ABSTRACT
The papers in this section highlight the importance of the father's role in the girl's sense of self and in her feminine identity. It may be disturbing that the papers also highlight the sizable contribution of the father's unconscious and its influence on the directions the daughter's life takes, both positively and negatively. For example, Pacella's patient Madelyn was for her father a projection of his hated sister (Ross, this volume). Balsam's cases illustrate the intense pact between father and daughter that the daughter not be anything like the disturbed and denigrated mother. And then there is the power of the daughter's unconscious when she overtly becomes the father's selfobject but covertly loves the mother. This is the reverse of the scenario proposed by McDougall (1980) in her male perverse patients, who have a pact with mother to denigrate father but who secretly love the father. There are serious implications for both of these deviations in the oedipal scenario, since the child, whether boy or girl, believes he or she is an oedipal victor; and the father or mother, whoever is denigrated, is forced to witness the romantic love between the child and the more powerful parent.
