ABSTRACT
What is the role of the father in child development? Is there anything specific to fathers? This chapter summarises psychoanalytic theories and data from infant developmental research and proposes that there are several levels through which fathers may execute an essential influence on children’s development. First, there is the experience of a ‘real’ father, which depends on whether or not there is a father present in the child’s daily life. Second, there is the father as a ‘third person’, part of the parent-child triad, either in reality or as an idea of thirdness. This opens the infant’s experience from an exclusively dyadic towards triadic and ultimately multi-person relationships. Third, there is the ‘internal father’. The nature of this internal father can depend on whether or how the child perceives the father directly, but also on how the father is perceived through the eyes of the mother. The question of gender of the third, non-mother person is raised and the authors concluded that sexuality and gender are an inherent part of ‘father’.
