title: Finding one's father: the mother's contribution to early father representations.
abstract: The attachment of psychic meaning to relationships emerges in pre-oedipal life through the epigenesis of the representational world. The mother-child dyad is traditionally understood as the prototype of all subsequent one-to-one relationships, including to the father. However, developmental research data suggest that a child, even in optimal situations, has relatively little actual contact with the father in the first year of life. It is therefore suggested that father-representations derive from sources outside of the father-child dyad. The way a mother brings her youngster into contact with the father can catalyze or discolor the child's affective attachment to him. Mother can facilitate or retard the "other-directedness" of an infant in her husband's presence. During separation-individuation, the mother may affect father representations through her capacity to transitively vitalize or disenfranchise the father in his absence. Correlations from both clinical psychoanalytic work and infant-toddler observation are offered in support of these hypotheses.
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005219:Father-Child Relations; D005260:Female; D005783:Gender Identity; D006801:Humans; D007207:Individuation; D007223:Infant; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D008297:Male; D008425:Maternal Behavior; D009035:Mothers / Q000523:psychology*; D009769:Object Attachment; D011606:Psychosexual Development