance of the relationship between an infant, a father, and the father's body, contending that psycho-analytic theory as it presently stands has not considered this very important aspect of human development - that is, the place of the father's body in the life of a child. I argue that the absence of theory in relation to the father's place is partly responsible for the problematic which is 'masculinity'. I make the claim that the relationship with the father is potentially just as important as the one with the mother.
The (so-called) mother's part in infant and child development asymmetrically places the burden for all child rearing on to women, rather than women and men. The emotional and psychological consequences of mother-centred child-rearing upon women have been incalculable. I argue that an infant needs two equally responsive parents, arguing that Western theories of infant development need revision. If this task is neglected, the present patriarchal model of development will be upheld, allowing two discrete attachment systems to remain: one in relation to the mother (secure attachment), and the other in relation to the father (insecure attachment). A symmetrical approach, which encourages a 'pair imago' to be internalised, such as the one described here by Anne Springer, a German colleague. is the model I wish to encourage for reasons which I hope will become clear.
During the course of its early development, the child experiences its two parents, including their bodies, and forms an inner concept of the pair, a pair imago, an image of the primal scene. The internalised parents, as a pair, are the makers of new life - of babies, dead and alive, loved and tormented. (Ann Springer, l995)
The mother-infant dyad has been said to be the paradigm for all other human relationships. In the view of the feminist psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell (l999, p.175) 'it was male hysteria that led to the focus on the mother-infant relation-ship'. Mitchell cites Freud's hysteria as responsible for the omission of the father. It is an enormous claim, and one which deserves close attention, particularly since so few psychoanalytic writers have cared to understand the reasons behind the absence of father-infant theory.
In allowing, or even sanctioning, the father's physical and psychological absence from a child's infancy, the absence of theory has created a parallel absence in the internal world of a child. It is possible to see the creation of a theoretical triangulation at this point, in the way the physical and emotional absence of the father opens up a space or an absence (of the father) in the child's internal world. These two 'absences' thereby create the impossibility of observing the father, and writing theory about the father and the father's body.
The cycle of multiple absences is then perpetuated over generations and even centuries. It is these absences, I suggest, which have led both to a misunder-standing of the nature of human relationships, and, moreover, a failure to identify the cause of the failures as and when they occur.
It was several years ago when I first became aware of the father's body in its 'shadowy' form. A woman I was treating in therapy began to recount memories from the time she was ten and studying for an entrance exam for high school. It turned out that her father was determined to teach her maths and so every evening she studied with her father hovering over her, instructing her, wrongly, as it happened. This 'hovering body' became an internalised image of the event from long ago, and the presence of this image was palpable in my consulting room. My client's father was a kind of bully who insisted that his daughter follow his way, which turned out to be the wrong way. His daughter, my client, failed the exam and the rest of her school life was changed in a very unfortunate way. That father's shadow extended over the whole of his daughter's life.
This experience of the father's brooding physical presence, which I understand as an aspect of masculinity as it has been historically constructed (masculinity = absence/emptiness, see Frosh, l987) led me to think about certain theories with which psychoanalysts work on a daily basis. A variety of psychoanalytic vocabulary which I understand as object relations theory - from Klein, Bion and Winnicott - describes how the mother-infant relationship is drawn from the external world and then placed, metaphorically speaking, in the internal world.
The topography of the internal world has its own psychic mapping. Here the 'internalised' experiences are transformed into 'objects' or 'part-objects'. What happens to these internal images then and how does the infant make psychic use of the objects now in the internal world? What kind of movement is possible in the internal geography?
The infant feeds from the mother's body, crawls all over her, as if she were a familiar landscape, is able to distinguish her smell from any other woman's, and forms a particular understanding of life from just the touch of her skin. The touch of the mother's skin is the first meeting with life outside the uterus, as the baby pushes its way into the world.
My intuition suggests that the father's body, rarely known by the infant, might potentially hold the same physical and psychological significance as the mother's body. Since, however, it is generally unknown by the baby, it becomes, symbolically speaking, an unknown aspect of life, waiting to be known, expectant. I understand that the father's body may be just as significant as the mother's body, so I offer the theory that fathers hold the potential to be equally important in the child's internal and external reality. Moreover, I argue that it is crucial that they take on this possibility.
This theory can be understood as essentialist, and therefore problematic. Moreover, it can be seen as conservative, given that in the contemporary Western world many women have decided to have children on their own, caring for and raising children without a father's presence. I am aware that many same-sex couples also have chosen to have children outside a heterosexual nexus. In articulating this I am endorsing a dialectical arrangement between the psychological and biological aspects of parenting. In observing that patients in psychotherapy can experience an 'absence of fathering' I am referring a biological link to a social or psychological connection. Such a feeling of an 'absence of fathering' may be connected to the way in which the internal world has been configured, with just 'vacant space' where the father might otherwise be. Whatever need is not met by the father - and central to this paper is the idea, perhaps essentialist, that the child needs the father's active presence - becomes a part of the child's shadow, using shadow according to the theory established by Jung.
