What do we mean by “the father” today – clinically, culturally, and psychically? In many contemporary contexts, paternal authority is no longer taken for granted, and masculinity no longer reads as a self-evident inheritance. Yet in analytic work the father does not simply disappear. He returns sometimes as ideal, sometimes as threat, sometimes as absence; organizing questions of recognition, prohibition, rivalry, tenderness, and shame. Freud’s early attention to the “father complex” (before the later consolidation of the Oedipal triangle) already suggests that “father” is not only a person but a dense psychic position: a set of demands, identifications, fantasies, and constraints that can be transmitted, contested, and rewritten across generations.

Later theoretical and social shifts have complicated where, and how, the paternal is located: e.g: in families, institutions, and within the analyst’s own mind.
In this panel, Donald Moss, MD and Louis Rothschild, PhD; both of whom have written incisively on the role of the father, explore how masculinity is passed on as a demand that can organize anyone’s psychic life: what is encouraged, forbidden, admired, or ridiculed in relation to dependence, vulnerability, aggression, and tenderness. They will consider father – son life as it emerges in transference and countertransference, and how analysts are inevitably implicated as witnesses, inheritors, and sometimes as parental figures within the analytic scene.

Learning objectives:

At the end of this presentation participants will be able:

1. To trace the development of the father image from Freud’s early theorizing to modern, c0ntemporary versions of the internal(ized) father.
2. To articulate defensive and non-defensive aspects of masculinity.
3. To appreciate the role of the father in the transmission of versions of masculinity.

Presenters

Louis Rothschild, PhD

Louis Rothschild, PhD is a clinical psychologist in Baltimore County, Maryland. Specializing in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, he also provides supervision and occasionally reviews manuscripts. His publications have ranged from quantitative to qualitative, social-cognitive to psychoanalysis, and clinical to philosophical. Presently, he is working on a volume on fatherhood to be published in the Routledge Introductions to Contemporary Psychoanalysis book series. Additionally, a volume co-edited with Michael O’Loughlin and Salman Akhtar entitled Between Amnesia and Recollection: Environmental, Creative, and Clinical Pathways to Memory is forthcoming with Karnac. Regarding recent publications, in 2024, he completed the book Rapprochement between fathers and sons: Breakdowns, Reunions, Potentialities in addition to penning an epilogue for Salman Akhtar’s Truth: Developmental, Cultural, and Clinical Realms. He co-edited and contributed a chapter to the 2023 Gradiva nominated Precarities of 21st-Century Childhoods: Critical Explorations of Time(s), Place(s), and Identities. Moreover, he penned a chapter for Salaman Akhtar’s and Lisa Crilley’s The joy of torment: Understanding and managing sadomasochism.

Donald Moss, MD

Donald Moss, MD is the author of five books and 60+ articles written over the past 40 years. He is the recipient of the Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Prize from the IPA for his work against prejudice and the winner of the Gradiva Prize for his book Psychoanalysis in a Plague Year. He is on the editorial boards of JAPA and the IJPA and the faculty of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.