ABSTRACT
Using a case history of the infantile psychic trauma as his starting point, the author analyses the significance of the father in the constitution of the human mind. Representing genital reality beyond the early fusion with the mother, the father as an absent ‘other’ signifies a threat to the child. However, the traumatic locus in the primal scene is not the perception of the parents’ sexual relationship, but the child’s premature confrontation with the instinctual drive in itself. What becomes perceived in this encounter forms a lifelong challenge for an individual regarding psychic representation of elementary drive phenomena on a preconscious level of psychic functioning.
The recognition of the primal father in a human shape signifies for the child primary identification. It outlines a frame of reference for the psychic representation of elementary drive phenomena and contributes to the future ego-ideal. In representing the same metaphorical configuration, the psychoanalytic setting also creates a stage for dealing with the threats of the primal scene at the metaphorical level making the solution to the drive conflict possible in the transference
