Psychoanalytic Practice  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Editor: Michael Owen 

Managing Editor: Allengary Naicker 

Copy Editor: Sheryl Neel 

Editorial Board: 

Katherine Bain (Johannesburg) / Duncan Cartwright (Durban) / 

Derek Hook (Pittsburgh) / Gavin Ivey (Melbourne) /  

Kgamadi Kometsi (Johannesburg) / Carol Long (Johannesburg) /  

Wahbie Long (Cape Town) / Dale Moodley (Stellenbosch) /  

Adrian Perkel (Cape Town) / Jenny Perkel (Cape Town) /  

Lisa Saville-Young (Grahamstown) / Gillian Straker (Sydney) 

 

 

 

VOL 32 No 1 2024 





 

Contents 

 

 
 Editorial i 

   

 Article:  

   

Rui Aragão Oliveira Paternal function, masculinity and 

the introduction of the third: The 

mind of the analyst in clinical 

practice 

1 

   

 Response paper:  

   

Jennifer Allen Response to Rui Aragão Oliveira’s 

‘Paternal function, masculinity and 

the introduction of the third: The 

mind of the analyst in clinical 

practice’ 

25 

   

 Articles:  

   

Thomas Burkhalter Playing with ‘the father’ in 

memory and desire: Exilic 

thirdness in transitional space 

32 

   

Yvette Esprey Through the mother’s eyes: A 

crochet of thoughts on the maternal 

and paternal 

61 

   

 Book review:  

   

James van der Walt Unlocking the nature of human 

aggression: A psychoanalytic and 

neuroscientific approach by Adrian 

Perkel 

78 

  





 

Editorial 

 

 

 

Michael Owen 

University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa 

 

 

Welcome to the first issue of Psychoanalytic Practice for 2024. This 

editorial is the first that I write as editor of the journal, as I attempt to fill 

some impressive shoes. I am honoured to take over editorship of 

Psychoanalytic Practice from Katherine Bain and I hope to make both 

her and the rest of the editorial board proud. Getting this first edition to 

print has been a steep learning experience, and I hope to produce issues 

that continue the tradition of excellence within analytic publishing that 

my predecessors have established. In line with the editorial board’s 

vision for Psychoanalytic Practice, we aim to publish work that speaks 

both from within the consulting room and beyond, challenging and 

reimagining what psychoanalytic thinking and theorising can offer. 

 

With this in mind, this issue follows a recent South African 

Psychoanalytic Initiative (SAPI) conference held in Johannesburg, 

which was themed around paternal functioning. Two papers on the 

paternal function that were presented at the conference have been further 

defined and are included in this edition: the first by Portuguese 

psychoanalyst Rui Aragão Oliveira and the second from a South African 

psychotherapist, Thomas Burkhalter. Response papers follow each of 

these articles respectively, the first by Jennifer Allen responding to 

Aragão Oliveira and the second by Yvette Esprey responding to 

Burkhalter. The result of this configuration is an interesting 

psychoanalytic dance between the papers, that together cover an 

explication of the paternal function, and its relevance and importance in 

current analytic thinking. There is a wonderful playing with this towering 



  Psychoanalytic Practice 32 (1) 2024 

 

 ii 

theoretical concept, as spoken by and heard through both masculine and 

feminine voices, pondered on by these mothers, fathers, analysts and 

teachers, and imbued with loss, confusion, erudition and power. 

 

Whereas Katherine left off her final edition speaking to the lessons that 

can be learned when contemplating how our individual subjectivities 

infuse our intersubjective patterns, and questioning a need to learn from 

the past, the paternal function asks for something similar yet also quite 

different. The intersubjective and its created thirdness – an evolving 

analytic attitude linked to the creation of transitional space, as Benjamin 

(2004) so eloquently describes – links to the paternal function. It 

challenges us to not only learn from what has come before but as a 

balancing of or breaking away from enmeshments with traditional values 

that no longer serve us, thereby allowing us to safely individuate within 

the collective. The foregrounding of paternal function is about bringing 

in a new perspective that has dogged analytic thinking and also the way 

we operate in the world. This could not be more relevant in a world which 

appears to be returning to narrow, problematic ways of thinking. Paternal 

function, however, seeks to challenge binaries and limiting ways of 

thinking, it hopes to evoke and play, and the papers in this edition inhabit 

this space in sophisticated and eloquent ways. They not only define 

paternal function and its workings within the analytic setting but show, 

through writing and conference presenting, paternal function as active 

and alive, asking us to tolerate the unknown, challenging antiquated 

ways of thinking and showing the relevance of paternal functioning in 

modern psychoanalysis. 

 

The first paper by Portuguese psychoanalyst Rui Aragão Oliveira is 

entitled Paternal function, masculinity and the introduction of the third: 

The mind of the analyst in clinical practice, which introduces the concept 

of paternal function and frames the theme of the issue. Aragão Oliveira 

carefully and skillfully describes the origins of the paternal function, how 

it develops, the functions that it fulfils and its role in the dynamics of 



Note from the Editor   

 

iii 

psychic life. The paper also discusses how the paternal function 

influences object relationships, symbolic elaboration, and learning 

experiences. It further touches on the interplay between fear of the 

castrating father and the development of the superego. Through clinical 

vignettes the author reflects on the challenges posed to clinical work and 

analysts themselves regarding the complexities of the paternal function. 

It’s a complex, heady piece that is eloquently responded to by Jennifer 

Allen. Entitled Response to Paternal function, masculinity and the 

introduction of the third, Allen argues that paternal function is not a 

gendered concept but an internal psychic process which lies somewhere 

‘between limitless desire and a natural limit from which a third position 

can emerge’ (p. 26). Allen, too, uses a clinical vignette to explore the 

workings of this concept and her understanding of paternal function. 

 

The third paper in this issue by Thomas Burkhalter, Playing with ‘the 

father’ in memory and desire: Exilic thirdness in transitional space, is a 

thought-provoking and challenging piece which deepens the exploration 

of paternal function. Burkhalter’s elegant article is both a response to 

Aragão Oliveira’s paper and a powerful demonstration of how writing 

his paper served as a paternal function working-through process. This 

process allowed him not only to contemplate illness but also the passing 

of his son. It is a profoundly moving tribute and a courageous piece of 

work. As Burkhalter explores his own mourning process, he shows the 

link between paternal function and transitional space, and reiterates a 

space that is not only for mourning but for playing too and, of course, 

working through. Burkhalter notes that this ‘playing with tension’ is 

familiar territory for psychoanalysis, which ‘is always struggling with 

these tensions, between the polymorphous and Oedipus, the ego and the 

id, conflicted and haunted’ (T. Burkhalter, personal communication, 

June, 21, 2024). The final paper is Yvette Esprey’s response to 

Burkhalter titled Through the mother’s eyes: A crochet of thoughts on 

the maternal and paternal, and ‘crochet’ feels like the right word to use 



  Psychoanalytic Practice 32 (1) 2024 

 

 iv 

for a piece that weaves complex psychoanalytic concepts into a 

digestible, personal and affecting piece of writing. 

 

The edition closes with a thoughtful review by James van der Walt on 

Adrian Perkel’s recently published book entitled Unlocking the nature of 

human aggression: A psychoanalytic and neuroscientific approach. Van 

der Walt elaborates on the central tenet in Perkel’s work: the nature of 

aggression and how aggression is linked to our most instinctual drives. 

He shows how Perkel develops his thesis by using both psychoanalytic 

theory and neuroscientific evidence, and weaving complex theories into 

a readable and decidedly modern analytic text. 

 

 

References 

 

Benjamin, J. (2004). Beyond doer and done to: An intersubjective view 

of thirdness. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73(1), 5–46. 

https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2167-4086.2004.tb00151.x 

 

https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1002/j.2167-4086.2004.tb00151.x


 

Article 

 

 

 

Paternal function, masculinity and the introduction of 

the third: The mind of the analyst in clinical practice 

 

 

 

Rui Aragão Oliveira  

Lisbon, Portugal 

 

 

Abstract 

 

This article addresses essential aspects for defining the paternal function 

in metapsychological terms. The enormous sociocultural changes that 

took place in the 20th century, relating to the decline of patriarchal 

societies, and the emergence of a new and fascinating vision of the 

feminine in the 21st century, have allowed us to gain a new perspective 

on the psychoanalytic ‘paternal function’ and to take a different look at 

the complexity of the internalisations associated with it. This article 

discusses the paternal function as a singular object of representation in 

the organisation of the mental world, associated with power, protection 

and admiration, but also with castration anguish, authority, dread and 

obstruction. The main theoretical influences that have made it possible 

to relate the maternal body to the possibilities of new identification 

processes are discussed. More recently, the paternal function has been 

associated with the development of symbolic capacity. This has major 

implications for psychoanalytic identity and the connection to authority, 

masculinity and the notion of the third. In a final section, using clinical 



  Psychoanalytic Practice 32 (1) 2024 

 

 2 

vignettes, the author offers a brief reflection on the challenges posed to 

the specificities of clinical work, as well as to analysts themselves. 

 

 

Introduction 

 

Many concepts in psychoanalytic vocabulary use expressions derived 

either from everyday life or adapted from other areas of knowledge, 

especially the social sciences and humanities. The ‘paternal function’ is 

a good example of this. The implication is that the concept runs the risk 

of being confused with the meanings given to it by sociology, educational 

psychology or even by developmental psychology. Due to its proximity 

to these sciences, its designation in psychoanalysis allows for doubts or 

misunderstandings, including among analysts. I remember, for example, 

Leticia Fiorini (2014) – who has made significant contributions to this 

particular topic – suggested that this term should no longer be used in 

psychoanalysis to avoid many misunderstandings and confusion with 

parental functions or issues associated predominantly with external 

reality or role behaviours. In psychoanalysis, regardless of the form of 

paternal function present in reality, or even in its absence, the father 

interests us as an object of the internal world. The origins of the paternal 

function is the focus of interest in this article, which includes how this 

structure develops, the functions it fulfils, and its role in the dynamics of 

mental life. Exploring the paternal function and holding the ‘third’ in 

psychoanalytic practice is one of the main clinical topics that currently 

needs to be further developed. 

