ABSTRACT
Unmourned childhood loss of a parent can be re-evoked when the bereaved person becomes a parent him/herself. The psychoanalytic theory of après coup can be helpful in understanding a father’s experience of becoming a parent in such circumstances, as thoughts and fantasies hold both historical and contemporary relevance, as a child then and as a father and husband now. In the clinical case brought, a traumatic birth aroused a new father’s fears that he would lose his wife and baby. These fears linked up with the unacknowledged emotions and fantasies of Oedipal triumph and punishment at the time of his childhood losses of first his father and then his mother. The father’s habitual defences against pain and guilt impacted his wife and baby, and the therapeutic work in parent-infant psychotherapy to address this is described.
