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Working With Fathers in Psychoanalytic Parent-Infant Psychotherapy edited

by Tessa Baradon, Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2019, 191 pp. :
Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Americ...

Article in The American Journal of Psychoanalysis · November 2020

DOI: 10.1057/s11231-020-09268-6

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 The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2020, 80, (485–488)
Ó 2020 Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis 0002-9548/20
www.palgrave.com/journals

Book Review

Working With Fathers in Psychoanalytic Parent-Infant

Psychotherapy edited by Tessa Baradon, Routledge, Abingdon
and New York, 2019, 191 pp.

Psychoanalysis and Contemporary American Men: Gender Identity in a

Time of Uncertainty by Steven Seidman and Alan Frank, Routledge,
Abingdon and New York, 2019, 260 pp.

Following the turn toward object relations and subsequently relational psycho-
analysis, familial life continues to be re-examined in a shifting cultural landscape
where psychoanalytic thinking about mothers, fathers, and children has become
increasingly textured if not complicated. While a pre-oedipal lens has greatly
contributed to nuanced understandings of mother and child interaction, scholarship
on fathers and masculinity, while significant to a point of asserting that fathering is
not tethered to biology (cf., Rothschild, 2019a), continues to be appraised as a site in
need of further study. Simply, scholarship on matters domestic remains mother-
centric. Two new volumes labor to shed light on the dark continent that is man albeit
from divergent vantage points. In some regard, each is concerned with the
implication and limits of Target’s and Fonagy’s (2002) idea that the father is simply
another attachment figure. Tessa Baradon’s edited volume focuses on the world of
psychotherapy with fathers and infants, while the co-written work of Steven Seidman
and Alan Frank centers on masculine identity per se. Taken together, critical aspects
of a masculine functional territory become apparent in a fashion that illuminates
questions and particularities regarding our shared human conditions.
As the initiator of the Parent Infant Project at the Anna Freud Centre, Tessa
Baradon has edited a book on psychoanalytic parent-infant psychotherapy in which
most of the contributions including Baradon’s own are represented by English
clinicians working at the Anna Freud Center or the Tavistock Clinic. In addition are
contributions from Germany, Sweden, France, and Israel. Across these well curated
papers exists the idea that a real living third sets limits for the primary parent-infant
dyad, and that such a person may be considered to be engaged in the act of
fathering. The chapters address working with fathers present and absent in treatment,
transference and countertransference, and the effect of a therapist’s gender on
treatment. Here, the capacity for reciprocity between three people (i.e., triangulation
or triadic relations) is considered a manner of existing that grants autonomy to an
infant. These clinical papers excel in showing that creating such a space is often a
challenge to parents. A mother or primary parent may feel excluded in allowing a
486 BOOK REVIEW

third into the dyad, or a father may too easily withdraw. Throughout the volume,
parent-infant therapy is considered an opening of triadic relational processes that
focuses on the internal world of the infant and parental impact on that world. The
manner in which cultural changes in gender identity, sexuality, and family structure
alter the particularities of attachment figures in triadic relations raises developmental
questions regarding identity.
Troubling the identity waters, New York City psychoanalysts Steven Seidman and
Alan Frank argue against a narrow and normative conceptualization of masculinity
while asserting that men are as complex as women. Central to this assertion of
complexity is variation within gendered and sexual social categories. Consistent
with advances in social psychology that demonstrate how multiple social variables
intersect in social groups, Seidman and Frank break with normative sexist binaries
through fine grained focus on individual qualities of gendered identity that may be
autonomously fashioned. The authors note that although normative conceptions of
Victorian Culture remain, that legitimate alternatives to normatively exist within a
contemporary culture that affords less emphasis on gender as an organizing principle
(the authors alternate between stating that their subject matter is the United States
and Euro-American culture). Changes in legal status in regard to gender (women’s
rights) and sexuality (homosexuality as consistent with citizenship) are foundational
for this multiple social variable frame. Central to Seidman’s and Frank’s argument is
the idea that the developmental thesis that triadic relations require a child to dis-
identify with the primary parent is patently false. Questions regarding the location of
another attachment object, what, how, and when it is found in a child’s mind are
central to appraising the validity of the idea that a child need not dis-identify from a
primary parent.
Interpreting the meaning of the words ‘‘just another’’ in regard to father as an
object of attachment is by no means simple. Another attachment may be as rich and
varied as the difference that the otherness of a psychoanalytic treatment aims to
provide. One way out of this problem of difference is a shift in emphasis from
structure (gender of and location of parent) to process. Leaning into process,
Seidman and Frank write that regardless of sexuality, biology, and gender identity,
any parent presents variable identities such as a ‘‘father-in-the-mother’’ (p. 30, quotes
in original). This observation coupled with the idea that two parents are increasingly
actively parenting underpins the challenge to the necessity of disidentification.
Seidman’s and Frank’s arguments align with Kai von Klitzing’s (ch. 2 in Baradon)
consideration of triadic pre-oedipal dynamics, and with Louise Emanuel’s (ch. 10 in
Baradon) writing that maternal and paternal functions may be found in parents of
either gender.
In contrast, Björn Salomonsson (ch. 12 in Baradon) focuses on Freud’s infant who
needs a father’s protection from an oceanic feeling. Translating the oceanic feeling
becomes as important as translation of ‘‘just another,’’ as the oceanic feeling may be
read through lenses of sexism or narcissism. A sexist reading that it takes a father to
rescue a child from engulfment by a mother appears consistently antiquated in each
book. To that end, humility containing omnipotence, or a willingness to fail
gracefully (Dickon Bevington’s ch. 1 in Baradon) allows a triadic process that aids
 BOOK REVIEW 487

