Fathers, Sons, and Masculinity

Written By: Dr. Yedidya Levy

“Initiation says that before a boy can become a man, some infantile being in him must die” (Bly, 2015, p. 85).

As boys develop, they often become fascinated by their fathers. Freud captures this in his presentation of the Oedipus complex (Freud, 1905). For Freud, a boy’s fascination with men manifests as competition with his father to win the love of his mother. As such, the relationship to the father is one of ambivalence and complexity. For Freud, the father is a model of masculinity, for which he is both loathed and adored. He is the boy’s adversary in the fight for his mother, but he also holds the key to a representation of adequate masculinity. After all, he is the man chosen by the boy’s mother and, therefore, possesses a masculinity that is worthy of such an important and desirable love.

Bettelheim (1962), in his work Symbolic Wounds: Puberty Rites and the Envious Male, offers a variation of this in his suggestion that the father-son relationship consists of a survival partnership, which involves the transmission of masculinity but without the sexual jealousy described by Freud.

Psychologist Ruth Stein asks, “What is a father?” (Stein, 2006). She notes the father’s contribution to the creation of the child as being a “tiny drop” in a “fleeting moment.” How does this compare to the magnitude and role of the mother in the formation of the child? The father’s contribution is mysterious and, in some ways, invisible. Stein (2002) suggests that the relationship to the father is cast in the image of his role in conception. The father becomes connected to the child through the act of procreation but is also markedly separate from the child thereafter. The nature of his ongoing connection to the child is elusive, and yet this elusiveness is paralleled by a sense of profound longing from the child for contact.

References

Bettelheim, B. (1962). Symbolic wounds: Puberty rites and the envious male. Free Press.

Bly, R. (2015). Iron John: A book about men. Vintage Books. (Original work published 1990)

Freud, S. (1905). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. In The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 7). Hogarth Press.

Stein, R. (2002). The father and his relation to the child: Some psychoanalytic considerations. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 57, 143–160.

Stein, R. (2006). The question of the father: A psychoanalytic inquiry. Karnac Books.