 

 

The paternal function as intrapsychic construct 

 

From an epistemological point of view the paternal function is perhaps 

the most structured and essential. It has been attributed to different 

elements and historical-evolutionary perspectives have been advanced 



Paternal function, masculinity and the introduction of the third   

 

3 

by various authors (Aragão Oliveira, 2020). The central claim is that it 

indeed fulfils a structuring role in the mental world, which deserves more 

attention. 

 

The paternal function does not exist as something in and of itself, but 

rather is intertwined with, a probably unending, didactic process, 

associated with creativity, learning and alterity or ‘Otherness’. It 

introduces a different view of both the external, and also our own internal 

world. It refers to a process that is problematic, but also dynamic, 

flexible, and variable. It exposes the individual to different qualities of 

anxiety and emotions, which influences their internal structure of object 

relationships, as well as the capacity for symbolic elaboration, creativity, 

and the possibility of learning from experience – as Bion purported. 

Mindful of the importance of the paternal function, our Italian 

psychoanalytic colleague Giovanni Foresti (2008) recommended that we 

should keep the paternal function clearly specified, because its meaning 

changes, disappears and/or reappears in various guises over time. Wise 

and sensible advice. 

 

The evolution of this construct constitutes an object of singular 

representation in the organisation of the mental world comprising 

elements of power, protection and admiration on the one hand, and on 

the other equally associated with castration anxiety, authority, dread and 

obstruction. More recently, however, it has been associated with the 

development of symbolic capability, and so carries implications of 

utmost importance for the psychoanalytic identity (Aragão Oliveira, 

2020). 

 

 

From loss to creativity 

 

In Freud’s (1913) original work, the father is closely associated with the 

idea of loss (of the mother and/or of omnipotence), submission, and also, 



  Psychoanalytic Practice 32 (1) 2024 

 

 4 

gradually, representing the impossibility of access to the object – the 

experience of a disturbance in the realisation of a desire. This disturbance 

or castration then serves as a trigger for the subject to creatively do 

something with the feeling of ‘facing impossibility’ or limits. Something 

decisive which provokes structuring of an internal law, or the ego ideal 

and for the organisation of more advanced mental mechanisms, in 

particular the sublimation capacity. 

 

In relation to the experience of fear of the castrating and possibly 

threatening father, Freud, at first, emphasised identifying with the phallic 

and idealised father as a possible way out of the intense Oedipal 

experience, organising the super ego structure and the ego ideal. I 

suggest, however, that Freud’s papers that were written after 1923 seem 

to offer another interpretation. While he did not elaborate directly 

regarding the structural model of the mind, he came close to elaborating 

concerning roles of the paternal function that could have various 

outcomes for the mental world: constructive and progressive, or 

absolutely crushing and catastrophic. This article, which primarily has a 

clinical focus, seeks to demonstrate how the two roles associated with 

the paternal function, those of a regressive nature and those that favour 

growth, can be interrelated in a demanding and elaborate transformation. 

Leveraging this idea of two roles we can potentially come closer to a 

contemporary view of the paternal function which can also incorporate 

cultural constructions and the development of curiosity. 

 

In Civilisation and its discontents, Freud (1930) pointed out that the 

formation and development of the superego mitigates the forces of our 

primitive instincts which manifest in sexuality and aggression. Since the 

subject cannot simply satisfy these primitive instincts freely, they learn 

to transform, or access other possibilities and pleasures at their disposal. 

In this way, one part of the self (the superego) comes to love and admire 

the other part (the ego) for being able to renounce drives or, at least, for 

being able to circumvent and/or modify them. However, this can be seen 



Paternal function, masculinity and the introduction of the third   

 

5 

as a partial artifice because the conflictual tension has only given way to 

a temporary compromise. The part that we identify as the id, considers 

itself a ‘victim’, and waits for an opportunity to act out and experience 

the pleasure drive. 

 

So, the idea of how we can internally lead with our drives, what we 

should do or feel able to do with frustration are absolutely related to the 

ability to organise such an internal structure, resulting from the 

identification with the enigmatic figure – the father. The father facilitates 

the paternal function and what dynamics it is, or is not, able to mobilise 

in the internal psyche. In fact, we can think of it in terms of different 

modalities of facing impossibility, that actualise the outcome of the 

problem of what we can or cannot do with our drives and unsatisfaction. 

 

The effort to ‘get away from something’ does not just concern an impulse 

but can be something more problematic due to its irreconcilability with 

other demands and intentions. The aim is then to banish from 

consciousness the impulse that seeks some kind of pleasure or desire, or 

to distance oneself from pain and displeasure. In other words, the impulse 

is subject to repression if it comes up against the opposition of another 

strong impulse, is ego-dystonic, is framed within the ego ideal, or is 

subject to superego demands. All these dynamics associated with 

repression cause anxiety. They are not the result of anxiety, as is 

sometimes mistaken. 

 

In addition to repression, Freud also described one of the most elaborate 

forms of the psychic apparatus – which we have labelled the most mature 

– as sublimation. Sublimation implies an internal transformation caused 

by the pressure of the drive, in which the achievement of the experience 

of pleasure, in its most evolved forms, determines a change in the 

dynamic-economic balance of the psychic apparatus (Aragão Oliveira, 

2023). 

 



  Psychoanalytic Practice 32 (1) 2024 

 

 6 

The repression associated with the third gaze, which assumes an 

apparently passive position, enables the reduction of libidinal intensity 

from the impulse. The portion of libido that escapes repression, through 

sublimation, becomes curiosity which is a powerful tool for investigating 

the world around, and also within us. In this way ‘sexual’ desire is 

transformed into a thirst for knowledge, which is nevertheless another 

way for the subject to sublimate and thus ‘secretly’ take possession of 

the object, in another form of pleasure. Consequently ‘knowing’ can be 

another way of ‘having’ the object with us. 

 

In his well-known book The work of the negative, André Green (1999) 

paid particular attention to the vicissitudes of sublimation. He pointed 

out how Freud tended to oscillate between the progressive and the 

regressive aspects of sublimation. The progressive aspect was considered 

as a development that follows from the drive whereas the regressive was 

conceived as eventual deviations from the drive, and which therefore 

implies sacrifice and/or renunciation of the pleasure associated with the 

drive. It seems then, that sublimation is organised into multiple 

derivatives of the ‘thirst for knowledge’ that often triggers diverse 

pleasures in a private and complex relationship. Sometimes these 

pleasures may be ego-dystonic such as in the form of voyeuristic-

exhibitionism or sadomasochism. 

 

While Freud essentially postulated the divergence and renunciation of 

libidinal pleasure which led to progressive desexualisation, Melanie 

Klein focused on the child's developmental capacity to identify with 

objects and make new investments. In the latter case, a narcissistic libido 

is transformed into an object libido which lends itself to sublimation. As 

a new object, even if initially only in the mother's mind, the father 

emerges as the fundamental figure available for the child to identify with. 

The effect of sublimation is to extend the action to the thought process 

and its multiple forms of expression. If, at first, the subject seems to 

renounce the satisfaction of the libido, he has the expectation of 



Paternal function, masculinity and the introduction of the third   

 

7 

satisfying himself through knowledge and access to other pleasures of a 

subjective nature, with different characteristics. Therefore, beyond 

simple renunciation, we can frame sublimation as a capacity for 

development, with the aim of also fostering psychic growth. 

 

 

The maternal body and the opportunity for new identifications 

 

Now, moving on to a second way of looking at and understanding the 

paternal function, where separation anxieties and individuation processes 

find another space. From this standpoint, if we consider the contributions 

of Klein (1945), we understand that these anxieties were always more 

centred on primary investment of the maternal body – which, indeed, 

Klein called the feminine stage of infantile development. It is essentially 

the frustration that the breast presents and the desire to notice it 

(associated with depressive anxieties) that would lead the child to return 

to the father's penis, conceived as belonging to the maternal body and 

thus invoking the Oedipal triangle. It therefore allowed the conception of 

‘another Oedipus’, extraordinarily precocious and far from the 

experience of the triangulation of the external world, in something that 

we today understand as pre-Oedipal. 

 

Kleinian theory constructed the complexity of the internal world in 

which representations of the self and of objects (the maternal body, the 

breast, the penis) appear from the very beginning. From this theoretical 

vantage point, we understand that, like these bodily experiences, the 

experiences of the internal world that determine the idea of masculinity 

and femininity also begin at birth. As Freud argued, these experiences 

occur long before the existence of the maturity with which the difference 

between the sexes can be observed and affirmed. Research in 

developmental psychology highlights the importance of parents' 

unconscious communication with the child. This includes the parents' 

unconscious processes, as well as the way they conceive and organise the 



  Psychoanalytic Practice 32 (1) 2024 

 

 8 

‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ within themselves. The interrelationship 

between the masculine and feminine become important elements in the 

child's unconscious and phantasmatic creations which has consequences 

for their later physical, affective and cognitive development. 

 

 

Paternal function, masculinity and the introduction of the third 

 

This section highlights that the father is valued through his presence in 

the mother's mind, even if only an ‘unconscious presence’. In this sense 

the paternal function is organised as a third element that creates the 

prohibition of incest and fusion in the relationship between the mother 

and baby. The mother does not need to think, to verbalise or to act 

differently: Her intentionality makes itself felt. It is enough to be 

emotionally connected with the father (or with a third figure) to transmit 

the unconscious presence. The baby can feel the difference in the 

relationship with a mother who has another person inside her mind or a 

mother who lives the fusional fantasy and excludes connection with any 

other figure. The baby does not understand it but can feel it. 

 

It is therefore contact with the presence of the father in the internal world 

of the mother, which places him back into primal scene fantasies that 

introduce the child, almost brutally, to the psychic space between mother 

and child. The idea of the ‘father in the mother’s head’ becomes an 

essential element, capable of facilitating contact with the ‘yet-to-be-

known’ father (Ogden, 1989) and subsequently with external objects. 

This moment of internal transition, between the presence of pre-Oedipal 

mother and the ‘mother the woman of the father’, acts as a dynamic 

system, capable of first organising unconscious movements of 

identifications. We can therefore surmise that the fantasies associated 

with the primal scene are essentially a constellation of thoughts and 

feelings in permanent flux and evolution. These fantasies make 

themselves felt but are difficult to define and work with.  