Jung's idea can be understood in at least two ways. In the canon of Jung's psychoanalytic terms, it is possible to find a description of the 'shadow' as meaning the whole of the personal unconscious, signifying that everything which is unconscious forms a part of the shadow. In this sense the personal shadow is formed from the experience life brings. The term 'shadow' is used also in relation to an individual's least admirable aspects, or the ones least accepted. It is that part (or parts) in the personal unconscious which does not conform to the standards of so-called acceptable behaviour laid down in early life by those in authority. The shadow often produces confusion and mis-understanding. Given that it is unconscious, the shadow is projected on to other persons or objects who hold the projection until it is made conscious. The shadow is not 'bad' in itself, rather it is the attitude towards the qualities of the shadow that is difficult.
In this paper I am suggesting that the shadow of the father's body is that part of himself which he does not accept. 'Fathering' is therefore the unknown aspect of life, that which he never experienced in his own life and which therefore appears to be culturally unacceptable, or else the part he avoids or disowns and casts on to the mother and her body. Mothers traditionally have played the 'caring', intimate, relational role while fathers have maintained an emotional distance. Emotion in relation to offspring becomes part of the father's shadow. I also argue that the father's body casts a shadow on to the world, both the world of nature and the world of work, where men's minds make their impressions.
In another sense, I understand the absence of theory about the father's body as the 'shadow of the theory of the mother' in the way the theory appears in stories of human psychological development. The father's body is the left-out part, the part denied, or even deliberately avoided. The mother and the mother's body are made to do the work which belongs to the couple, the parental dyad. The mother not only has to do all the caring for the child but she has to do the father's part too. Here I am suggesting that there is something of the theorists' shadow which lingers on in psychological theory: the part they were unable to recognise lives as their shadow. In Freud's case, for example, his unrecognised hysteria (Mitchell, l999) might have formed part of his shadow and allowed him to avoid what was glaringly obvious.
The theory relating to the mother's part in infant and child development - from Freud, Jung, Klein, Winnicott, Bowlby, Stern, and so on - places all the burden for all child-rearing on to women rather than allowing it to be shared. Although this theory is psychological, is also appears to be tacitly political, serving to keep women in the private domain, and out of public life. It is as though women are handed the care of the physical part of life, the body part, whilst men believe that they live the life of the mind, the mind part. What, I wonder, happens to the father's mind which might potentially be mindful of children?
An extension of the idea of the father's body as the 'shadow' suggests that men then project their fathering capacity on to their working environment and the men who supervise their work or whom they supervise. I see men 'fathering their work and their working environment', creating siblings/sons/mates, and searching for themselves in the fathering they seek from their superiors. The father's body becomes, in this sense, a shadow in and of the public world. Since the father has appropriated the public world, his shadow therefore unconsciously fills it. This shadow has, as Philip Knight, chief executive officer of Nike, stated, 'created the war without bullets' which takes so much public space.
There is, still, a private world where women care for children and are not paid for their long hours and hidden labour, and a public domain where visible work is parented by men, and where men take care of each other and together hold on to the wealth of the public world. I argue that real fathering is removed from its appropriate context and transferred to the highly visible public world.
This idea about the father's body can be applied to certain political issues too. Just as the mother's body has been colonised by psychological theory, so colonisation of the mother's body (stereotypically 'instinctual', part of 'nature's' body', consistent with the natural order, and part of the natural world) continues still with all the kinds of paternalistic claims that are made to justify the invasion of nations. The coloniser's perverted sense of 'fathering' and 'protecting the vulnerable' allows him to take over the 'other'; the 'other's' unmet needs allows the belief that s/he may at last be about to be taken care of.
It is a fascinating though tragic fact that of all the psychoanalytic theories on child development there is none which identifies the place of the father as central to development; I am referring here to all the mainstream theorists. It is as though the theories first formulated never lose their grip; and so the original ideas (still only one hundred years old) about psychological development which call for the total attention and affection of the mother for the infant have continued to hold centre stage. All the phases of infant development are now familiar to everyone, as are the emotional responses of the mother to each of these phases. Maternal reverie is a key theory of Wilfred Bion, but paternal reverie, a potential equivalent psychological and emotional experience for an infant and a father, do not yet exist in the literature.
I maintain that there is need of a kind of symmetry in parenting, and that our theories of infant development, invented more in response to social and historical conditions than the needs of infants and their two parents, are in want of thorough revision. If psychoanalysis leaves this task undone then it will be maintaining a patriarchal model of development and encouraging a lopsided internal world where two discrete attachment systems apply: one in relation to the mother and another to the father. Such attachment systems are perpetuated throughout the whole of life and set the model for all human relating. It is not surprising, then, that many of those who seek therapy and analysis tend to do so because they feel they have problems in the way they relate. This is the consequence of our present child-rearing arrangements. It is not that all people who come into analysis or therapy do so because they are troubled, but because they have recognised the failure of present child-rearing systems which perpetuate such distortions in reality.
