This talk focuses on how we theorize fathers—particularly what I term the primal father—and how psychoanalytic thinking both reflects and shapes men’s engagement with children and childcare.

We are called to bring the primal father into view: to see him engaged in childcare, body-to-mind; to see his provision and preoccupation inflected by the ordinary eros of daily caregiving; to see the heightened sensitivity that enables him to feel himself into his infant’s place; and to see him balancing containment with the inevitable failures that beset childrearing.

Drawing on my early work with a three-year-old boy—my first patient—I revisit the question that organized that encounter: Can one be primal and be someone other than a mother? I link this question to the field’s insufficient psychological theorizing of fathering and childcare. Casting men as living outside the primacy of infancy and early childhood perpetuates the belief that men do not know how to love children or care for them.

Ken Corbett Professor New York University Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, and Faculty, The Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. He has authored numerous articles and two bestselling books. In Boy Hoods: Rethinking Masculinities, Dr. Corbett advocates for a new psychology of masculinity that moves beyond normative expectations, emphasizing that “no two boys, no two boyhoods are the same.” His book A Murder Over a Girl - named a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice – is a story about a murdered girl, a murdering boy, community, families, friends and teachers that unfolds into a wrenching drama about the human psyche. He is a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities, and a consultant on the Showtime docu-series Couples Therapy.

1) Describe the differences between a primary father
vs. a secondary father; 

2) Summarize how keeping
men outside of the realm of infantile primacy
perpetuates a distortion in lived family life. 

Syllabus

When Fathering Fails: Violence, Narcissism, and the Father Function in Ancient Tales and Clinical Analysis