Paternal function, masculinity and the introduction of the third   

 

9 

The formation of masculinity emerges from the introduction of the third 

party, a paternal function, on condition that it offers itself as an object of 

identification. The British psychoanalyst Fakhry Davids (2002), clearly 

influenced by Bion, argues that the roles performed by either the mother 

or the father in the human mind are different, and should not be reduced 

to the mere complementarity of being connected, such as when the 

Oedipean issue arises. In Davids’ view, these roles exist potentially even 

before the full experience of the Oedipus complex. The experience of 

meeting the real father, or merely meeting with the internal 

representation of the father in the mind of the mother, produces the 

realisation of the father concept in the mental world of the child. 

 

We therefore understand that the perception of the father is created from 

the first direct contacts, but equally through the ‘eyes’ of the mother. The 

mother's conscious and unconscious expectations and fantasies about the 

role of the father seem to play a decisive role in the child's psychic 

formation and in organising the structure of the internal object 

relationship. The role of the internal representation of the father has been 

understood as fundamental because it allows for the introduction of a 

different, external reality to the primitive, symbiotic relationship 

between the child and the mother. The real absence of the father is in no 

way equivalent to his absence of representation. For the same reason, we 

can understand that the introjected father is very different from the real 

father. 

 

In 1968, Greenson pointed out the particularities of how the process of 

disidentification with the mother in the male child was complemented by 

counter-identification with the father. His theoretical hypotheses were 

widely accepted at the time, apparently proven by anthropological 

studies where the presence of ceremonies, sometimes violent, signalled 

the radical separation of the boy from maternal influence, with the 

justification of guaranteeing a future, manly man. This forced separation 

supposedly made it possible to achieve the desired autonomy, virility and 



  Psychoanalytic Practice 32 (1) 2024 

 

 10 

independence that were essential characteristics of good masculinity at 

the time. Following this line of argumentation, prolonged contact with 

the maternal figure was to be avoided because the ‘excess of mother’ 

would contaminate the boy, hindering the organisation of masculinity. 

Thus, in the words of Michael Diamond (2009), ‘the most significant 

thing about being a man is not being a woman’ (pp. 23-54). Cultural and 

artistic expressions of masculinity have portrayed the individualistic 

heroes of the 1940s to 1960s as the self-sufficient man who seduces and 

conquers but does not connect and consequently suffers loss in a love 

relationship. For example, in the famous performances of John Wayne, 

or the James Bond and, later in the 1980s, the MacGyver series. 

 

Today we understand that when ‘mother excess’ occurs (that is when the 

child internally attributes such omnipotence to the bond with the mother, 

there seems to be no room for the presence of the father in its symbolic 

expression, and the father is eclipsed in the child's mental world) we are 

faced with a pathological, rigidifying dynamic, where the mother seems 

to oppose autonomy, disidentification occurs and this ‘cutting-off’ 

function serves as a narcissistic defense. These dynamics usually 

contribute strongly to the organisation of severe and rigid superego 

structures. Figlio (2024) believes that this creates the conditions for 

organising what he calls ‘toxic masculinity’, where phallic narcissism 

imposes itself through dominance and omnipotent intrusion. In reality, 

this contributes to a more rigid sense of masculinity without room for 

affective plasticity or ambivalent feelings, and it could even give rise to 

emotional dullness. Contact, when considered in these terms, would 

basically tend towards an intrusive and defensively penetrating 

experience in terms of the associated unconscious fantasy. The feeling of 

possession, although essentially subjective, would seem to govern in this 

economy of psychic dynamism. 

 

However, research into attachment and early development has shown 

something different: it is the quality of the relationship with the mother, 



Paternal function, masculinity and the introduction of the third   

 

11 

and not the quality of the separation, that seems to facilitate or hinder the 

construction of masculine identity (Fonagy, 1996). In this sense, 

Diamond (2004, 2009, 2017) assumes that the child is capable of 

condensing both identificatory processes. And so, instead of just 

highlighting the cut of separation and emphasising the polarity of 

choices, we can conceive of the child as being able to take advantage of 

the shifting of identity transformation to mobilise a phallic function, 

knowing how to place it at the service of contact with a different reality. 

It is a connection and communication link, which demonstrates the 

ability to tolerate incompleteness and the restlessness of discovering the 

strange, respecting otherness, and an awareness of vulnerability. Figlio 

(2024) contends that it essentially stimulates a depressive position which 

is oriented towards reality and relationships, characterised by hopeful 

fertility and with a ‘seminal’ quality. In this way, the desire and pleasure 

of possessing the object can be transformed into an instrument or 

differentiated mental function, capable of promoting the opportunity for 

discovery, creating connections and intersubjective encounters with the 

potential to have an impact on one’s own internal world. This means that 

from the same moment can emerge the cut, characterised by 

intrusiveness-penetration, or a caesura, which favours communication 

and creative construction. 

 

I think that potentially both solutions co-exist, accessing different 

pleasures, albeit sometimes contradictory and/or conflicting. The 

pleasure of dominant possession and/or, the creative encounter of 

discovering the Other1, while simultaneously discovering oneself 

through the relationship with otherness. It is from the internal 

organisation of this coexistence and the dynamic-economic balance of 

the psyche achieved that an ethical responsibility and the caring function, 

 
1 In psychoanalysis, the concept of the Other refers to the external world and 

other people as perceived by an individual. It encompasses the idea that 

individuals develop their sense of self and identity in relation to others. 

 



  Psychoanalytic Practice 32 (1) 2024 

 

 12 

of the reflexive nature inherent in the development of the analytic 

function of the mind, can be effectively organised. 

 

The relationship with the father should be capable of allowing for the 

internalisation of the paternal imago – representing genital masculinity – 

in which adaptive and phallic aspirations are integrated with relational 

and bonding faculties. The phallic characteristics therefore become more 

pertinent, being organised into more integrated forms of the self that seek 

complete, flexible relationships and where recognition of incompleteness 

and the consequent need for the object is present. The paternal imago 

therefore mobilises the phallic function at the service of contact with 

reality, understanding of differences with the other, and to develop a true 

empathetic capacity. 

 

It was in this sense that Dana Birksted-Breen (1996; 2016) proposed the 

concept of ‘penis-as-link’ as an instrument of eros, challenging the 

notion of it as an instrument of thanatos. It is the mental function of 

‘penis-as-link’ that allows the linking of the parental figures inside the 

head of the child, signalling the emergence of the Oedipal structure: ‘it 

has to do with the tripartite world of the self in relation to the parents as 

different yet linked to each other… It involves the knowledge of 

difference and by the same token the recognition of incompleteness and 

need for the object’ (Birksted-Breen, 1996, p. 650). It allows for the 

recognition of the parental relationship and both generational and gender 

differences and their implications for mental functioning. This is in stark 

contrast to the phallus that does not recognise such differences. 

 

It is the libidinal bond with the subject and its loss or renunciation 

together with the search for a substitute that promotes the internal 

movement towards symbolisation, as well as the internal organisation of 

a paternal function. This makes it possible to bear the separation and the 

new bonds, and to develop symbolic capacity and thought as a true 

instrument of internal change. Therefore, identification with the father’s 



Paternal function, masculinity and the introduction of the third   

 

13 

penis is not only structured as having an intrusive and penetrating 

element but also a binding function between two parts/figures, 

conceptualising the combined figure. 

 

 

Changing views of masculinity and authority 

 

The enormous sociocultural changes that occurred in the 20th century 

relating to the decline of patriarchal societies, and a new and fascinating 

view of the feminine, allow us to acquire a new perspective on the 

psychoanalytic ‘paternal function’ and to look differently at the 

complexity of the internalisations associated with it. From a sociological 

viewpoint, the transformations have been immense and rapid. Fathers 

and mothers, family dynamics, the hierarchical system, professional 

activities, and social representations of the genders have mobilised 

ethical, moral and ideological debates from political forces all over the 

world. These issues were not properly considered at the birth of 

psychoanalysis. Also, the new advances in technology and, of course, 

changing world economies have exacerbated the situation. For example, 

in his book Rethinking the psychoanalysis of masculinity, Figlio (2024) 

seeks to make a significant contribution to a psychoanalytic 

understanding of the financial crisis and a world deeply marked by 

mental functioning associated with a toxic form of masculinity, in which 

reality is neither entirely accepted nor rejected. It evokes the phantastic 

object described by David Tuckett, which Figlio describes as phallic, 

grandiose, and capable of providing magical expansive power. 

 

The social and human sciences have facilitated this debate, reporting on 

injustices and suffering, and promoting deeper reflection of the subject – 

sometimes driving home a point; sometimes bringing confusion and 

contradictions too. Changes have been felt in all walks of life including 

education policy, professional hierarchies, family life, and so on. Even 

in the analytic relationship, the listening position of the analyst or 



  Psychoanalytic Practice 32 (1) 2024 

 

 14 

supervisor role has undergone significant transformations and 

challenges. 

 

Until a few decades ago, paternal authority was essentially associated 

with the power that was attributed to it, sometimes acted in a didactic 

way, and which could mark relationships in the family structure through 

repression, coercion, and violence. Within this paternal framework, 

relationships were organised through Others’ responses of submission 

and/or withdrawal. The authority figure saw the Other as an extension of 

himself, not separate. Others were at the mercy of his manipulation, 

desire and even perversity. It meant obedience and loss of individuality, 

using fear and threats. Historically – not that long ago – the ‘rule of 

kingdoms’ mirrored this powerful figure, who was decisive in 

controlling and imposing limits. This represented the perfect scenario to 

elicit fear and experiences of castration anxiety, and revenge too. In this 

view, it is easy to recognise the castrating father, who keeps away any 

prevaricating incestuous desires, reducing the mother's influence and 

imposing space for the Other and the law. The castrating father thus 

makes loss, submission, and fear prevail, instilling a feeling in others of 

‘having to put up with it’, of having to live with inevitable dissatisfaction. 

 

We can also recognise authority over the Other but coloured with more 

positive associations, different meanings. Thus, we can also find an 

authoritarian father, capable of loving and caring for the mother, and who 

offers himself as affectionate and close to his children. He can open up 

to the world, exploring it, promoting multiple interests, compensating for 

the introduction of limits, self-control and tolerance of frustration. This 

type of authority can be trusting and appreciate their responsibility and 

the independence they have achieved. Understanding this form of 

authority can be essential for the construction of our own identity. The 

introjection of a sense of authority, self-confidence and respect for our 

freedom is used to construct a sense of self-determination and 



Paternal function, masculinity and the introduction of the third   

 

15 

transformation, as well as for needed self-control of impulsive and/or 

destructive aspects.  