It is equally important to consider the effects of developmental theories on the social body, particularly in Australia where the European part of society has been so strongly influenced by the era of transportation. Jungian theories of the collective unconscious are immensely helpful in studying the ways in which Australian men, for more than two hundred years, have acted as though they were on their own in this land, as if they did indeed 'own' it, with just the support of their 'mates', leaving women on the periphery of male existence, save for providing for their physical and emotional needs. By relegating the physical and emotional aspects of life to women, who invisibly meet men's needs, men have thereby been able to disconnect from them and see them as marginal. It is possible to argue, particularly in Australia, that women have been left to get on with a creative aspect of life -giving birth and rearing children - whilst many men have seen their task as confronting 'nature' and living a life of destruction (work).
The dis-identification of boys from their mothers: patriarchal masculinity
The topics of 'dis-identification' and 'masculinity' have been theorised by only a few psychoanalysts and analytic theorists. Nancy Chodorow was one of the first feminist theorists to raise the subject in The Reproduction of Mothering , (l987). Several years later, a British theorist, Stephen Frosh, in Sexual Difference: Masculinity in Psychoanalysis , (l994) elaborated Chodorow's work. Although so rarely acknowledged, the 'dis-identification' question is central to the lives of young boys and therefore men.
At around the age of 4 - 5 years, boys are encouraged to 'adopt' masculinity. This means that they must reject the relationship with their mothers. (This is a fascinating point, for it suggests that until the 'adoption' of masculinity, boys have lived in another and different world. Is this other world a gendered world?) Essentially, the fact of the boy having to become a 'man', having to adopt 'masculinity', puts him in the place of having to disidentify with the gender, and, by implication, the humanity of his mother. The young boy thereby separates himself from 'maternal practice', the day-by-day involvement with his mother, and very likely with the only person with whom he has had an intimate and continuous relationship. The disconnection confronts his humanity, his capacity for intimacy, and his 'masculinity'. Since it is his mother who has largely been responsible for his well-being, it is quite possible that he has little relationship to the invisible masculinity he now has to search out. And he has to do this separated from the only person he really knows and loves. He has, in a sense, lost his identity as well as being dis-identified. He now must ask himself 'What does it mean to be a boy?' and 'How do I become a man?' Stephen Frosh (l994) describes this masculinity as 'absence'.
This means that masculinity becomes defined as an absence, a move away from the mother and identification with an empty other (the emotionally or physically distant father), its sole context the fear and rejection of women. Whether or not this is a complete description of the psychodynamics of masculinity is a debatable topic, but it has certainly offered some insights into men's conventional difficulty with intimacy, nurture and maturely dependent relationships.
Frosh (l994) sees masculinity as being constructed on the 'basis of separation from the mother and all her feminine power' - this is a separation from all that the infant knows. Frosh therefore characterises masculinity as 'perpetuated by a continuing process of shutting out the feminine', a description many gender-conscious analysts will recognise. In Frosh's (l997) words, 'masculinity comes to be defined experientially as a movement away from something - from maternal intimacy and dependence - rather than towards something with a clear and vibrant content of its own.'
The same process of disidentification is differently paraphrased by the American theorist Cucchiari (l98l) in the description of the cultural and psychological origins of patriarchy.
... men are 'the category of persons lacking special power ... the masculine gender is formed negatively at first - by what it is not.'
These same men, whose gender is defined negatively, are the ones who then define the gender and gender roles of others by dint of the fictional patriarchal power they bear. This is an important point in my argument.
Femininity, masculinity, and binary oppositions
The discourse of masculinism holds 'femininity' and 'masculinity' as binary opposites, an essentialist proposition which I wish to confront. I take issue with the very notion of 'opposites' seeing them as obstructing our view of the way in which this discourse has been formed by social and historical construction.
The vast current literature on 'gender', the work of so many scholarly feminist theorists of the last twenty to thirty years, underpins the context of so much of this argument. What is being challenged here is not just the essentialism of the 'traditional' (traditional to whom?) gendered structures that have so defined and shaped the lives of women and men for so many years, but the origins of these fictional structures. I see that one of my tasks is to begin to disentangle notions of masculinity, particularly as they relate to the disidentification of boys from their mothers, and the apparent incapacity of men to be intimate. I am questioning the 'relational' capacities of those who have been defined as 'masculine', suggesting that masculinity as it is presently understood in the West holds within it the meaning 'unrelated'. I ask whether the very notion of relatedness is outside the patriarchal value system. This does not mean that I am posing an 'essential' masculinity; rather I am offering the proposition that 'unrelatedness' may have been integral to the historical construction of masculinity, over time, and for a multiplicity of reasons, in contra-distinction to femininity, and because of the essentialist belief in difference, or opposites.
