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In my discussion, I consider each article's presentation of significant features of the relationships of fathers and daughters. I will emphasize the changes that have occurred in psychoanalytic theories of father-daughter intersubjectives as indicated by the authors and from my own perspective.
The authors agree that the starting point for a discussion of fathers and daughters is a reconsideration of the patriarchal family: Mother and daughter (or son) are enmeshed in a fusion (ideally of mutual bliss). Father is essentially absent in these early stages, and enters the dynamic scene as a disrupter of the mother-daughter symbiotic union. Father supplies the sense of time, order, and rules, and a link to the outside world otherwise absent in the restricted world of cradle, kitchen, and playpen. Then, in the Oedipal period, the traditional Freudian view gets murky. The father-daughter dyad may simply mirror the conflicted path of father and son or is determined by the daughter's penis envy. The daughter's development requires an acceptance of passivity. Her Oedipal love activates a desire that the daughter never renounces in the absence of castration anxiety, and results in a less structured superego. The adult daughter seeks a man like her father, and through him relates to the world outside the home, while in the home achieves agency as housekeeper and mother.
Each article challenges this stereotype from one perspective or another. One perspective is that gender no longer connotes the fixity implied in "anatomy is destiny," but rather it is a soft assembly (Harris) and plays out in a variety of ways in any father-daughter pair. A second perspective is that, clinically, father-daughter pairings take so many different outcomes that loose predictability seems a more useful premise than replacing the traditional category with a "newer better" version. A third perspective that I will take up later points toward the usefulness of a developmental view of family (mother-father-baby) dynamics as a contributor to the playing out of the father-daughter experience.
Two of the articles approach the topic by reviewing the relationship of Freud and Anna as a historic prototype. Cohler and Galatzer-Levy play off of Freud's fascination with myth by noting, first, the analogy of Freud-Anna to Oedipus-Antigone, and then note how Freud selected one part of the...