 

 

Paternal function in the psychoanalytic process 

 

In this section I have introduced two clinical vignettes – Alberto and 

Anna – in the hope of demonstrating the complexity of the different roles 

of the paternal function as well as of the analyst’s role as ‘the third’. As 

elucidated in this article both phallus and penis-as-link can coexist in the 

unconscious world, serving different mental functions. It is in the 

coexistence of the complexity of roles that it seems possible to develop 

true mental flexibility, and a greater capacity to deal with external and 

internal reality in a more gratifying way. This internal position is inherent 

in the reflexive attitude needed for investigative exploration and access 

to a differentiating quality of intimacy. It functions as a separating 

element that creatively reinforces the capacity for intimacy with a 

different and autonomous Other. This alternative perspective is equally 

present in the reconstruction of the ‘prehistoric’ individual – the 

individual prior to having any experience of conflict or history within the 

environment. Although the mother-baby combination is certainly 

necessary to organise a stable and secure internal structure, an exclusive 

focus on it becomes frighteningly insufficient, as portrayed in Vignette 1. 

 

Clinical vignette 1 - Alberto 

 

Alberto is a young accountant, curious and attentive. Fatherless 

since childhood, an only child, he complained of professional 

insecurities and difficulties in deepening a love connection, 

despite easy contact and feeling that he has a good physical 

appearance. ‘For some reason, my relationships don't develop’, 

he initially confided. 

 



  Psychoanalytic Practice 32 (1) 2024 

 

 16 

In the early days of analysis, it was very difficult for me to help 

him shift his concrete speech about himself. Any simple 

interpretation or comment of mine sounded to him like an 

inaccessible intellectualisation. He seemed to have the concrete 

thinking of a psychosomatic, but without any complaints or other 

characteristics. However, he gradually began to realise the 

mental barrier he was creating on topics directed at his internal 

world, which I was trying to propose, as opposed to his great 

sensitivity to others, to listening and understanding. 

 

This was a fact that I was trying to point out, without any further 

understanding, by encouraging him to question himself. So, for 

some time, I had chosen to leave him with only a few of my own 

elaborations during the sessions, flagging the main emotions 

that showed up. My words were perceived by Alberto as 

incomprehensible, strange, and inappropriate. He listened to my 

words effortlessly, but they left him perplexed.  

 

One day he received a phone call from the landlord of his house, 

whom he believed would force him to move house. This left him 

in a strange and disproportionate state of unease and wanting to 

switch off, even if he had not found it to be such a big problem 

nor unexpected. 

 

Then, he admitted to me that at home, after the phone call, he 

quickly associated with the chaotic feeling when, as a child, 

someone went to his home to report the death of his father in an 

accident – in reality, he did not retain any other conscious 

memory of his father’s presence. Quickly, in an unusual insight, 

he realised how the omnipresence of the maternal figure 

imposed itself on him in his life. This included the pathological 

mourning of his mother which created an overwhelming feeling 

of insecurity. This was a feeling with which he fought in the 



Paternal function, masculinity and the introduction of the third   

 

17 

construction of his autonomy, his masculinity and in contact with 

other women. 

 

Although Alberto had previously been prevented from hearing 

and understanding my words and comments, the accidental 

contact with the painful consciousness of loss allowed him to 

suddenly begin to listen to me – an enigmatic other – in another 

way and to perceive a little of my own language. 

 

Vignette 1 demonstrates how the practice of the analytic function has 

implications for different levels of emotional involvement – including 

intimacy, closeness, spontaneity, emotional intensity and authenticity – 

for both participants in the analytic dialogue, patient and analyst. A 

mature intimacy corresponds to triadic functioning, in contrast to a proto-

intimacy associated with the experience of imperious contact with the 

mother's body. As analyst, I sought to use the analytic setting to achieve 

an optimal relationship between immersion and interactivity. This 

included listening to and observing: the dynamics of the paternal 

function of the patient; how I perceived Alberto’s understanding of the 

interpretation; and how he experienced the relational moment. These 

essential elements regulated the degree of interactivity and immersion of 

the interventions. It resembled a continual manoeuvring between being 

immersed in fluctuating attention and the surfacing regression of other 

levels of internal reality. 

 

As analysts, we must tolerate ‘losing’ the ‘internal setting’ (Diamond, 

2013, 2017), but create conditions to bring the patient back to presence; 

this arises from the unconscious collision of the analyst’s ambivalence 

with the patient’s own world of unconscious anxieties. The analyst must 

be able to withstand the narcissistic blows and demands that the patient 

uses for their own balance. In the case of Alberto, I had to tolerate the 

inability to be heard immediately by the patient. At the same time, I had 

to offer myself as an element of connection and creativity with whom 



  Psychoanalytic Practice 32 (1) 2024 

 

 18 

Alberto could identify. In so doing I aimed to organise a third in his own 

mind, being able to listen to himself and work out his content internally. 

The pace of this type of transformative work is crucial. The demands on 

the analyst are perhaps greater as they are required to: remain alert and 

flexible; understand the multiple languages of the unconscious; 

withstand not knowing or erring; tolerate narcissistic pains; and maintain 

their investigational attitude and curiosity to learn. 

 

 

Clinical vignette 2 – Anna 

 

Anna is a young woman who came to me in desperation. She 

cried compulsively as she felt that she was destroying a love 

relationship – one that had spanned many years – and she 

appeared to be destroying this relationship involuntarily, 

however with great aggression. This aggression was also 

directed at herself, putting herself in risky situations and 

sometimes mistreating her body with severe cuts and deep pains. 

 

Through the evolution of analytic work Anna associated the 

violence that had lived in her family of origin with her present 

love relationship. Her father subjected her mother to domestic 

violence, instilling a climate of terror in the family, and that led 

her to cut off relations with her father. Noticing the 

uncontrollable similarities with dad left her in a tremendous 

amount of pain and deep depression. 

 

During the analysis, she recounted a dream: she was in a factory 

with her partner, and they realised that in a large room there 

was a man being tortured by workers. It was an environment of 

enormous tension. The man revealed nothing, and remained 

well-disposed and smiling, despite being tortured. Anna was 

seized by the workers and was forced to also torture the man 



Paternal function, masculinity and the introduction of the third   

 

19 

with syringes. He continued to resist and laugh. In the next 

moment she was outside the room, in a car with the man who 

was tortured. Anna’s boyfriend was outside, shouting for her to 

leave, but also trying to calm her down. She took off in the car 

at great speed with this man who meanwhile becomes a woman 

inhabiting a mixed position, half man, half woman. They then 

proceed to a boat. All the while her boyfriend continues to shout 

at her, while trying to encourage her to remain calm. 

 

She associated the man being tortured with the analyst, but was 

impressed by the torture/resistance, even though she found in 

him a guarantee of persistence and a sense of humour in the face 

of the despair that she often brought to the sessions, expressed 

through uncontrollable crying. I pointed out the details of this 

man that she felt firm, as if to direct her to the waters of the 

feminine. She laughed and commented: ‘You won't believe this! 

For the first time this weekend, I was able to talk to my mother 

at length. And I experienced a different woman who seemed to 

have never realised I exist, yet she was capable of listening to 

me! We felt so close for the first time’. 

 

It is perhaps in the analysis of cases, as portrayed in Vignette 2, that 

distortions – sometimes subtle but fundamental – of the paternal 

functions are particularly well demonstrated, because the place that the 

subject occupies in the particularities of the phantasmal game of parental 

relations is revealed to be perverted. In Anna’s case, the father does not 

position himself in the mind of the child as an absent object, nor an object 

to be hated, nor of being a lost object. The paternal function therefore 

needed to be reconstructed in the analytic setting through the remaining 

fragmented debris, or as Green (2009) states: ‘the lost father needs to be 

somehow found within the transference’ (p. 45). 

 



  Psychoanalytic Practice 32 (1) 2024 

 

 20 

The internalisation of the father figure thus arises early with an important 

function of mediation capable of structuring itself and promoting mental 

development. In Anna’s case, the analytic context aimed to promote 

mediating the relationship with the reality of the external world, and also 

mediating the relationship with the unknown found within Anna, herself. 

Anna then needed new resources that allowed her to deal with the non-

thinkable reality, to develop mental contact with the ‘different’ and to 

support the narcissistic wound of the discoveries being made. 

 

In Anna’s vignette we realise a painful but necessary process of 

disidentification from a phallic-narcissistic representation of the father 

figure. The analysis revealed a difficult process that involved the internal 

separation of identifications that constituted a narcissistic, overbearing, 

arrogant and violent ideal ego, which did not seem to recognise or value 

otherness in a couple relationship. Risking change in these cases can 

result in disillusionment about oneself, exposing oneself to a lack of 

identity. In doing this, the patient feels that parts of her with which she 

had identified and valued immensely, which were necessary to her in 

some aspects of her psychic survival, had been mutilated. 

 

The analyst needs to exist in the patient's mind, in a seemingly passive 

and intuited way, but not available to be reflected upon. The analyst must 

wait for the right time to assert themself. Vignette 2 demonstrates that it 

was necessary for the analyst to allow some kind of fusion with parts of 

the patient, yet in such a way so that she did not get confused. This 

dynamic facilitated the emergence of a different object which offered 

other qualities (does not retaliate, does not seek to dominate, but also 

does not withdraw). Moreover, it afforded Anna the opportunity to 

establish identifications with this object; she could get to know the Other, 

get to know herself and understand that the human dwells in the Other 

and, potentially, also in herself. 

 



Paternal function, masculinity and the introduction of the third   

 

21 

Thus, as analyst I sought to promote in the patient the feeling of being 

observed, allowing her later on to develop the capacity to understand 

herself in interactions by identifying with a third position – in an internal 

identificatory triangulation – essential for the capacity to be observed and 

to reflect on oneself. The organisation of this third, which we attribute to 

the organisation of a paternal function that is more capable of discovering 

otherness and finally perceiving the Other (and the parents as separate 

entities too), is perhaps what facilitated Anna’s discovery of living 

affective relationships beyond the dominant/dominated binomial. 

Because Anna acquired the possibility of being a participant in a 

relationship – of being observed by a third person and being an observer 

of her different relationship – thereafter she was able to imagine and 

create different stories around her parental relationship, to discover 

herself as ‘thoughts in the mind of others’. 