Men have been in difficulties with relationships for a very long time, thousands of years in fact, and it is about time we revised out ideas about what men are for. Sebastian Kraemar, 'A Man's Place', l995)
Kraemar, a child psychoanalyst and theorist at London's Tavistock Clinic, is writing in the context of psychoanalytic theory as it applies to child development and fathering, and it is there he confronts the problem of 'opposites'. Likening it to 'the prejudices of racism, or madness', Kraemar (l995) contends that 'differences are amplified to create what amounts to two different species, with no overlap.'
The American theologian and eco-feminist, Rosemary Ruether (l975) confronts the same notion in her work on women and nature.
The psychic organisation of consciousness, the dualistic view of the self and the world, the hierarchical concepts of society, the relation of humanity and nature, of God and creation - all these relationships have been modelled on sexual dualism.
This paper challenges the established notions of 'femininity' and 'masculinity' as the 'polarities' that are falsely held within the traditional psychoanalytic context (internal/external; conscious/unconscious). And I refer especially to the Jungian position, since these binary polarities continue to hold a powerful force within analytic theory and practice. Some analysts adhere to the model of polarities, sometimes using it as diagnostically.
Again within the Jungian context, dualism had had a particularly negative effect upon the women and men who have been drawn to Jung's theories on contra-sexuality (Jung, l936) and who have unquestioningly accepted his understanding of the contra-sexual theories Jung called anima and animus. Linked to the philosophy of Romanticism, and apparently benign, Jung's essentialist theory always places one polarity over the other (i.e. man over woman, spirit over nature, white over black, light over dark). Women are seen as consciously passive and receptive, ruled by irrational 'feeling', whilst consciously men are assertive and governed by the rational 'logos' principle. Eternally wedded to dualisms, Jung finds that in the unconscious the opposite is true.
What may sometimes be useful as metaphor has become firmly embedded in theory, with the full force of dogma. There is an urgent need to deconstruct the theory in order to bring about a new understanding of humanity. As it is, humanity is split into two parts, psychologically speaking, reflecting patriarchal constructions. Psychological theory as it presently stands forms part of the ideological framework which bolsters patriarchal power.
Some anthropological strands
Like a number of anthropologists, I am interested in examining the origins of male domination in Western society. In order to do this I tracked down some 'attachment' anthropologists, who work with the model of the attachment theories of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. The attachment anthropologists wish to draw attention to the absence of theory about the father in traditional attachment systems and the incongruity between Western psychoanalysis and the practice of fathers in a number of traditional indigenous cultures. This opens for analysis the relationship between male-dominated cultures and psychoanalysis.
A number of texts is helpful for research purposes, in particular the work of the anthropologists who have studied parental roles in hunger-gatherer societies; urban China; Aboriginal communities in Australia and Kenya; the Caribbean; the Yanamamo people; and so on. Amongst these studies there is a number which focuses on the father-infant relationship and which therefore allow a fuller understanding of the place of the infant-father relationship in indigenous communities in various parts of the world.
Eleanor Leacock's text (Myths of Male Dominance , l98l) provides an important anthropological overview of the equality of parenting which exists amongst the indigenous Montagnais people. Leacock's research draws on the diary of a seventeenth-century Jesuit priest from Quebec who observed and described the tender and gentle way a Montagnais father look after his sick child. Writing in 1636-7, Fr Paul Le Jeune SJ finds no way to understand the relationship between this father and child. It appears that he had never before witnessed such concern for a child on the part of the father. The Jesuit project at that time was to search for the means by which the Order could attempt to break the 'barbaric' style of the father and make the women responsible for all child care. Finding tenderness 'barbaric', the intention of the Jesuits was to foster discontinuity between women and men and to render obsolete the gender equality which existed then amongst the Montagnais. Perhaps this was not only culturally important for the Jesuit cause but also because conversion to Catholic Christianity could not be easily established unless gender inequality prevailed. The monumental patriarchal structure of the Catholic Church was at that time even more firmly opposed to equality than it is today. Sexual parity, so often disturbed by colonisers, is an important consideration in my argument, both in terms of gender construction and the shape of the internal and subjective world of human beings.
Gender, women's bodies and nature
My present understanding suggests that the culture established and dominated by capitalist patriarchy seeks to perpetuate the division of the world into 'public' and 'private', with men and women responsible still for each of the divisions, men taking the greater share of all wealth, and women forced to do the greater part of the work for the world and humanity whilst earning a tiny income, if anything at all. Although individual men are clearly not responsible for inventing their own historical and social traditions, men in the West tend to support their own lineage.
The question which I presently confront is that of identity, and identification. It is as though male dominance has by definition bestowed an identify upon women which has more to do with the imagination of men that the reality which is truly that of woman, if if is possible to speak of the category of 'woman'. I make a parallel here with racism and the way in which people of colour have been accorded an inferior identity which does not conform to their own reality. Moreover, people of colour and women belong to inferior categories and suffer oppression as a result of this 'so-called' inferior status. Women of colour suffer a triple oppression.
Frantz Fanon (l990, an Algerian-born French psychiatrist, contextualises himself as a 'black' man in a 'white' world, and at how he is forced to live.
as he groped to understand who he was ... (he) began to understand that either he was doomed to struggle, to to exist, not as he was, but as he appeared in the eyes of others.
