Response piece to an article in issue 48.3 of this Journal by Judith Edwards: ‘The elusive pursuit of good enough fatherhood, and the single parent family as a modern phenomenon’

Abstract

Judith Edwards’ article in the December issue of this journal surely comes as a breath of fresh air for all psychoanalytic practitioners working with children and families, and wondering how to accommodate thinking about the father. It is a rare contribution to the sparse psychoanalytic literature on the role of the father, and she takes a refreshingly open position, using existing ideas and presenting new ones. She opens by saying – ‘No answers are to be found here, merely more questions, and each reader will hopefully find their own questions and answers. New doors may be opened’ (Edwards, 2022, p. 362). In conclusion she says – ‘With Bion in mind, the conclusion is to come to your own specific conclusions, to work with specific cases’ (Edwards, 2022, p. 375). This brief reply, although making a point, seeks to keep the questions rolling. It is derived from my own work with children and families for whom the role of the father was unoccupied. That is to say, the biological male present at conception was either emotionally or physically absent, and the role of father remained vacant because no parent, of either gender or sex, single or couple, was able to fulfil it. This was partly because the parents I saw struggled to offer paternal function, the development of which was something I could help them with. However, I will argue here that there are some important aspects of the role of the father that only the biological father can fulfil. When this absence in role was also a feature in the lives of some of the adopted and fostered children I have seen, the impact of this non-occupancy was more complex. Whilst Judith deliberately does not present her ideas as ones to be grappled with academically, nevertheless, my clinical experience has led me to organise my reply around two ideas that appear to contradict one another. The first involves her response to a line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest in which the spirit Ariel tells Prince Ferdinand of the drowning of his father in near five fathoms of water. Ariel concludes that ‘Nothing of him that doth fade’. From this, Judith derives ‘how the memory of our own fathers lies deep within our minds, and our very bones, affecting the way we parent’ (Edwards, 2022, p. 363). The second idea involves her comment that ‘fathers, whether present or absent, and of either sex, are indeed important in the life of every child, in order to be the third point of the oedipal triangle’ (Edwards, 2022, p. 375). Whether Ariel, Prince Ferdinand, or ourselves, in my opinion Judith’s quote is