 

 

Final notes 

 

It is my hope that this article has shown that the analyst can give life to 

the paternal dynamics arising from the patient’s unique configurations 

by tolerating ambivalence and ambiguity. Only with careful 

consideration can the analyst tolerate being placed transferentially in 

both places and make use of interpretation with the ultimate objective to 

not produce a direct insight, but to facilitate the psychic functioning of 

the patient that assists them in reaching the insight. The associations 

created by the patient make it possible for them to overcome resistance 

and gain the flexibility that stimulates contact with the ‘different’. 

 

In the complex work of analytic intimacy, where the internalisation of 

the paternal function can be revived and recreated through the figure of 

the analyst, the subject seems to renounce primordial parental images. 

However, this is done while still using them as identity origins, enabling 

the development of a sense of temporality and history of their own, 



  Psychoanalytic Practice 32 (1) 2024 

 

 22 

thereby constructing their ‘own project’ and the objectives of the 

therapeutic process. In performing this paternal function, the analyst 

needs to renounce the temptation of ‘possessing’ the infantile sexuality 

of the patient. In a similar vein to how their own internal parents 

renounce the process of infantile sexuality (Perelberg, 2009). The analyst 

must be neither too fragile nor too narcissistic in order to withstand the 

patient's criticisms and able to organise themself as an attentive observer, 

even when they do not understand or understand very little. By holding 

‘the third’, the analytic setting evolves from a transitional state of 

symbiosis to potential union, capable of reflecting the original location 

and the differentiating identity of the subject. 

 

 

References 

 

Aragão Oliveira, R. (2015). O lugar do pai na clínica psicanalítica: 

Ontem e hoje. [The father’s place in the psychoanalytic clinic: 

Yesterday and today]. Revista Portuguesa de Psicanálise, 35(1), 

45–52.  

Aragão Oliveira, R. (2020). The father and the paternal function in the 

psychoanalytical process: Theoretical and clinical issues. The 

American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 80, 309–330. 

https://doi.org/10.1057/s11231-020-09262-y 

Aragão Oliveira, R. (2023). Livro do prazer: Reflexões psicanalíticas. 

[Book of pleasure: Psychoanalytic Reflections]. Taiga. 

Birksted-Breen, D. (1996). Phallus, penis and mental space. 

International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 77(4), 649–657.  

Birksted-Breen, D. (2016). The work of psychoanalysis: Sexuality, time 

and the psychoanalytic mind. Routledge. 

Davids, M. F. (2002). Fathers in the internal world: From boy to man to 

father. In J. Trowell & A. Etchegoyen (Eds.), The importance of 

fathers: A psychoanalytical re-evaluation (pp. 67–92). Brunner-

Routledge. 

https://doi.org/10.1057/s11231-020-09262-y


Paternal function, masculinity and the introduction of the third   

 

23 

Diamond, M. J. (2004). The shaping of masculinity: Revisioning boys 

turning away from their mothers to construct male gender 

identity. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 85(2), 359-

379. 

Diamond, M. J. (2009). Masculinity and its discontents: Making room 

for the ‘‘mother’’ inside the male—An essential achievement for 

healthy male gender identity. In B. Reis & R. Grossmark (Eds.) 

Heterosexual masculinities: Contemporary perspectives from 

psychoanalytic gender theory (pp. 23–54). Routledge. 

Diamond, M. J. (2013) Analytic mind use and interpsychic 

communication: Driving force in analytic technique, pathway to 

unconscious mental life. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 83(3), 

525–563. 

Diamond, M. J. (2017). The missing father function in psychoanalytic 

theory and technique: The analyst’s internal couple and maturing 

intimacy. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 86(4), 861–887. 

https://doi.org/10.1002/psaq.12173. 

Figlio, K. (2024) Rethinking the psychoanalysis of masculinity – from 

toxic to seminal. Routledge. 

Fiorini, L. G. (2014). The decline of the father. Paternal function or 

third-party function? [Online Debate Post]. IPA World Forum.  

Fonagy, P., & Target, M. (1996). Playing with reality: I. Theory of mind 

and the normal development of psychic reality. The 

International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 77, 217-233. 

Foresti, G. (2008). The paternal function: Intrapsychic, relational and 

social factors. International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 17(1), 

20–27.  

Freud, S. (1912-13). Totem and taboo. In J. Stachey (Ed. and Trans.), 

The standard edition of the complete psychological works of 

Sigmund Freud (Vol. XIII, pp. 1-162). Hogarth Press. 

Freud, S. (1923). The ego and the id. In J. Stachey (Ed. and Trans), The 

standard edition of the complete psychological works of 

Sigmund Freud (Vol. XIX, pp. 1-66). Hogarth Press. 

https://doi.org/10.1002/psaq.12173


  Psychoanalytic Practice 32 (1) 2024 

 

 24 

Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and its discontents. In J. Stachey (Ed. and 

Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological 

works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. XXI, pp. 57-145). Hogarth Press. 

Green, A. (1999). The work of the negative (A. Weller, Trans.). Free 

Association. 

Green, A. (2009). The construction of the lost father. In L. J. Kalinich & 

S. W. Taylor (Eds.), The dead father: A psychoanalytic inquiry 

(pp. 23–46). Routledge.  

Greenson, R. R. (1968). Dis-identifying from mother: Its special 

importance for the boy. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 

49, 370–374. 

Klein, M. (1945). Love, guilt and reparation and other works (1921-

1945). Hogarth Press. 

Ogden, T. (1989). The primitive edge of experience. Jason Aronson. 

Perelberg, R. J. (2009). The dead father and the sacrifice of sexuality: An 

abridged version. In L. J. Kalinich & S. W. Taylor (Eds.), The 

dead father: A psychoanalytic inquiry (pp. 121–131). Routledge. 

 

 

 

Rui Aragão Oliveira is a full member and supervising analyst of 

the Portuguese Psychoanalytical Society (PPS). He is the former 

president of the PPS (2016-2019) and the former director of the 

training committee of the PPS (2020-2022). He is the past editor-

in-chief of the Portuguese Psychoanalytical Review (2013-2015), 

and past International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) editor 

of Psychoanalysis Today (2014-2017). He teaches at the 

Psychoanalytical Institute in Lisbon. raragao20@gmail.com 

 

mailto:raragao20@gmail.com


 

Response paper 

 

 

 

Response to Rui Aragão Oliveira’s ‘Paternal function, 

masculinity and the introduction of the third: The mind 

of the analyst in clinical practice’ 
 

 

 

Jennifer Allen  

Private Practice, Cape Town, South Africa 

 

 

In his paper Aragão Oliveira describes the paternal function as an 

intrapsychic construct; a psychic development which has a structuring 

role in the mental world of each individual. 

 

The installation of this function is part of a psychic journey from loss to 

the potential for psychic creativity and whilst it is called the paternal 

function, it concerns the mental life of both boys and girls – as a 

‘structure’ it is not gendered. 

 

The internal representation of the paternal function sets in motion the 

germination of a different, separate reality in the primal fusion between 

the child and the mother in the child’s mind. It has an inner psychic 

quality that has less to do with the real father and his concrete absence or 

presence. A lovely example of this function is cited by Aisenstein (2015), 

which shows how a single mother can induce the third element to which 

we are all subjected. This example comes from a reading of Barack 

Obama’s memoir Dreams of my father. After his father had returned to 

Kenya, Obama was brought up by his mother who had to get up at 4 a.m. 



  Psychoanalytic Practice 32 (1) 2024 

 

 
26 

to make him do his homework before she went to work. He probably 

resisted this. His mother asked him whether he thought she enjoyed 

waking him so early, then pointed out that she had no choice. 

 

Reading this paper reminded me of Freud’s (1913) earliest ideas about 

the psychic significance of the father in the inner world. In Totem and 

Taboo he posited in our ancient prehistory a story of the murder of an all-

powerful narcissistic father by an original horde of brothers because he 

had ruled through terror and possessed all the women. The murder was 

followed by guilt and remorse as the brothers both loved and hated their 

father. Now that he was out of the way they found a new problem to 

contend with – they all wanted the women to themselves. To prevent their 

own destruction through violence they instituted a law against incest, 

forbidding sex with their mothers and sisters (Perelberg, 2013). This 

prohibition represents the beginnings of the foundation of society. The 

killing of the father represents the renunciation of violence and the 

installation of the law against incest. 

 

In contemporary psychoanalytic theory, as Aragão Oliveira describes in 

his paper, the paternal function is not the representation of an actual 

foundational murder but rather as a primal potential in the psyche of the 

conflict between limitless desire and a natural limit from which a third 

position can emerge (Aisenstein, 2015). As Green (1995) describes, on a 

primal level, the father represents a third term: a separator of the mother 

and the child before he is an Oedipal father, an object of desire or a figure 

arousing destructive rivalry. Inhibition – of the limitless power of the 

drives – is at the heart of the primal identification with the father. 

 

I thought that Aragão Oliveira’s heading, From loss to creativity, was 

beautifully put and thought about, what is felt on a primal level so 

profoundly, as loss. The child meets the third – the father in the mother’s 

mind – and with it comes the experience that there is a limit to the 

satisfactions he can have with the mother. If you remain in the ‘bliss’ of 



Response to Rui Aragão Oliveira’s ‘Paternal function’   

 

 
27 

the fusion with the primal mother, or in thrall to the seductive or 

overstimulating violent mother, you will not thrive – it will become a 

terrifying psychic catastrophe. This pertinent idea will be illustrated in 

my case description which follows shortly. This limit is a psychic 

boundary of safety out of the fusion with the mother and allows for 

something essential to develop – the link with the two parents and a 

relationship of tenderness. This loss of fusion is felt as an absence, is 

painful and has to be mourned over and over in many iterations. The 

psychic reality of separateness, the limiting acknowledgement of the 

difference between the sexes and the generations are all experienced as 

painful narcissistic loss which, through the work of mourning, can be 

transformed into a renunciation of the demand for limitless desire. 

 

These tropes of parricide, remorse, guilt and renunciation – sacrifice – 

underlie many stories from religious narratives to works of literature. 

And, in the internal world of individuals is a source of suffering brought 

into the consulting room by our patients. This leads me to my 

associations with the section of Aragão Oliveira’s paper concerning the 

clinical setting. I share a few thoughts and end with a short clinical 

vignette of my own. 