The late Dr Charles Perkins, felt he did not exist, either as person or statistic, because of his skin colour. It was as though he had been defined out of existence, and certainly the policies of the Australian government at the time were directed towards 'assimilation', that is, the 'breeding out' of colour.
This is the same question a woman asks as she struggles to exist in a world defined for her, and not by her, always having to be prepared for the gaze of those who have told her who she is, and how she is to be.
The question thus remains: how is it that men, with their fragile masculinity, are able to define others, given that their own identity is formed through dis-identity? Is this a defensive technique which prevents men from taking a closer look at themselves?
The theory of social construction holds that at birth one is neither a woman nor a man. It takes very little time, however, for a child born in the West to have gender thrust upon it, along with a firmly attached gender role - one that will be fixed in place for the rest of life in accordance with the sexual dualism prevalent in the West. In Rosemary Ruether's eyes, this is because:
The male ideology of the 'feminine' that we have inherited in the West seems to be rooted in a self-alienated experience of the body and the world, projecting upon the sexual other the lower half of these dualisms.
Closely following the 'gender construction, women and nature' debate are the theories about women's adult intellectual development, informed by maternal observation and practice, such as are presented by Sara Ruddick (l989). Ruddick's arguments locate the possibility of replacing the conventional understanding of international politics, particularly the politics of peace-making, with maternal practice. It is the practice of mothering which leads Ruddick to theorise the practice of peace-making. Could the practice of fathering ever lead a man in the same direction, by allowing a man to develop his own relational subjectivity?
Ruddick writes
and certainly through most of history, women have been mothers. To speak of 'parenting' obscures the historical fact, while to speak evenhandedly of mothers and fathers suggests that women's history has no importance. Moreover, I want to protest the myth and practice of Fatherhood and at the same time underline the importance of men undertaking maternal work. The linguistically startling premise that men can be mothers makes these points while the plethora of literature celebrating fathers only obscures them.
One of the thoughts that arises our of this discussion suggests that a Western man's subjective world might not be 'human' enough to allow him to care for children? This is not an 'essentialist' thought but a question raised in the understanding that gender construction, through the social requirement of the dis-identification of boys from their mothers, may harm a man's relational potential. It is suggested here that this might be a direct outcome of the patriarchal ideology of gender construction, ideology which is predicated upon men's denial of the value of relationship.
Psychoanalysis and father theory
No major psychoanalytic theorist has put the father alongside the mother, and thereby transforming the infant-mother dyad into an infant-mother-father triad. Most psychoanalytic literature focusses upon women as object or problem, arguably because psychoanalysis, blind to gender, is historically situated. It is within the historical context that it is possible to see how the father was left out of any active 'caring' role in early theorising. But by forcing women to take on the complete responsibility for the caring part, psychoanalysis has been able to focus upon women and women's so-called failures in mothering. Furthermore, girls and women have been robbed of their life in the public world and confined to the invisible private and domestic sphere, where they have been forced to concentrate their creative energies on child-rearing, under the scrutiny of the child developmentalists and psychoanalytic theorists. And in these tasks they have been found wanting. Some women therefore feel that they are not able 'even' to get the (unpaid) task of mothering right, thereby diminishing themselves even further. Fathers, in their invisibility, cannot be criticised. Thus women remain the problem, central to the textual body.
The fact of mother-centred child rearing is challenged by the feminist theorists Dorothy Dinnerstein (l987) and Nancy Chodorow (l987). Both women see this fact as a central problem in human development. In the view of Dinnerstein and Chodorow only shared parenting (equal time with both parents) disallows the kinds of projections that are made upon women as failed parent and perpetual object of hatred. In addition, both theorists argue that the child cannot come to terms with the kind of power that a woman has as a consequence of being the parent with sole responsibility. Although a woman rarely feels that she has 'power' over her children, it does not appear this way to children. With two equally-involved parents, the power struggle which a child inevitably faces is shared. Our present arrangements allow the invisible father to be idealised, yearned for, and set against the bossy mother. Frosh (l987) writes that 'For Dinnerstein, our fear of the flesh is displaced onto women rather than integrated into our personalities.' How much, I wonder, does this displaced fear keep men moving 'away' from intimacy?
The problem with mother is further emphasised by Joyce Treblicot (l984) who argues that mothering and patriarchy are not good companions.
Women are required to give birth only to children of their own race; mothers are required to make children conform to gender role according to biological sex; mothers are expected to transmit the values of the dominant culture, whatever they may be, to their children, and more generally, to teach their children to be obedient participants in hierarchy; and women are expected not only to reproduce patriarchy in children but also to care for the men who create and maintain it.
Why was it that the early psychoanalysts bypassed any theorising of the father's place in the life of infants - that is, from the moment a baby is born? It is possible to speculate that at that time they did not believe in the emotional life of the child (Freud's drive theory might have got in the way of thinking about relational capacities), or else were convinced that early infancy was simply women's business and men therefore ought not to be involved in the messiness that surrounds the first months of life.
