ABSTRACT
ON FATHERING DAUGHTERS At the height of the Cleveland affair (a child sex abuse scandal in Britain), my next-door neighbor confessed to me that he was frightened to cuddle his two-year-old daughter in public. The moral panic over child sexual abuse was reinforcing difficulties which many fathers have over physical aspects of their relationships with their daughters. Years later, when some daughters enter analysis, past inhibitions about bodily contact and the apparent failure to establish a warm, shared physical contact with the father turn out to have been very wounding. In a sense, these wounds are at the opposite extreme from the wounds caused by actual incest, but they generate their own brand of profound psychic pain. The understandable stress on the avoidance and detection of incest masks this other, more subtle problem.