 

Our psychoanalytic technique flows directly out of our theory. The frame 

and the setting serve as a holding structure, a boundary of safety and a 

limit. A safeguard against incest and violence. This structure is the 

paternal function. It is a limit for both the analyst and the patient: the 

limit of set session times in the week, the rule/law of abstinence and the 

asymmetry in the relationship between the patient and analyst. The 

analyst is the guardian of the treatment where intimacy can be safe and 

all wishes and desires of the patient can be expressed both sexual, 

sensual, aggressive, and hostile, with love and hatred. No other 

relationship offers this. 

  



  Psychoanalytic Practice 32 (1) 2024 

 

 
28 

The third term is also represented within the internal setting of the analyst 

holding in mind their internalised theory and technique. Termination is 

the final expression of the paternal function in the clinical setting. Both 

therapist and patient must renounce their desire for their relationship so 

the symbolic chain of the generations can be perpetuated (Delourmel, 

2012). 

 

 

Clinical vignette 

 

N is a man in his late 40s who had contacted me in a terrified, shattered 

state and profound despair. He was only able to leave his home to see me 

after receiving intensive anti-depressant medication. N had some 

terrifying realisations set in motion by the exposure of his and his 

partner’s lifestyle. This included the exposure of sexual practices, contact 

with the underworld of prostitution and limitless parties with drinking 

and drugs. He had been abandoned. N said that on the surface of all of 

this he would have described himself and his life as golden and in control 

of it all but for there being in him always a sense of anxiety. 

 

His traumatic realisation was, in his words, ‘the ugliness of it all’ – the 

contempt, blame and hatred emerging from himself and his partner and 

the shame and the depth of the despair he felt. The pain of being alone 

was crushing and unbearable and he felt totally abandoned and in terror 

of losing everything. Now that he was also a father, he could not bear 

repeating the contempt and hatred so thinly disguised between his 

parents during his childhood. He had avoided thinking about it but, now, 

clearly saw was being repeated between his partner and himself. 

 

I thought of N as a clinical example in response to Aragão Oliveira’s 

comment on limit cases, that is, where there is a tragic failure in the 

development of the paternal function and a perverse solution is instated 

in the inner world of the subject. For N his golden, perverse solution was 



Response to Rui Aragão Oliveira’s ‘Paternal function’   

 

 
29 

his reckless rejection of any boundary of psychic or bodily safety and the 

refusal of any limit. Rather, taking a position of invulnerability and 

omnipotence, was a desperate attempt to ensure his psychic survival in 

the face of danger of his own pain, hatred and terror, and in the face of 

the danger of the other from whom he was not psychically separate. But 

this solution inevitably will not hold and when it shattered it threw him 

into an experience of painful psychic catastrophe. 

 

N has struggled violently with the drug-like allure of his physically 

beautiful but cold mother/lover/partner, where it feels to me that when he 

is in this state there are no internal qualities to her, but a desire for the 

possession of her body and fusion with her. This is the shadow in his 

inner world of the painful failure to separate psychically from the over-

arousal of his violent and seductive mother in persistent hostility with a 

distant authoritarian father. 

 

In his third return to treatment with me: it had been a long and hard road 

and a six-year interval between his last treatment. It is very difficult for 

patients such as N to enter into a therapeutic relationship and receive help 

because the other, the analyst, is a dangerous other and in the patient’s 

experience the connection between the self and the other is the ‘glue’ of 

hostility and unbearable anxiety. This is a precarious psychic situation in 

which it is difficult for the patient to use the analyst, in Winnicott’s terms, 

for holding and containing. This also means that intervals between 

sessions, weekend breaks, or any form of waiting are difficult to bear and 

are responded to with panic, rage and despair. There is no internal sense 

of safety, security, care and continuity. 

 

I will describe below how this internal psychic state of affairs came alive 

in the room between N and me. On his return in crisis, he had difficulty 

with the frame – the holding structure and boundary of safety of the 

paternal function. He sent me desperate texts between sessions and on 

weekend breaks. I saw him four times a week face to face. He would 



  Psychoanalytic Practice 32 (1) 2024 

 

 
30 

arrive early for his sessions, ringing the bell eight minutes before, then 

five minutes, and then three minutes, violently banging the doors on his 

entrance and exit. Over time and many repetitions, he found a sense of 

safety and reliability in my analytic stance of absorbing and 

acknowledging his rage, frustration and panic while at the same time 

holding the boundary of the frame with regard to the limit of time. 

 

As our work together progressed and the storms of the very early days of 

the therapy were weathered, N discovered, new to him, a few experiences 

with me of real warmth and comfort. In relation to this I’d like to echo 

Aragão Oliveira regarding his comment of the psychic risk of change in 

these cases. 

 

I have hope for this patient – on this very long road we will have to see 

how long he stays the course. With this in mind and to conclude I’d like 

to quote from Eizirik (2015): 

 

We must maintain the hope for change and transmit this hope 

even in cases of multiple trauma where the real father has failed 

while continuing to believe in the patient’s primary psychic 

potential whose role of induction can be activated/reactivated 

through the analytic relationship (p. 344). 

 

 

References 

 

Aragão Oliveira, R. A. (2020). The father and the paternal function in the 

psychoanalytical process: Theoretical and clinical issues. 

American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 80, 309-330. 

Aragão Oliveira, R. A. (2024, February 24-25). Paternal function and 

the mind of the analyst in clinical practice. [Conference 

presentation]. The South African Psychoanalytical Initiative 

Conference. Johannesburg, South Africa. 



Response to Rui Aragão Oliveira’s ‘Paternal function’   

 

 
31 

Aisenstein, M. (2015). The question of the father. Psychoanalytic 

Quarterly, 84(2), 351-362. 

Delourmel, C. (2012). De la fonction du pére au principe paternal. [From 

paternal function to a paternal principle]. Bulletin Société 

Psychanalytique de Paris, 106, 34-130. 

Eizirik, C. L. (2015). The father, the father function, the father principle: 

Some contemporary psychoanalytic developments. 

Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 84(2), 335-350. 

Freud, S. (1912-13). Totem and taboo. In J. Stachey (Ed. & Trans.), The 

standard edition of the complete psychological works of 

Sigmund Freud (Vol. XIII, pp. 1-162). Hogarth Press. 

Green, A. (1995) La Causalité psychique. Entre nature et culture. 

[Psychic causation: Between nature and culture]. Odile Jacob. 

Perelberg, R. (2013) Paternal function and thirdness in psychoanalysis 

and legend: Has the future been foretold? Psychoanalytic 

Quarterly, 82(2), 557-585. 

 

 

 

Jennifer Allen is a psychoanalyst and South African 

Psychoanalytical Association (SAPA) training analyst in Cape 

Town. She is in full-time private practice and is involved in SAPA 

in teaching and training. She is interested in a wide variety of 

aspects of psychoanalysis both clinical and theoretical. 

jenniferdotsville@gmail.com  

 

mailto:jenniferdotsville@gmail.com


 

Article 

 

 

 

Playing with ‘the father’ in memory and desire: Exilic 

thirdness in transitional space 

 

 

 

Thomas Burkhalter 

University of Johannesburg, South Africa 

 

 

Abstract 

 

This paper is located as a transitional object in transitional space, that 

while exploring the play of paternal function, itself serves to provide 

paternal function in a process of becoming. It is an account concerned 

with intersectionality, a situated subjectivity, and the psychosocial in a 

South African context. It employs theoretical plurality to speak to how 

we construct meaning, position authority, and navigate otherness with 

thirdness, and to explore how a broader situated experience might be an 

influence on how we approach the therapeutic endeavour. Maternal and 

paternal orders are conceived relationally, to present thirdness as the 

interplay of primary and secondary process. As such, it offers a 

perspective on paternal function that is not only the bearer of paternal 

law and separating third, but also a facilitator of space and play that 

operates in the spaces between. To do so, the narrative traverses the 

author’s experience of disability and trauma. The paper proceeds to focus 

on the father as a specific paternal functionary, and given his precarious 

grounding in masculinity and the patriarchy, posits an exilic 



Playing with the father   

 

 
33 

consciousness as an orienting perspective to navigate states of 

marginalisation, dislocation, incompleteness and precarity. 

 

 

Introduction 

 

Thirdness, or paternal function, is an integral part of psychoanalytic 

practice, and a critical developmental achievement. Being neither fixed 

nor static, where we place thirdness shifts within session, along the 

length of a treatment and with experience across a lifespan. It is uniquely 

positioned according to therapist and patient and in relation to the 

nuances of a particular therapeutic relationship, and is employed 

differently within and across various psychoanalytic schools. 

Developmentally, while paternal function (thirdness) comes into play for 

the child at the dawning of the capacity for representation, it has been 

present and active long prior to that, in the minds of their caregivers and 

in the social and physical structures into which the child is born. As such, 

paternal function can be said to always reflect what has been, and as 

pointing towards what is to come. Because we ask something with it, and 

it asks something of us, we need to ascertain how we are positioned 

within it.  

 

Paternal function implies a particular vantage, a point of view. As 

representation, it ushers in a distancing (separation) to allow a way of 

looking in on something, in order to reflect on and give meaning. And 

yet, we do this in a time historically located that not only allows us to 

deconstruct authority, but has made us aware that all knowledge 

construction must be considered to be provisional, contingent and 

strategic (Frosh & Baraitser, 2008). Our world increasingly asks that we 

hear the voices on the periphery. This requires, when translated as 

depressive position functioning, the capacity to hold the tensions 

between the centre and the margins, between enlightenment notions of a 

stable, unified identity, and ‘post’ conceptions that ‘deconstruct 



  Psychoanalytic Practice 32 (1) 2024 

 

 
34 

naturalism, disarticulate identification, and relativise normativity’ 

(Corbett, 2001, p. 319). Further, as psychoanalytic practitioners we 

understand that the psyche is not stable, linear or clearly and consistently 

articulated. Rather, we hold to being driven by unconscious wish and 

desire, to experience being haunted, and to the unreliability of memory. 

In what ways does this inform the construction of thirdness? More 

specifically, what do I want with thirdness and what does it want of me 

given my lived experience? I engage these questions with memory, 

desire and some things I found and picked up along the way on a journey, 

to illuminate something of the play of paternal function, in order to make 

sense, and as it turns out, to engage with and to find, a father.  