It is curious that within the last twenty-five or so years fathers have become a matter for psychological and scientific inquiry. In the first half of the century, it appears, child-rearing was seen unquestioningly as the sole responsibility of women, and fathers simply did not take part in the emotional or social lives of their children. Between the years l929 and l956 there were 260 American research papers published on mother-child relationships, but only ll research papers on father-child relationships.
In the last twenty-five years, impressive evidence has shown that participant fathers 'are good for children's development'. It is also clear that children with two active parents 'experience a greater richness of caretaking' whilst girls and boys with absent fathers have 'an extra obstacle' to deal with in life, even though 'many will successfully overcome it.' (Lamb and Oppenheim, l989) There is now a whole body of evidence which shows without doubt that fathers are important from the very beginning of life, and, moreover, it has been found that
the security of attachment to one parent was dependent upon security to the other parent, that type of insecurity (avoidant/resistant) to one parent was dependent upon the type of insecurity to the other, and that sub-category classification within the secure category to one parent was dependent upon sub-category classification to the other. These data raise important questions regarding the meaning of infant attachment classification as derived from the strange situation. (Strange Situation Interview, Fox, NA, Kimmerly, NL, and Schafer, WD, l99l)
A century after the foundation stone of psychoanalysis was laid, there are only pockets of understanding about the place of fathers within the profession. So the questions remain: how did the first psychoanalysts come to believe that women were solely responsible for children? Were they not able to examine more closely the public and private worlds so carefully designated by men as the discrete domains belonging separately to men and women? Why could they not uproot the prejudices which were so clear?
The theorists and their fathers
Psycho-history is the study of persons and history from a psychoanalytic perspective. What happens if we examine the personal biographies of the mainstream psychoanalytic theorists in relation to their theories? Is there something to discover?
Marie Balmary undertook a huge task in writing Psychoanalyzing Psychoanalysis (l982), a book 'concerning the authenticity of the official version of the life of Freud's father, Jakob Freud.' In this text Balmary sets out to unravel the reason for Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory (a theory about fathers) which she believes he replaced with 'psychoanalysis'. His purpose in doing this, she maintains, was to keep at bay his problematic feelings about his father.
Balmary is not certain whether or not Freud actually knew about his father's second wife, Rebekka, who was, it appears, 'abandoned' by Jakob Freud. Jakob Freud then married Freud's mother. Balmary makes a convincing case, and she asserts that Freud was aware of some secrets within the family and never resolved his difficulties with his father. Further, Balmary argues that psychoanalysis is the consequence of Freud's denial about this father. Juliet Mitchell (l999) is in agreement with Balmary on the question of Freud's denial of any problem, though she may not agree with the exact reason for the problem.
Although not central to my case, Balmary's arguments certainly connect with my own and I suggest that the legacies inherited from 'father difficulties' had consequences for all the theorists in their relationships with other men, particularly close colleagues. Freud's general difficulties with other men, his students and his colleagues (Victor Tausk, who committed suicide after a long difficulty with Freud, Sandor Ferenczi, Carl Jung, the psychological son, Alfred Adler, and so on) are well documented and the subject of much speculation.
In contrast to Balmary's assertions, Juliet Mitchell (l999, p.57) in writing of Freud's hysteria, claims that in mourning his father's death Freud was cured (of his hysteria). But it was not a 'complete'cure, since it rendered Freud incapable of holding on to 'siblings, or male friends. Mitchell finds Freud ambivalent in his connection to 'being'.
The kinds of difficulties which Jung experienced with his father are also well documented and he himself describes some of them in his autobiography. As a child, Jung felt he could not rely on his emotionally-distant father, and could not respect the fact that his father 'lost' his faith when Jung was a child and did nothing about it, continuing his work as a pastor in a Protestant church.
Donald Winnicott (l896-1971), the distinguished British psychoanalyst and paediatrician, felt that he had been abandoned by his father. Winnicott is quoted in the biography by Adam Phillips (l990).
My father was there to kill and be killed, but it is probably true that in the early years he left me too much to all my mothers. Things never quite righted themselves.
Phillips felt that Winnicott 'abandoned' the father theoretically because that's what his father had done to him. Phillips infers a kind of shame on Winnicott's part at being treated so dismissively by his father.
Wilfred Bion, whose theory of the mind has been so important for psycho-analysis, was born in India in l897 and sent to England to be educated. Like Winnicott, Bion also seemed 'suspiciously cheerful' about his father.
The first memory of his father recounted in the autobiography describes Wilfred seeking admiration and approval [from his father], but eliciting the opposite reaction. From his earliest years the child Wilfred tended to ask question upon question. He remembers having completely spoiled his father's attempts to read him Alice in Wonderland because of his endless questions about it. Wilfred soon realised that his father was a 'sensitive' man, and discovered what could floor him or make him beside himself with rage. He wished he could rival or equal his father's powerful character. (Bleandonu, Gerard, l994)
Clearly, Bion felt disempowered by his father and his father's 'sensitivity'.
