ABSTRACT
Parents can be unavailable for many reasons: a mother or a father may be depressed or stressed, alcoholic, abusive, or just absent. When the parents have a bond, however stressed, that contains admiration or love, the parents’ sexual partnership can be envied and desired. When a father is abandoning or attacking and is denigrated, then it has an impact on the child’s love relationships and sexual desires. The little boy can claim that his little penis is all that his mother needs and wants–but if he can notice, woundingly, what his father offers her, then he has a sense of parents who are of value to each other, and to him. For some, slowly, grudgingly, a brother or sister can come to be seen as having their uses–as playmate, as fall-guy, as an ally in standing up to parents. S. Freud thought that we resolve the Oedipal struggle by internalising a version of our parents.
