ABSTRACT
One morning an analysand, a married mother, arrived in my office tired and mentioned that the family had been annoyed to be awakened before 6:00 a.m. by the noise of the garbage being collected. The only family member not annoyed was her toddler daughter, almost three, who emerged from bed in a sunny mood, exclaiming: "Daddy, this morning you were outside singing!" This little girl, secure with both parents, has an inner representation of a singing Daddy that turns garbage trucks into music. This is not the case for most children of divorce. This chapter discusses the impact of divorce on children's external and inner encounters with the father who is no longer at home. I focus on the relation to the absent father because in the majority of cases the mother is the home parent. However, although disruptions in maternal and paternal functions have different developmental impacts, many similar issues are at stake when mother is absent. I will consider how the child's experience of the father is also affected by the particular ways the child's mother, the rest of the family, and the broader social network view the father (see chapters 8 and 9). Internal images of father, conscious and unconscious, are transformed in his absence in ways that can foster or impede the child's attempts to cope with the loss and the changes that accompany it.