John Bowlby, a close colleague of Bion and Winnicott at London's Tavistock Clinic, also neglected the father in his theory of attachment behaviour. Bowlby's father, Major-General Sir Anthony Bowlby, surgeon to King Edward VII and King George V, was impossibly remote and, like many British men of his class and time, uninvolved emotionally with his children.
Whilst there are many other theorists to consider, it is enough to register the fact that I have so far not come across any psychoanalytic theorist who has had good experience with their personal father. It is for this reason that I argue that perhaps one of the most significant reasons for 'father absence' in psychoanalytic theory lies in the personal absence of the fathering experience of the theorists themselves.
'Father' research
The distinguished psychoanalyst and writer Christopher Bollas, believes that the 'mother' and the 'father' represent two discrete psychic structures. Bollas questions the behaviour of fathers, referring to it as 'unacceptable' particularly when it comes to work. In his essay entitled 'Don't Worry Your Father' (Forces of Destiny , l986) Bollas employs an ironic tone to suggest that the father problem is a money problem, and that 'They (the family) do not have the economic right to expect this of the father, who assigns himself the role of the one who solves problems for money.'
The two areas of work, [the working environment and the home] the one in which one is labouring through the day for money, the other where one is absent and problems accrue, constitute two psychic structures. The one is the world of men and income, the other the space of children, mothers and expenditure. The family spends while the father earns. There is a split between the two areas.
Bollas's diagnosis accounts for the lack of emotional reality between fathers and their children. Being outside their emotional reality, the child is unable to make 'psychic use' of the father in the way that the child can make psychic use of the mother. Bollas describes the father's space as impersonal and harsh, a 'place of no-admittance, an area of labour.'
Bollas's father may behave in this way because he, the father, believes that only women know how to relate to children. He may even have been persuaded that there is something in the 'genes' of women which makes them able to care for children. It is likely that this once was a commonly-held {tacitly political) view until thirty or forty years ago, when fathers were stereotypically regarded as bread-winners only.
It is due to the research by Michael Lamb, now the Director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Washington, and his associates, that such a view has been entirely disproved, even if the view itself is not widely known. Lamb began his research on fathers and infants in the 1970s, an attachment theorist trained in the research methodologies of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. Bowlby's theory, which brought him into conflict with classical Freudian psychoanalysis, was based upon his concept of the love (attachment) between mothers and babies. Bowlby was declaring war against Freud's drive theory; and Lamb went on to declare war against the traditionally-held attachment theory which focussed almost solely on the mother-infant relationship.
Lamb and his colleagues were able to show conclusively (from the 'masculine' perspective possibly) that infants make strong attachments to their fathers, provided their fathers are present. (It is important to note that Lamb's work co-incides historically with feminism and feminist theories on mothering and fathering. This means that the question must be addressed of whether the male psychoanalytic theorists are simply responding to women's raised voices; perhaps the whole idea of participatory fathering arose out of men feeling pressured.)
Psych-physical shock, war, and the social body
Encouraged by a capitalist patriarchal ideology, the world wars of the twentieth century, and the perpetual 'small' wars, have brought immense distress to the emotional lives of the men who fought in them. I am concerned with the psychological consequences of the emotional distress and show how it relates to the study of the 'father's body' and the discourse of masculinity.
Between 1992 and 1999, the British novelist Pat Barker wrote four books based upon the experience of men's suffering during and after the first world war.
Barker's research into the life and work of the social anthropologist and psychiatrist Dr William Rivers, therapist and doctor to the first world war poets Siegfried Sassoon and William Owens, shows the way in which the experience of war lives on in the men who return home. Furthermore, Barker's research confronts the way in which the experience of war is passe don to everyone around them for years to come.
I use the eighteeenth-century term 'social body' (Susan Griffin, 2000) to explore the way a whole society can be moved, and changed, and possibly held in unconscious traumatic shock for generations following war. This suggests that much of the world has been held in shock for most of this century. The importance of the research into post-traumatic stress disorder (formerly called war neurosis) for which many men were shot as 'deserters' and its consequences cannot be over-emphasised in this particular context. The internal world of the whole 'social body' (if one can theorise, as Jung did a 'collective unconscious') is turned upside down, thereby confusing the normal developmental process.
War neurosis and post-traumatic stress disorder damage the nervous system, leaving sufferers in a state of trauma preparedness. It is as though they are always expect another 'battle' and the adrenalin rushes keep them hyper-alert, just in case they need to made a dash for the hills to hide from the aggressors.
I am theorising that when the 'social body' is infected by people suffering from war-neurosis and post-traumatic stress disorder, the whole (social) body then becomes hyper-alert, ready to find danger where it does not exist. The social body is unconsciously prepared for war.