autonomy. Marie-Christine Laznik (ch. 11 in Baradon) argues that if the mother or

primary parent makes the law in an omnipotent fashion thereby failing to relinquish
power in manner that shares power and intersubjectivity with a third, then the child
will have behavioral problems interacting with the external world. At issue here is an
idea that the disidentification thesis exists as a cry against narcissistic engulfment,
and that when such a disturbance is not present, that breaking with a primary
identification may simply not exist as a problem. For Seidman and Frank it is gender
flexibility that offers a limit to narcissism as they hypothesize that in post-traditional
(i.e. consciously gender flexible) families that maternal (i.e., primary parent)
narcissism would be less likely to hinder triadic movement. Herein is an old idea
that rigidity is part and parcel of neurosis (Shapiro, 1981). Each of these books is
recommended for their laboring in the intersection of gender, narcissism, and
rigidity.
That rigidly held sexist binaries limit adult development is not news (Rothschild,
2019b). Therefore, wondering to what extent each contribution is different by degree
or kind from earlier work (e.g., Benjamin, 1988) on identity and development matters.
My own reading is that each work adds to complexity rather than cancelling out
previous conceptualizations. Further, while Baradon should well agree, Seidman and
Frank might not. Each book finds changes in the west, as fathers on average are
increasingly involved in child care thus creating a breakdown in the belief that rigid
gender roles are essential. Seidman and Frank provide a refreshing preference for
transitional experience over tidy resolution. However, their openness may go too far in
the idea that the identified trans man up-ends traditional binaries in a manner that
thwarts dyadic narcissism. Such an argument of gendered life as a work of art ventures
toward a limitless disorientation considered a functional marker of fatherlessness (cf.,
Strenger, 2005). Creativity without limit aligns with an aspect of pragmatism affirmed
in the United States (Fairfield, 2002) where faith in modernity has persisted through a
disavowal of loss and history (Summers, 2010). The resulting fixation on transience
ironically perpetuates a void or an oceanic feeling that may foster reactive
disidentification. Common to each book is an understanding that such complexity
requires additional thought both in and out of our respective consulting rooms.

Louis Rothschild, PhD

18 Oakridge Ct, Lutherville, MD 21093, USA
e-mail: louisrothschildphd@gmail.com

REFERENCES

Benjamin, J. (1988). The bonds of love: Psychoanalysis, feminism, and the problem
of domination. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.
488 BOOK REVIEW

Fairfield, S. (2002). Analyzing multiplicity: A postmodern perspective on some

current psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity. In: S. Fairfield, L. Layton, and C.
Stack (Eds.), Bringing the plague: Toward a postmodern psychoanalysis. pp. 69-
102. New York, NY: Other Press.
Rothschild, L. (2019a) Introduction to reconstructing fatherhood. Psychoanalytic
Perspectives, 16:3, 312-315.
Rothschild, L. (2019b). Adult sexuality in clinical discourse. In: S. Akhtar & R. Gulati
(Eds.): Eroticism: Developmental, cultural, and clinical realms. pp. 137-139.
New York: Routledge.
Shapiro, D. (1981). Autonomy and rigid character. New York: Basic Books.
Strenger, C. (2005). The Designed Self: Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Identities.
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Summers, F. (2010). Violence in American foreign policy: A psychoanalytic
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Encounters of Psychoanalysis, Warmaking, and Resistance. pp. 153-174. NY:
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Target, M. & Fonagy, P. (2002). Fathers in modern psychoanalysis and in society:
The role of the father and child development. In J. Trowell & A. Etchegoyen
(Eds.), The importance of fathers: A psychoanalytic re-evaluation. pp. 45-66.
New York: Routledge.

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