ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that those working clinically with the under fives have all too often privileged the role of the mother’s “ghosts” at the expense of those the father brings to the nursery. It shows that fathers are important primarily as part of a parental couple. The primacy of the parental couple as a factor in emotional development has been adumbrated particularly by contemporary British objects relations theorists. They hold that a central feature of psychic development, and a measure of mental health, is the way in which the child manages to negotiate his relationship to the parental couple. The role of the parental couple has important implications for clinicians. The infant will be particularly affected by the nature of the parental couple that his single parent has in mind. It is parental couple that forms the core of the personality and is particularly influential in determining the kind of parent that the child will become in his turn.
