ABSTRACT
The social climate made Uranus more credible—the father who ate his children, the jealous castrating father. Sigmund Freud started with the little boy and his father, who was first rival, then threat, and finally an ideal to be internalized. Donald Winnicott was working in general paediatrics for decades, and so his experience of children and their parents was wide and realistic: his understanding was less affected by theories derived from the consulting-rooms, but based rather on hospital out-patient work and home-visits. In Winnicott's description of the father's part in the child's life, the idea of the child's "use of the object" can be clearly seen to recur. Many male psychoanalysts and some female ones are even now convinced that a penis is so desirable to all women that everyone of them must want one. Winnicott's concept of the father who protects the mother/baby unit did well enough in liberal circles until, say, the 1950s.