 

Thirdness is crucially implicated in separation, and can thus be seen as 

having a transitional function. In line with Green’s (2005, 2009) use of 

Winnicott (1971), I situate ‘the father’ in potential space, in the arena of 

play – language being ‘the heir to the first transitional objects’ (Green, 

2005, p. 47). As this writing too is a transitional phenomenon, it must 

similarly be understood as being replete with contradictions, paradox, 

and irony. The paper therefore asks, contrary to the traditional ‘paternal’ 

symbolic, that you tolerate the slipperiness of its signifiers, its fluidity, 

and its irresolution. How this informs technique is related to 

psychoanalytic ethics asking us to wrestle with abstinence and the 

suspension of pre-judgement (Thompson, 2004), and is tied to the notion 

of psychoanalytic space being an openness to absence, to the ‘potential 

area of play and field of illusion’ (Green, 2005, p. 57). And because we 

practice (and write) in a context where we are continually rubbing up 

against otherness, the challenge then is to resist the ‘will to power’, the 

tendency towards knowing, when confronted by the anxieties that 

otherness induces. In order to negotiate what that throws up, we may feel 

drawn to constructing reflective positions with exclusive binaries, or 

otherwise, by collapsing the notion of difference and in so doing erecting 

authoritative platforms that restrict flow and subjectify. In counterpoint, 

holding transitional space allows for the use of illusion, the possibility of 



Playing with the father   

 

 
35 

movement and for attuning to and bearing our doubling; to forever 

becoming and being undone in the process. 

 

In line with earlier efforts (Burkhalter, 2015, 2021) and with thirdness 

thus positioned, my aim is further to extend the notion of 

(counter)transference beyond what we might traditionally or exclusively 

recognise as a regression – transference as the evocation and repetition 

of the archaic unconscious and of formative relations. Given that the 

therapeutic relationship resides in social context, transference also 

carries the history of place and the reverberations of the physical spaces 

and community in which it plays. In a sense, I am advocating for a 

psychosocial thirdness, not intended to undermine or reprioritise 

tradition but rather to add to. Because ‘therapy’ and ‘analysis’ play in the 

interchange of beings in space and time, it impels us to think about how 

our particular lived context weighs and impinges, often unconsciously, 

on how we think and practice. Clearly, how I have constructed my 

thoughts here has everything to do with how my internal objects are 

arranged along with unconscious desire, and in relation to the desire of 

the intimate socius of my formative beginnings (Laplanche, 1997). But I 

take this aspect to be commonplace and well considered within 

psychoanalytic theory and praxis, and I ask that it be sufficient to be 

assumed here. 

 

 

Situating paternal function 

 

I will be drawing considerably from outside of psychoanalytic theorising. 

These thirds in my relationship to psychoanalysis are offered to 

triangulate my ‘primary’ relationship, and to show how such ideas might 

resonate with psychoanalytic thinking. They serve to emphasise 

thirdness not only as difference, but as other – given that I assume their 

being unfamiliar. I do so to give form to the idea that however 

demanding, disruptive and unsettling moments of bumping into 



  Psychoanalytic Practice 32 (1) 2024 

 

 
36 

otherness may be, they can, with curiosity and engagement – to which 

the therapeutic relationship attests – yield creative growth encounters. 

And yet, when confronted with the unfamiliar, we often stop listening. 

Otherwise we subtly retranslate otherness into a language, a theory for 

example, that brings it inline and renders it familiar. At best we remain 

inquisitive and through close listening, allow for the expression of this 

otherness to reveal possible points of recognition and convergence. 

Consequently, the more I look at it the more I see paternal function as an 

elaboration of maternal holding, and maternal function as mediated by 

the ‘father in the mind of the mother’, with their differences having a lot 

to do with how we arrange them relationally within theory. 

Psychoanalytic practice requires that the dream, representing the order 

of the child, the free associative reverie of the maternal order, and the 

interpretative function of the paternal order, must learn to play together 

(Bollas, 1999).  

 

Following on the notion that pre-oedipal and oedipal dynamics are 

continuous and interrelated (Green, 2005; Ogden, 1989), we may read 

the distinctions in positioning between them to set up a false dichotomy. 

We are born to and nurtured by bodies that we experience through the 

senses, and we are also born into a symbolically constituted social world 

that predates us. This arrangement, constructed across the human 

lineage, shapes the boundaries of what we can be. If we think of this 

through the language of desire, we may say that we come into being 

through how our wanting unfolds in relation to what is wanted of us. 

Thirdness, through signifying our subjectivity, might then be understood 

as being constituted through both the sensorial and the symbolic orders, 

as employing the acquired capacity for representation to navigate the 

dialectics of these orders. We assign thirdness the ‘paternal function’, 

because the ‘father’ is the necessary third in relation to the 

‘mother’/infant dyad, and as such, ‘he’ has an observing function, present 

or imagined, that stands outside looking in (Green, 2009). Paternal 

function looks on the space between the indeterminate, the indefinite 



Playing with the father   

 

 
37 

being-in-oneness on one side, and the finite limit and difference of the 

symbolic2 on the other. We might call these poles, those of maternal and 

paternal law respectively. 

 

I will, later in the paper, situate paternal functioning in a particular father 

and specifically, with one who identifies as a man. Being a cisgender, 

heteronormative story, it is not intended to essentialise, but is offered 

rather with the hope that the reader finds enough room in it and in 

response to it, for the play of their own positioning and desire, allowing 

space to drift with it, to transpose, transfer, translate, transition or 

transgress. Being of transitional space, its paradoxes need to be 

respected. To that end, I make my way with the idea of language as a 

signifying practice, where the meaning of ‘practice’ involves ‘the 

acceptance of a symbolic law together with the transgression of that law 

for the purpose of renovating it’ (Kristeva, 1986a, p. 29). I insist on this 

because the path we set out on, what we intend, expect and assume, can 

never be read as given, and so I require paternal function that can hold 

its own doubling, and that can go off-road. 

 

The writing here carries the additional dimension of not only playing 

with the notion of paternal function, but also of having served as paternal 

function in a particular way: It has worked to traverse trauma. The 

original paper was largely written over three months, during which time 

I had intensive chemoradiation therapy for a head and neck cancer. The 

paper was to be presented at a conference a month after the end of 

treatment. I disclose this because having been constituted in the 

performance of specific work, the paper must inevitably carry in its bones 

something of that experience and what it asked – albeit too close for me 

to reflect on at this juncture, other than to contain the fear of losing the 

 
2 According to Lacan (1977), the symbolic order is the ultimate guarantor of 

meaning, while also, the order of symbolic fiction, and is related to notions of 

paternal law, the phallus and castratedness – all touched on or alluded to here 

but not developed further. 



  Psychoanalytic Practice 32 (1) 2024 

 

 
38 

capacity for representation. In so doing, while the ideas presented here 

predate the paper, they coalesced with the treatment in a way that made 

how they worked for me very evident. As such, the writing served as a 

transitional object, both found and created, inherited and conjured, in 

order to among other things, help carry me from somewhere towards  

someplace else. They are ideas fashioned under pressure and animated 

by a deeper sediment disturbed, in order to illuminate the play of 

thirdness as I needed it. Namely, a thinking function that augments and 

stretches maternal holding and containment, to make sense of and to 

orientate within self-experience, in close proximity of the real. As 

Czeslaw Milosz’s (2006) poem portrays: 

 

To find my home in one sentence, concise, as if hammered in 

metal. Not to enchant anybody. Not to earn a lasting name in 

posterity. An unnamed need for order, for rhythm, for form, 

which three words are opposed to chaos and nothingness. 

(p. 197) 

 

The constructs gathered here shelter and give form to a habitus. They 

play in the interchange of past, present and future, through fantasy and 

materiality, and through the work of filling absence with objects that 

have accompanied and grown with me along the way. I re-emphasise, 

that I do so by following a path that holds to representation and 

symbolisation having embodied origins, where drive and the symbolic, 

and affect and idea, are intimately arranged as different, but not distinct 

(Kristeva, 1986b).  

 

 

Representing the senses 

 

To follow up an earlier statement, our (post) Enlightenment time lacks 

the founding of universalised, totalising theories, and this leaves us 

having to find grounding without foundation. In a context where our 



Playing with the father   

 

 
39 

reference points are provisional, and where we need to account for the 

substantiation and goal of every step we make, it is arguably aesthetics 

that become paradigmatic (de Solà-Morales, 1997). ‘In contemporary 

experience, the aesthetic has, above all, the value of a paradigm. It is 

precisely through the aesthetic that we recognize the model of our richest, 

most vivid, most ‘authentic’ experience in relation to a reality whose 

outlines are vague and blurred’ (p. 59). Our aesthetics speak from the 

periphery. They are seductive, implying rather than constituting how we 

apprehend reality, which makes it all the more important that we 

recognise them in order to render them thinkable3. This way of 

acknowledging our subjectivity and how we construct meaning is 

important because much of what we translate in the room is shaped by 

the currents of how we are affected, how we feel – on the effect that the 

patient’s communication has on us, rather than exclusively on an analysis 

of the content of what they say (Green, 2005). 

 

The psychoanalytic relationship generally accepts that we engage each 

other as bodies with sensorial minds as well as embodied intellect. And 

so the paternal functionary must be sensitive to pre-symbolic 

communications, to the effect of the semiotic, that archaic layer of drives 

and their articulations that survive the work of repression by the symbolic 

(Kristeva, 1986b). Affect and how we sense things is often subsumed by 

the language of rationality. Self and other, parts of self, and body/mind, 

are difficult to disentangle. We know from therapeutic experience that 

we are, as Brennan (2004) asserts, porous and permeable, and that affect 

circulates to speak energetically between bodies in space. The things we 

feel in the room we do with a totality of bodily sense, and this is crucial 

to how we bring thirdness to mind and into play. The perceptual world, 

not unlike that of language and symbolisation, comes to us linked, 

 
3 I am drawing an association here to semiotics and to the poetics of 

representation (Kristeva, 1986a; 1986b), to the evocations of the maternal order, 

and to how these dimensions speak to both memory and desire.  



  Psychoanalytic Practice 32 (1) 2024 

 

 
40 

connected and ordered, and as ‘givens of sense’ these associated 

perceptions ‘give sense’, namely ‘orientation and meaning’ (Lingis, 

1996, p. ix). And so language, the body and affect, are not distinct 

entities, but rather related in a circularity that is mutually co-constituted 

(Ayouch, 2017). I am positioning maternal and paternal function in that 

reflexive dance.  

