Finding one's father: the mother's contribution to early father representations

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.