The oedipal experience: effects on development of an absent father

This paper discusses the effects on both child and adult when there has been a loss of the father through separation or divorce in the first five years of life. It is written with regard to the psychoanalytic treatment of individuals who have experienced such a loss of the father. The first part of the paper deals with the developmental effects on the child from the viewpoints of the pattern of oedipal development, superego structuralization, identification and sexual identification, and the analytic treatment process. The second part gives brief accounts of the analyses of two adults. It is proposed that while analysis of such patients may achieve a certain level of success, there may in some cases remain a relatively intractable degree of narcissistic interference and an impairment in their capacity to make an internal separation from the remaining primary object, the mother.