In the years following the first world war the way in which trauma was passed from one physical (psychological) body to another was not understood. The case I make here, following the careful research in Australia and the United States, particularly with surviving veterans of the Vietnam war and their families) suggests that men returninh from war pass on to their families, through the inter-subjective space, their own physical and psychological shock. This shock, I suggest, then becomes part of the social body. In essence it means that the whole society experiences this shock and unconsciously lives in it. It accounts for a number of 'depressed' societies.
The father's body at work
The father's body go to work in the world: in the corporations, in the forests, on farms, in the mines, in the shops, the slaughter-houes, the cafes and restaurants, the factories, the stock exchange. This is what Frosh (l987, p.l990), recapitulating Dinnerstein, distinguishes as the 'history making and nature-assaulting world of men.'
Men leave home for work every morning and go in search of themselves, even though they have been well cared for at home (as if they were themselves already) and their emotional needs have been met by their partners.
What part does the father's body play in the public world, where, I argue, the shadow of the father is at work. Christopher Bollas asserts from his position as a Winnicottian analyst, and his thoughts on 'father nature' a term that could almost find a place in the vocabulary of eco-feminism, shows his understanding both of the split in men's lives and the potential men have, were they to recognise the shadow, especially as it manifrests itself in the working space. Bollas says that there is something about the way the man moves between the work space and the home space that makes holding on to the meaning of the one whilst being with the other so problematic. Bollas theorises, and I agree with him, that father is more 'at home' in the working space. Men take their fathering (relational) abilities into the impersonal corporate world, I suggest, where they search for that succes, 'patriarchal recognition', which is attached to a notion of masculinity. A man commented to me tht he felt he could be a 'father to his employess' but added that he could only do that when he was the manger and in charge of everyone and everything.
Although always seeking recognitional from the corporation, the directors of the corporate bodies for whom they work are in fact very poor fathers. Thier intention is often to led corproate sons into 'destruction', insisting that men sell their ethical values for a fatherly pat on the head and a stake in the corporation.
There is a Faustian quality to so much of corporate life. The corporation clearly symbolises an unconscious need in men. I suggest that they are still searchging for the invisible 'masculinity' which has eluded them since early children. Even though it must often be obvious that this capitalist kind of masculinity is without ethical or moral values, and crual in its treatment of employees and the natural world, men stay attached to it. This is, I suggest, because they believe it to be their true identity.
It is in the world of work that the father's shadow is seen most clearly, doing all the things that do not have a place in, nor are spoken about, in the 'other world' which is home. The father dis-identifies from his work when he is at home and dis-identifies from his home when he is working. The father, and the father's body, living in two places, in fact lives in neither. Being split, he is split from both places.
The shadow of theory: the father's body
It was Jung who gave us the term 'shadow'. In this paper the notion of 'shadow' suggests the one cast by the centrality of the theory relating to the infant-mother relationship. In fact it is a truism that father ideology, as distinct from theory, and the fact of fathering as it is experienced in the West, has created a vast shadow over much of the world. The 'shadow' (theory) is therefore that which pertains to the part intended to be played by a father in relation to his children.
Furthermore, it is likely that the shadow phenomena encountered in a number of chapters of this thesis refer to the shadow components of the psychoanalytic theorists themselves. If, for example, Freud, Jung, and the members of their respoective circles, had difficulties with their own fathers, then it is very like that their own father 'complexes' would have influenced the 'shadow' qualities of the personality: 'infleunced' in the sense of enlarging and creating greater fear.
Most important in analytical psychology, the shadow needs to be known, and made as conscious as possible,in order to be integrated into conscisousness. The more the shadow is known, the less it is likely to interfere wiht every-day functioning, and the richer the personality becomes. Richness occurs when the personality is allowed its own diversity, and doesn't have to silence a part of itself and force it into unconsciousness where it comes a 'shadow'.
What many of the psychoanalytic theorists have failed to recognise, because of their own personal 'shadow' (their own fathers' shadows) are the shadows cast by the ideology which has developed through the over-concentration on women-centred child rearing. Children who are cared for by women alone, usually the biological mothers, retain a fear of the power that women had over them when they were very young. Although it is not real power the mothers have, it feels like power to tiny children who live still in the realm of the unconscious. So the assumed feeling of power which becomes attached to the mother then goes into the child's unconscious and remains unconscious until the child or adult has recognised for itself what has taken place.
The consequences of the shadow of the absence of 'father theory' affect every aspect of private and public life. The very fact of private (mother) and public (father) worlds is an indication of the shadow of the father. It is the task of this paper to make clear exactly how the absence of father theory affects the psychological work of analysts, and strengthens the patriarchal hand to maintain the status quo.
© Heather Formaini 2001. All rights reserved.
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Heather Formiani is a member of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Jungian Analysts and works in private practice in Sydney. Formerly an award-winning broadcaster with the BBC and ABC, she is author of the best-selling book, Men: The Darker Continent and contributor to Sex and God. Heather Formaini is presently researching and writing on 'The Father´s Body: The Problematic of Masculinity´.'
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