 

This reading of the perceptual world alerts us to how affect, emotions, 

and their movement between bodies are situated, and further, that they 

often have a pre-existing place within the social imaginary (Ahmed, 

2004/2014). In other words, we read bodies in context. We are informed 

and shaped by stepping into and performing the social repertoire of a 

perceptual matrix, by what we recognise or associate with, via the senses. 

As such, when we ‘feel the room’, we are also reading the perceptual 

matrix which conveys, among other things, the racialised, gendered, 

sexual and class givens of a particular context. This being a personal 

story, its writing must be understood to be shaped by these ‘givens’, ‘my’ 

gender, sexuality, education, class, age, culture, whiteness, and so on – 

and more recently, the poke of mortality. Such situated perspectivism is 

increasingly being theorised within psychosocial orientations to 

psychoanalysis, and consequently, generating extended notions of 

(counter)transference (Flax, 1990; Frosh & Baraitser, 2008; Layton, 

2008). And further, because this composition emerges in contemporary 

South Africa, it must be understood as of the postcolonial, within post 

conditions that are forever becoming and yet inevitably of what has been 

(Hook, 2014). It is bound to a history of cohabitation and contestation 

along disputed frontiers, among their shifting contours and with the 

inescapable, ongoing, rubbing up of otherness, wherein we try to find 

ourselves and each other 4 (Burkhalter, 2021). This is my home (habitus), 

 
4 We might draw an analogy here to the human psyche, antagonistic unto itself 

and bound to the dynamics of ‘afterwardsness’ or ‘nachträglichkeit’ (House & 

Slotnick, 2015). 



Playing with the father   

 

 
41 

and as such, must be considered to be sown into the text. Nuttall (2009) 

tells us that to inhabit such spaces of perpetual transition, leans on the 

improvisational, and requires ‘conceptual categories which embrace 

social velocity, the power of the unforeseen and unfolding, and a concept 

of the social as experiment and artifice versus order and contract’ (p. 

156). It asks paternal functioning to navigate performances that are, if we 

add the postcolonial context, ‘fundamentally ambiguous, fluid, and 

modifiable even when there are clear, written, and precise rules’ 

(Mbembe, 2001, p. 129). There is here the evocation of the transitional, 

and of play.  

 

And closer still, this is a Jozi story. It comes into being from within a 

sprawling metropolis of migrants who, as diverse, restless, resilient and 

creative, easily lawless and opportunistic, navigate the collisions and 

contestations that mark the being of this place. And as with all other 

modern South African cities, Joburg was designed to be divided against 

itself (Bremner, 2010). To live in such space is to breathe an atmosphere 

of vibrant uncertainty, need, greed, nervous tension and unstable 

meaning. I highlight this because ‘[c]ities as works of imagination… [as] 

structures of affect and producers of atmosphere’ (Nuttall, 2020, p. 267), 

become ‘constellations of enduring affect’ (Brennan, 2004). Place 

reveals the world through moods that weigh upon us in ways that are 

noumenal and often resistant to thought (Lingis, 1996). They are not 

thirds as we might normally attribute, and yet they press on us, they 

present and represent, shaping how experience is translated and brought 

into light in any given situation. I am aware that the city is alive on these 

pages, woven into the fabric of what it asks and what it lays down as its 

maternal and paternal functions5. 

 

 

 
5 Similar to what is inferred in the notion of the ‘brick mother’ (Trotter et al., 

2023), and more broadly, inspired by Mbembe (2001).   



  Psychoanalytic Practice 32 (1) 2024 

 

 
42 

What is it that you want with this? 

 

Returning to more conventional thirdness, our first caregivers come to us 

bearing the mark of Oedipus. They are laced into the social order of the 

symbolic and the demand of paternal law. Parental functions (including 

those of the therapist), come with a teleology in mind, which is often 

subliminal (Laplanche, 1992). By that I mean that the functions come not 

only with an ask, but with a destination in mind, something seeking 

resolution, and that is always in the service of an aim – the aesthetics of 

what we think is a good life, the idea of what is a useful intervention, or 

the right way of being. You have an intention when you say something 

to your patient. And yet, across psychoanalytic theory, what paternal 

function looks like in theory and practice is different whether one is 

aligned to the maternal turn theories of Klein, object relations or 

attachment theory for example, or the more paternal theories of say Freud 

and Lacan. They all emphasise thirdness and the paternal differently, 

which is reflective of how theory is constructed around what is 

considered important developmentally, and what is considered 

therapeutic; albeit often paradoxically and ironically. 

 

 To use Bollas’ (1999) example, where Kleinian theory is primarily 

focussed on development in the maternal order, in practice, Kleinians 

tend to be penetratingly interpretative. On the other hand, Lacanians, 

who privilege language in theory, might go an entire session in 

suspended reverie and not say a word6. And if you read paternal function 

as being the work of an actual father – ‘of whatever gender’ –  a review 

of the psychoanalytic literature adds to a separating third and to thirdness 

as representation, the notion of paternal function as the facilitator of 

affect management and a place of psychic safety, thereby emphasising 

 
6 Understanding that the relationship is more complex than is stated here, 

including that Kleinians also value the structuring function of language, and that 

Lacanians are wary of the indoctrination and suggestibility of the analyst’s 

desire (Birksted-Breen & Flanders, 2010). 



Playing with the father   

 

 
43 

thirdness as something that regulates, contains and secures (Davies & 

Eagle, 2013). 

 

Understanding that our relationship to theory is transferential, we might 

well ask why we privilege one way of aligning these parental functions 

over another. In Figures and their Functions, Bollas (1999) makes the 

case that our allegiance to theory is an oedipal story. How we affiliate 

speaks to something about the anxieties we carry around belonging, 

difference, exclusion and rivalry. This lends itself to a tendency to want 

to align with one side or the other, even to the point of wishing to be rid 

of our rivals. So what we want with paternal function points to how we 

desire and how we identify. Even when we speak it as thirdness, what we 

have actively done is neutered something about the position of father as 

third; which is not arbitrary.  

 

 

Lucas 

 

I came to fatherhood with the birth of our first child, Lucas. Lucas was 

born in trauma, which left him with severe cognitive and physical 

disability – namely cerebral palsy, and for a long time, intractable 

seizures. Disability is a broad and heterogenous category, but in Lucas’ 

version it meant that he was among other things, unable to walk, talk, 

see, or take care of himself. He had no ‘language’, and was in many ways 

always infantile. Our care of him remained largely in what we would 

understand as the realm of the maternal. While he felt difference and he 

felt pleasure, unpleasure and pain, we never knew what he thought, as he 

only had rudimentary capacity to represent it. He lacked the capacity to 

symbolise his experience and was as such, outside the realm of the 

paternal.  

 

Lucas was many things to us, and while I do not want to reduce his being 

to disability, I focus in on this aspect to serve the purpose of the paper 



  Psychoanalytic Practice 32 (1) 2024 

 

 
44 

and to illustrate how for his mother and I, his disability brought loss. It 

introduced difference and absence in a jarring and traumatic way, leaving 

us with a distinct sense of otherness in the world (Harvey, 2020). Among 

the things that Lucas brought us was the paternal law of Lacan’s Freud, 

in both the ‘name’ and the ‘no’ of the father (Lacan, 2013). With 

disability you are located in society as other to the order of things – the 

‘name of the father’ placing you in a generational lineage within 

language, culture and society. Within this and under the sign of disability, 

you become the carrier of dread and pity, you disturb and unsettle, and 

your path is misaligned. Secondly, the imposition of the ‘no of the 

father’, a castration that sets an immutable limit, is something which you 

are powerless to change. You wrestle with its insistence because you are 

in a period of magical thinking, of negotiating and investing in yearned 

for possibilities. You do so in the context of being trapped in mourning 

something that has not died, which, moreover, it still asks and provokes 

hope. The danger is that this orientation becomes hardened and fixed, 

exposed to the abyss and to falling into that which evokes the abject 

(Harvey, 2020) – a misery, bound but unattached, free but ungrounded, 

where melancholia stands as a substitute for the object in an enactment 

of despair, rather than its representation (Kristeva, 1982).  

 

But limit, if navigated, can begin to surface a functional boundary, and I 

think that the acceptance of that boundary eventually freed something 

generative, opening space to play more freely. We understand that it is 

only safe to play if you have boundaries – the frame, the rules, the fence 

– otherwise the boundaries themselves become the zone of play, and 

which is an anxious space on the borderlines, lending itself to the 

perverse. The acquiescence to that boundary – ideally a mourning that is 

symbolised – instituted a degree of separation that allowed me to rework 

my position in relation to Lucas. I needed to (re)find myself as a man in 

the world, with adult want and desire outside of unending, recurrent care, 

as mothers do when they wean, when their child can no longer satisfy 

their desire. And so I began to write, trying to write myself out of 



Playing with the father   

 

 
45 

disability, to be able-minded and to speak to a life beyond. The work of 

writing, the emergence of intellect from the senses and the gathering of 

scattered thought, suggests that paternal function in this sense was about 

finding and writing myself into being with more mobile subjectivity. 

 

During this period, when Lucas was five, our second child, another boy, 

was born. What then slowly began dawning on me was the question of 

what it meant to be father to a boy. I didn’t feel I had much to go on. The 

patriarchy, masculinity and men in society – in which I am implicated – 

didn’t leave much to trust in, other than as a point of reference to oppose. 

I grew up within Apartheid, where the privileges of positioning it 

afforded me were complicated, questionable and disturbing, but in my 

spaces not clearly framed. What was asked by the social order felt 

confusing and illegitimate at the very least. Growing up within the 

authoritarianism of Christian National Education (CNE) left me with a 

strongly ingrained aversion to rules, to law and to authority. I could not 

trust what I had inherited and, I must add, that I was born to parents who 

were recent immigrants and not acculturated, and who reared me with a 

lot of room to work things out for myself. Later, my professional training 

found me being cultivated within the maternal turn and object relations, 

by women, to find myself looking for a ‘father’ in Winnicott.  

 

More especially, I felt I had no experience of being a father. Parenting 

Lucas for five years revealed not much difference in the functions 

provided by his mother, myself or his caregiver.