Introduction

This chapter explores how fathers have been constructed within psychoanalytic thought. In particular, the feminists who engage with psychoanalysis continue to develop thinking on fathers in interesting and contested ways.

As outlined in Chapter One, this chapter and the following two need to be viewed as interrelated. While this chapter tells about how fathers have been constructed psychoanalytically, and Chapters Five and Six concentrate on psychological and sociological perspectives, feminist and pro-feminist theorists are involved in all. Moreover, there is increasing evidence of a psychosocial approach being developed by a range of researchers from differing disciplinary backgrounds. Poststructuralist approaches are a critique of, and an attempt to move beyond, the individual–social divide of disciplines such as sociology and psychology. Insofar as they use psychoanalytic approaches, and not all versions do, they will be dealt with here.

The ‘daddy’ of them all

As Frosh (1997: 37) notes, the above quotation supports a reading of psychoanalysis as a discipline of rationalism, of clear-headedness and, in the rationalist world view, there is little doubt that fathering is preferred to mothering: ‘Mothering is so messy, after all, so full of bodily functions … Children stop you thinking; everyone knows that they turn your brain to porridge’ (Frosh, 1997: 37, emphasis in original).

But Freud is also the ‘king of irrationality’. Through his work on the unconscious, he dethroned the I as master in its own house. Rather he established us as people who are seldom in charge of our thoughts, actions and dreams. Moreover, as Connell (1995), a contemporary theorist on masculinity, argues, he ‘let the cat out of the bag. He disrupted the apparently natural object “masculinity”, and made an enquiry into its natural composition both possible, and in a political sense, necessary’ (Connell, 1995: 8).